SCIENCE vs GOD

        Prof. Rajesh Katiyar

(Operations Management and Quantitative Techniques)

Do science and God challenge each other, or they rather complement each other? Belonging from a country like India, we might look at this question a little differently; religion is an inseparable part of majority of people of this land, but this land also produces world’s greatest scientists, scholars, researchers who excel in science in an international level.

 

If so? Then what is up with the infamous idea that science doesn’t believe in God or in other words…religions feel offended by science? Don’t you feel that for the longest time on this planet, every great idea has been misinterpreted and even after realizing the importance of greatest of inventions….no one has really UNDERSTOOD it?

 

 Some people born with great minds have led us to this life we are living today. Like bulb from Edison or nuclear energy (because of radioactivity) from Marie Curie or the black hole study by none other than, Stephen Hawking!!! But this must not go without notice that apart from having great brains they had one more thing….” VISION”. But where does this vision come from? Especially to the people who belong from science and solely believe in logic, facts and proven things!!! Every scientific law is a hypothesis at first and later when it is proved, it gets the designation to become a part of the great entity i.e., the saga of “SCIENCE”.

 

Now coming to religion…or rather God. What is God? We often in our lives from one point to other find ourselves asking the question, what is God? Or where is God? Or does God really exist?

 

No one has answer to that but what we know is that God is a belief which keeps a man in boundaries of morals, ethics and suggests a certain way to live, varying from religion to religion but, mostly ranging in our field of knowing and understanding what we know that God surely is a belief and a very strong one too.

 

Einstein’s essay published in 1954 quotes that “science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind”. This quote is often used to show both Einstein’s religiosity and his belief in the compatibility – indeed the mutual interdependence of science and God.

 

Every person has a belief system or what we call in general language an opinion. So, what does the physics professor Ramakrishnan, who performs his little ritual of praying for five minutes in the morning daily, lights the incense stick and leaves for his lecture on quantum physics believes in? And what about the researcher Miss Josephine who while watching her slides under microscope prays to Jesus that let her experiment be successful this time, believes in?

 

For what little we know…we can say that science seeks to ASK “HOW”. Like how a rainbow is formed? How to make electricity from any source possible? And religion...religion on the other hand seeks to TELLS us ‘’WHY’’. Like why we feel sad? Why is it wrong to do bad?

 

In a more complicated way, science is a bold attempt to reconstruct the existence by the process of visualization where there is a lot of questioning and proving. And religion exists with the same necessity and matter of fact-ness as he himself where there is no doubt and questioning.

 

Whom should we blame terrorism on? The science which gave humanity the access to lethal weaponry or religion which led to this fatal ideology?  It’s funny how mutually these two gave birth to such a destructive objective.

 

Nuclear energy was supposed be a source of energy to aid in human requirements but instead lead to nuclear weapon and religion was always about peace but in today’s era it’s a topic of which is bigger than which.

 

The truth is that no thought no belief no person can be hundred percent correct. And talking of science vs religion, if everything about these two entities is so opposing then why did Einstein say those words as mentioned earlier? And what should we interpret by the spirituality reflected by so many of the scientists in their study? I think this will remain a question till the end of time or till the day when science succeeds in discovering the horizon of whole universe and what’s beyond or if God presents himself in front of us.

 

Till then think what YOU believe in!!!