A Perspective on Context

Imagine yourself walking through the wilderness. Deep wilderness. There is not the faintest sign of civilization for miles and miles around, and no sign that humans had even set foot in this part of the wilderness before.

As you are walking, you suddenly come to a large stone statue, perfectly sculpted in to the shape of a human being. You are immediately struck by it's beauty and craftsmanship, even as you are completely perplexed as to how it got here. Upon coming home to your friends and family, you tell them about this wonderful thing you discovered; you might even subject them to a slide show of the photos you took of it.

Now we human beings are an inquisitive bunch, so inevitably as word got out, this statue would come under heavy scrutiny. Some people would be interested in who made the statue and brought it there. They would admire the artistry and wonder what it told us about it's maker. Why did they create this statue? What message or emotion were they trying to convey? What can we learn from their creation?

Other people would be interested in what the statue was made of. How long it had been there? How did it get there? Where did the stone come from? They would take samples and examine the area around the statue to look for evidence. They would come up with theories, and then test their theories.

If these two groups of people were to have a conversation, they may disagree about what the most important topics to cover were, but in the end, they're still talking about the same statue. The first group would suffer no backlash if they were to say that a skilled craftsman had obviously shaped the stone, but they would be foolish to suggest that someone created the stone itself. Likewise, the second group could tell us a lot about the composition of the stone, and likely how stone of that type ended up in the area where the statue was found, but it would be ridiculous for them to presume that there was no sculptor, and that natural processes had coincidentally conspired to create this perfect human likeness.

Now you probably see where I'm going here, and quite possibly you're frustrated at how I've used an over-simplified metaphor. However, I still think it serves my point well enough, and my point is this:

Science and Religion are not mutually exclusive.

Have you ever thought about why we use a base-10 number system? By that I mean, why do we count to nine, and then suddenly start using 2 digits instead of 1? What is the significance of that quantity? For that matter, when the Romans created their number system, why did they choose characters to represent multiples of 1, 5, and 10, and not other numbers? The answer is fairly simple: people have 10 fingers, 5 on each hand. If people had 8 fingers on each hand, the number system we use would be very different (i.e. hexadecimal).

So the only reason that counting to 10 makes sense to us is because we have a context of 10 fingers. If someone gave you a dozen roses, there would still be a dozen of them whether you had ten fingers or sixteen, but you would represent the number differently.

It is my opinion that science is the context of Creation. To put it differently, as we continue to try and understand the world around us, we are creating a context by which we can continue to learn and study things deeper and more fully. Imagine if all scientific endeavors just stopped where they were because everyone decided, "Welp, that's just how God made it." We need science. But science has to exist within its own context.

Skeptics and atheists would argue that science describes the real world, not some theoretical sub-context of it. However, my point is simply that all the science we perform today is dependent on the science that came before it, and thus all science is relative to itself. That doesn't invalidate anything, it just puts it in context.

As a Christian, I believe that there is a God, and I believe that He created the universe and everything in it. As a person with a healthy dose of curiosity and a love for science, I also believe that in order to understand something from a scientific perspective, you have to adhere to that context. The big bang, evolution, all those "anti-religious" theories - they're all the context in which science is performed.

However, I don't see those beliefs as being at odds; I simply see them as two different perspectives of the same universe, each with its own context, but not exclusive of each other. I don't attempt to - nor do I feel obliged to - bridge the gap between those viewpoints.  For example, I would never say, "God created the big bang," or, "God created evolution." That's not what I believe. If I had to put words to it, I would probably say, "God created the universe and all living things through processes that we cannot understand, but which left behind artifacts that are left to our interpretation, and which in the context of humanity's current scientific knowledge can be described as the big bang and evolution." (Contrived much?)

I also don't attempt to talk to someone about God from a scientific perspective, or have a scientific debate from a religious perspective. I think that's the reason so many people think that religion and science are polar opposites - proponents on both sides tend to try to win arguments from their own context, and the other side refuses to acknowledge that context. I really wish that everyone could, for just one shining moment, see the world from a perspective they've never considered. There's no reason to feel threatened by a different viewpoint unless you're really not that sure of your own.