(Tiago Ribeiro)
I've never believed that science and spirituality conflict half as much as they are often seen to do: like waves and particles they are simply two complimentary ways of being and seeing.
And last night's Horizon gave a good example of this (check it out on iPlayer - it was brilliant).
Titled 'Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong?', it looked at cosmology, the Big Bang theory and the way we believe our universe works as a consequence of this.
And, more significantly, how a new generation of cosmologists are unpicking this theory because, well, it doesn't really work: the maths don't add up, the laws of physics fall apart, and you have to invent a whole raft of unprovable, hypothetical concepts to explain what we can now observe (dark matter, dark energy and now dark flow)…and still the gaps remain.
Sound familiar?
It all confirmed to me that, ultimately…and like religion, cutting edge science boils down to faith in the unknowable and unexplainable, and the stories told to provide the knowing and explanation people crave.
Because, 'logical' as the stories were that's what they were doing.
Just watch the guy who has been sat in the bowels of a mountain for 5 years trying to issolate the dark matter that 'must' make up 80% of our universe's mass to see this - so far he's had 2 negligible hits.
Which dramatises the ironic faith-based similarities between the scientific and the spiritual (but in a good way - i think what he's doing is important).
And which also (for me) shows why rational humanists who belittle those with spiritual leanings are themselves being narrow-minded (and I will add here that I have just as little time for those at the other end of the spectrum - the literalists and fundamentalists from all religions).
After all, if you know anything about the more mystery-based, mystical traditions within the main religions, where unknowing is embraced rather than feared, you would notice that cosmologists are using exactly the same language and concepts to try and explain how the universe.
We are looking at the same things, but just using different metaphysical constructs to explain what we see.
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