Great news! Scientists just recalculated the size of the Milky Way, and we are bigger than we thought!
This is great because we should always be re-evaluating science! I get excited every time we up and change the fundamentals of how we understand the universe. Lets look at some great examples of the past:
() Making one of the planets not a planet any more (R.I.P. Pluto)
() Realizing that the earth isn't flat, and the sun (and stars) don't rotate around us
() After proving that "life" (AKA: proteins) could be made from the "primordial soup" of earth, realizing that the mixture of gasses was wrong (mainly it had oxygen where the early Earth had none)
() Suddenly realizing that our calculations were off and that our galaxy has 50% more mass than it did yesterday
We should make these changes more often! How about we say that Proxima Centauri is no longer the closest star to the sun? (BTW, contrary to popular belief, Alpha Centauri isn't the closest star to the sun, Alpha Centauri is a star system.) I like the idea of the Earth having three moons... science, can you take care of that? Ohh, why don't we fix "global warming" by shrinking the sun a bit, would 10% do the trick?
*sigh* This has always been one of my main complaints about "science": it is always changing. What we call "truth" now will most certainly change in a few hundred years, so why even try to keep up with it?
But doesn't religion do the same thing? Just as the world around us never changes, just our understanding of it, God never changes, just our understanding of him. God is constant, but we are constantly reevaluating our understanding of him, always trying to draw closer to his truth. I guess the thing that makes me so mad about science changing is that they always claim that "What I just came up with today is true" where they should be saying "These are my findings, this is my understanding of what I see." To contrast, the core of my religion has always been "There is a constant God out there, I am simply trying to find his truth."
I guess the two are much more alike than I thought.
Matthew
2 comments:
*thumbs up*
Like the post :)
Ditto...
I like to think that where science is the methodical attempt to describe how the physical world operates, religion is the methodical attempt to describe how the spiritual world operates. We have to be both sure enough that we can say "this is true, and these are my reasons," but also be honest enough to admit that we can never understand an infinite God. But we can understand an infinite universe all right; yup, got that one covered...
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