SCIENCE + RELIGION = THE FINAL FRONTIER

Here's a personal question. When you lie on your back and study the afternoon clouds or the evening moon, do you sense more than your senses are reporting? Maybe little hints of angels, shapes of divinity, maybe even a Marian apparition or two? Well if so, your biology textbooks take serious exception...!

For most of human history, Faith and its corresponding suspicions about divinity has held sway over us. It's this elemental need to believe I come from somewhere or someone intentional...I am here for a reason not by an accident....and I will be more than decomposing rot at the end of it all. But then starting about the 17th C, Science in the West snatched that sway away. Started to direct our attentions from things above which can't be "proved," to things here below which CAN be.

For some this was it. Finally a dependable methodology by which our intellects could be freed from the bizarre mysteries of primitive gods, idols, and worship. From now on, what we once talked about as mysteries could now be defined for what they really are: Problems for Science to solve. At first this sounded good, And yet, for some peculiar reason, Science wasn't quite able to drive the silver stake into the heart of Faith. And so it is that today, Science and Faith are still battling contenders more than bonding companions.

And this battle, it seems to sneak in everywhere. On campuses, in literature and within movies where ET's, vampires, exorcists, Vatican conspiracies, and evangelical hucksters in the plots help keep the battle brewing.

Passover and Easter are recurring seasons of Faith in which the faithful confront a kind of perennial choice: Either turn their prayerful backs on the encroaching blasphemies of Science, or face and embrace the discoveries of Science as just one more human experience in which God reveals Himself to humanity.

How interesting that two of the greats from Science and Faith say much the same thing about this choice. Einstein: "Science without Religion is lame; Religion without Science is blind." John Paul II: "Faith and reason are the two wings of the dove both needed to support its flight to the peaks of truth."

Why, they almost sound like Captain Kirk's heart saying right along with Mr Spock's brain: "Warp speed.....!"