SCIENCE and religion are related to each other and have something in common, something related to mystery, although, at first sight, science deals with the secular and religion with the sacred.
Both science and religion are searching for truth in the world and in reality. They develop theories but every time again they discover, they never can fully understand the reality. And this is so because the human brain has its limitations.
Therefore, the reality always contains something unexplained or inexplicable and that is what we call mystery. Even the scientists admit that in their search for truth they always arrive at what religious people call a mystery.
Take the case of the English physicist and astronomer Isaac Newton of the 17th century. He formulated the basic laws of mechanics and gravitation and applied them to explain the workings of the solar system. But he could not explain why they work like that.
How is it possible that two objects can attract each other without being in physical contact? Some people say Newton did not dismiss “the ghost in the machine,” but actually he “exorcised the machine, leaving the ghost intact.”
Here is a scientist who talks about ghosts. Our native people all believe in ghosts and spirits even if they don’t adhere to a certain religion. Their religion is nature; they talk to the spirits in the trees; before they cut down a tree they ask the spirits first for permission.
Can we call this superstition? That is the mystery of nature.
Another example of the mystery in the world and in reality is the language of men. People think that the small child learns how to speak from its mother. She teaches the child to talk through the process of simple imitation.
But scientists have discovered that human beings have an innate capacity for language – a biological predisposition that allows children to construct and understand sentences they have never heard before. Is this not a mystery?
My experience in the Philippines has taught me that the Filipino has an innate capacity to smile; it has become part of the Filipino culture. Our President Noynoy Aquino has almost always a smile on his face when he talks. That is his big asset; he easily makes contact with his audience.
The 17th century French philosopher René Descartes had the famous dictum: cogito ergo sum = I think and therefore I am. In the history of philosophy he is considered to be a rationalist in contrast with another trend in the history of philosophy, that of St. Agustin who believed that a person may come to know God by inner illumination of the soul and the heart through meditation.
For a person to be, is more than rational thinking; to be, is being in contact with a mystery, something we cannot understand, something beyond our reason. To be is being in contact with God. Man is body and soul, body and heart – a heart that is restless until it rests in God, according to St Agustin.
Neuroscience is another subject of particular interest here, because it can help assess the extent to which biology determines our being human and on the other hand our being human transcends the biology.
The hard-line materialists, like the Marxists do not recognize any possibility of a transcendent dimension; everything is matter and there is nothing else in the world than matter.
There is an urgent need for a dialogue between science and religion. Pope Francis and the Vatican are all for an open dialogue. It would open the mind of both the secularists and the rationalists in the Church for the presence of a mystery, the Mystery that is God. --Arnold Van Vugt, Sun.Star Cagayan de Oro