The Bible and science

As we have repeatedly mentioned, it is a frequent cause of conflicts between science and faith, as biblical texts are confronted with natural science. It seems like a lot here did not help the warning of St. Augustine; that is where the biblical books come into logical conflict with experience; they must go to the metaphorical interpretation. In many cases, this is evident, for example, for the biblical “day” and the day in our understanding.

In many cases, this metaphoric can be relatively easy to notice and explain. Consider, for example, the biblical interpretation of the famous “ten Egyptian wounds” that God wanted to force Egyptians to allow the Israelites to leave captivity.

Even a layman must dwell on formulations such as “God hammered
to Egyptian soldiers wheels on chariots “to make it difficult for them
persecution. If God is omnipotent, he does not need any primitive mechanical means to slow down the reels. Still, for many, the passage that God has sent seems more incomprehensible to many an angel to destroy the Egyptian cubs. Can he admit something like that benevolent God? If we accept that the relevant texts have a significant one informative value, but they wrote in a literary style, then all The “insidiousness” of the Old Testament texts will disappear. Braking the wheels, For example, it can cause heavy rain, which causes it to travel
muddy, and the wheels sink into the mud.

A writer who wants to impressively and convey this fact shall use the wording “God hammered the wheels of the persecutor” instead of stating that God caused the wind and the rain, making it challenging moving drivers. The resulting “truth” is the same; only how it is described differs from the mechanism by which this was done. (Let’s remember these opportunities, for example, with the Christmas tree we started with our treatise.) It could have been similar to the other “Egyptians wounds,” as evidenced by some serious professional publications.

With the need to seek the correct interpretation of the biblical texts, it is appropriate to recall the words of Pope John Paul II: “If the Bible gets into conflict with science, it is not necessary to change its text, but its interpretation.” 34) However, we will not discuss the specificity of partial significance now, but about a fundamental problem. It can also be formulated as follows: If literary, we will transform biblical sources’ language into modern ones’ professional language; we get information that correlates with current scientific knowledge or diametrically different from it distinguishes? A believer would like to know, although he realizes that the Bible, there is no scientific literature, whether this source does not contain (from a scientific point of view) of delusions. That’s the problem it would be we wanted to go into more detail in this chapter.

Before we get to that, we would like to mention a few more general observations regarding the “interaction” of science with faith. Let’s get started with another well-known quote by A. Einstein: “Faith without science is blind, science without faith it is lame.” However, he was an opponent of another famous physicist Niels Bohr, in his interpretation of quantum mechanics, by this statement, documented that he generally acknowledges the so-called principle complementarity. Its content asserts that the process of cognition usually has two sides: the more we focus on one, the more we miss the other, but both have their justification, and neither they cannot be completely rid of them.

The general formulation of the principle of complementarity has its
Genesis in the study of the micro-world. It also has a wave I corpuscular nature. When we examine the wave properties, it escapes us corpuscular essence. When we perceive the world as a set of particles, we will not notice the processes’ wave side. Complementary properties are seemingly excluded, yet we must keep in mind that both the properties exist parallel to each other and, in such a fantastic way unity, comprehensively depict the real world.

Whether someone likes it or not, science and religion are also in
a complementary relationship that reflects the interconnectedness
of spirit and matter. There were periods when only religion existed
without science, and other periods when many thinkers wanted to prove it only science without religion can live. Science was served to us as a mighty force, understanding, explaining, and planning everything man’s happy future. Religion was considered an unworthy and almost ridiculous pendant of the builder of the new company.

The relationship between science and faith was clearly defined as antagonistic, i. j. mutually exclusive. Somebody must admit that he is not responsible for creating such a relationship responsibility only materialistic philosophy. Also, representatives of religious thought have occasionally gotten into history throughout history, which recorded such a relationship. The point is that the object research on science and religion is not just completely separate from each other territories: the mental realm of faith and the material world’s realm
for science. These are two – mathematically speaking – mutually penetrating sets. Religions often offer, but sometimes more or less, postulate individual attitudes to the real world. In this area, advocates of religious concepts have often made careless efforts to formulate statements that later had to be corrected or full to leave. It was a philosophy based on the idea of “God of gaps.”

It was based on the premise that God’s idea is required by the “gaps” (white places) in our scientific knowledge. With such an attitude to the question relationship between science and faith (this also considers historical experience), it appears that religion will gradually abandon the “battlefield” and leaves the place leads. If there was only religion without science in the beginning, so in the end, somebody can expect only science without faith can be expected. Is it like that? There is also a second variant of the relationship between science and faith, the relationship.