Religion & Science

I was brought up in the religion of science. That is science, mind you, not Scientology. Scientology may be many things, but it is NOT science.

My mother was a chemist and my father had a degree in physics. My father was a lapsed Catholic. I don't know if my mother's family had any religious affiliation. Belief in god was not a part of my upbringing, though they did teach me the Lord's prayer.

I was brought up to believe science could explain anything, and for the most part I still believe it. There is the occasional fuzzy place around the edges where scientific explanations do not seem to quite cover the situation, but that may be more due to the limits of what a human being can understand than due to God mucking about with our reality.

My wife's family are died in the wool Lutheran's. We got married in a Lutheran Church and we attend a church with Lutheran roots, at least occasionally. So I am nominally a Lutheran.

So I have a little conflict here. On one hand I have a complete rejection of all religion and on the other there is this huge Christian religion that permeates Western civilization. How do I resolve this?

I got one clue about ten years ago when we attended a different Lutheran Church on a somewhat more regular basis. After an adult Bible study class one Sunday when we were delving into some deep issue or another, I asked the pastor: if there weren't any people, would there be a God? His answer was no. Well, anyway you look at it, that makes a certain amount of sense. If there weren't any people, there wouldn't be anybody to care if there was a God.

I got another clue when I saw "Angels & Insects", a movie set in Victorian England about an entomologist who married into a wealthy family. There is one scene were the husband is out horseback riding. A boy comes riding out from house with an urgent message that the husband must return to the house. He does so and discovers his wife being indiscreet. There is some question as to who sent the boy with the message, and the only answer that appears is that "sometimes the house knows". A Victorian mansion has quite a population, what with family members, servants and hangers-oners. In a closed system like that nothing is going to remain undiscovered for long. So eventually this little society decided that something needed to be done and arranged to open the husband's eyes.

So I have evolved my own idea of God: he (excuse the masculine pronoun) is the collective subconscious of all the people in the world. That is why things like natural disasters still happen. They are not within the control of people. That is why people lost in the wilderness often die: there are no other people around. God is all powerful only when he has people he can operate through.

Why are there some truly rotten people around? God only knows. Perhaps they have some defect that prevents them from connecting and communicating with other people. People are very complex. I suspect that constructing a scientific model of human behavior would be akin to modeling all the atoms in the ocean. Theoretically it could be done, but it would take more resources than exist on this planet.

Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.