On Science and Religion on a Saturday Afternoon

I'm a lapsed agnostic; I'm not sure what it is I don't believe in.

It seems to me that religion exists to explain the inexplicable. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do the good die young? Why is there injustice? Why do some things sometimes somehow work out?

Thing is, a long time ago, there were a lot more things that humans hadn't figured out a way to explain. And we humans are cursed with wanting answers. If we don't have answers we tend to make up answers. There's truth in myths and lessons in fables; truth in made-up answers.

Science came along and decided to look for answers that weren't made up. Scientists took the earth out of the center of the universe and shattered a lot of other myths over the years but didn't necessarily take the underlying truth away from myths and fables. We all appreciate the lesson of The Tortoise and the Hare, even if there wasn't an actual race; we understand the tragic implications of indecision even if there never was a real-life Hamlet; whether there really was a Job and God and Satan sat back and yanked his chain, we understand (or, at least contemplate) the point of the story.

I can understand people who need to think that a wise and good man might have been unjustly executed 2,000 years ago and that his spirit and love (in the form of his teachings and examples and parables...metaphors) live beyond the tomb. I can appreciate how Siddhartha Gautama might have discovered and taught and lived enough universal truth to become the Buddha. God or fate or happenstance or something might have pulled the Hebrews' fat out of the fire often enough for some people to pay attention. The bottom-line Truth therein remains inexplicable, and that's why there's religion.

If there is a God, I kinda figure He'd work his miracles on a larger scope than, say, Tinkerbelle. If a moment is like a thousand years to the omniscient, omnipotent, everlasting universal "god," digging the Grand Canyon is something He could do over his lunch hour, not with a wave of His magic wand.

And maybe, just perhaps, science is a systematic method to understand how His magic wand really works.

There's a recent report that the human genome project has discovered that humans and chimpanzees do *not* share 99% of their genetic codes; maybe only 96%. I'm bracing myself for the wave of faithful who'll cite this discovery as an "admission" that science doesn't know all it thinks it does.

That's the difference between religion and science: religion has the answers, science has the questions.

Religions cling to "answers," while science continues to ask questions. Scientists are humanity's Three-Year-Old, constantly asking, "Why?" We all know how annoying three-year-olds can be. Religionists are the good-but-frustrated parents who stop and say, "Because I said so."

I suspect Neanderthals thought they'd achieved the height of human understanding, what with their mastery of fire and ability to look at the sun and figure the mastedons were migrating this way. I suspect that every generation of humans tends to think *they* have achieved all there is to know. The only people who won't will be scientists, the damn little three-year-olds who persist on asking "Why?"