Thread theory

As I was mending my pants tonight after a night jog, I had an insight. People almost always talk about science and religion as being in some sort of conflict. Where there is science being conducted, people are likely to assume that religion will have no place, and vice versa.

Actually, for me, the real fundamental concept at work here is the concept of order. Human beings expect that the universe operates at some level of order. I would go a bit further and say that the human search for order is one of the things that define what being human is all about. We as a species would like to think that there is a reason things are the way they are.

In light of this, I see both science and religion as tackling this concept of order and broadening our horizons on it. But to me they are not in conflict; they are complementary, because science seeks to ask and answer how the universe is ordered, while religion and spirituality seeks to ask and answer why the universe is ordered that way. Both disciplines take as true the assertion that the universe is ordered in a certain way, and then explore the nature of that order.

Think about it: if we didn't think that the universe obeys some sort of order, and that instead it is randomness and chaos that governs its actions, then what good are science and religion for? What good are books, which seek to tell us what happened before or knowledge gained by others, if we know that such history or knowledge will never ever be useful again? The answer, of course, is nothing--if we did not think there was an order in the universe, we would be indistinguishable from the animals.

So hopefully you find some semblance of order as you leave this page and do whatever you are doing today. Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Nickelback, "Someday".