One ordinary man's reflections on how science informs his faith and his understanding of what we are becoming, written in a style reminiscent of Christian scripture.
Foreword: Preliminary thoughts on Science, Faith, Writing Style, and Becoming
During my lifetime, science and faith have often been perceived to be in conflict, both purporting to seek Truth, but utilizing different methodologies and often seeming to reach different conclusions. Even the understanding of what constitutes Truth often differs between the two. Science pursues Truth as understanding, how the universe works and how we might predict or control it. Faith pursues Truth as meaning, how we might be a part of, or become, something greater that ourselves.
Yet to the person of faith, these two goals must be unified, since any correct understanding of the universe must inform any meaning we might find in it and provide constraints and guidance on what we are becoming. This little book reflects my long musings on how science and faith can be reconciled in the search for meaning and how science and scripture together inform what we are becoming.
You might find this to be a strange little book, not only written in an unfamiliar style, but perhaps too mystical for the more scientifically minded and seeming heretical to the faithful who adopt a particular type of strict theology. However, after a lifetime as a scientist, college professor, and lay preacher, this is the place to which I have come. In putting my thoughts to writing, I am trusting that there is a subset among both the faithful and the scientifically skeptical who 1) believe with me that there is a Truth to be found, 2) wish to pursue that Truth with all their strength (neither uninterested in it nor presuming that they already have it), and 3) are willing to wade through my untamed words. You might ask why—in writing an essay on how science informs my faith—I would choose to write in a scriptural style. Scripture can feel archaic and cumbersome to our modern ears, the words full of their own importance, repetitive, and projecting a complexity that seems to hide meaning rather than reveal it. At the same time, the formality and distance of the words might, for some, convey a sense of the eternal. For some, the repetitiveness might suit recursive, non-linear human learning. For some, the difficulty in finding meaning might encourage deeper exploration. In this essay, I leave you, the reader, to find and interpret scriptural passages and to confirm and understand scientific references, neither of which I explain or fully cite, requiring a search for meaning outside the text itself. Thus, I invite you to explore ideas with me, searching out the eternal and finding in these words thoughts that you can make your own.
