Where Science and Religion Finally Met

Saturday Stories

March 31, 2018

There is a scene in Dan Brown's Angels & Demons where one of the main characters made a speech that I still remember after all these years.

In the story, the Vatican was held hostage by a mysterious group called the Illuminati, and it was set to be detonated by anti-matter – in an explosion powerful enough to destroy half of Rome.

Carlo Ventresca, the camerlengo, spoke at the papal enclave in a live broadcast shown all over the world. He said the Church has lost – and Science is now the new God. 

But the price is too high, he says. The new God gives us power but without the moral compass to show what is right and wrong. If a man cannot explain natural phenomena, does this make him more ignorant than the man who defies the power of nature?

And since we reject the idea of a Creator, then everything came from  random chance, and "we would rather believe in mathematical impossibility than in a power greater than us."

His speech made me see religion in a new light (pardon the pun). A belief in a Higher Power not only gives a person a sense of comfort, but also the idea of being accountable for his actions. 

I've always had a deep respect for a person's religious convictions whether or not we share the same creed, but I see more clearly now the value of faith in our fast-changing modern world. We may not understand most things, but if we believe we come from something greater than us, then we can also believe that the same "something" also has the answer to all our questions.

I believe science is just a different road to the same destination. I don't agree with every point he raised although they are all valid. We probe into the atom and the spaces between the atom, and instead of finding answers, we find more questions – but we also feel the sense of wonder at the miracle of creation from the infinity of the universe to even the smallest details.

Quantum physics is where the enlightened scientists and men of cloth have finally crossed paths. God is infinite, with neither beginning nor end, and omnipresent. At the spaces between the atomic particles, there is only energy which cannot be created nor destroyed, and this energy is everywhere in the universe. 

"Both religion and science require a belief in God," says Max Planck. "For believers, God is the beginning, and for physicists he is at the end of all considerations."

Photo courtesy of kinopoisk.ru