Making Science and Religion Compatible

It has been said that science and religion are incompatible with each other.  The more you scientifically understand reality and our place in it, the less you need a religious answer to help our understanding of reality.  That being said, though, until we understand the workings of all reality, there may still be a place for religion or God in our thinking.  At the very least, a good definition of God gives us something to aspire to.

In this blog, I want to explore the idea of how science and God can be made compatible.  To begin with, though, I should layout my view of the idea of God and religion.  My personal views are different than most people and I arrived at them over many years of contemplation, but they are still moving and adjusting as I learn more.

I would say that I am anti-religious, but agnostic when it comes to belief in gods.  Having grown-up in a Christian family and society, I still tend to think in terms of the Christian God, but I'm willing to consider all religious gods.  At this time, though, I feel that all religions that I know of have gotten the notion of God wrong and are, therefore, incompatible with science.  The two will naturally butt heads because the two attempt to address how life works, and should work, on a day to day basis.  The day to day workings of reality are the province of science whereas religion should be attempting to answer the Big Question.

The Big Question that all religions attempt to answer is "why are we here?"  All other questions in the religious sense ("is there a God?", "is there an afterlife?", etc.) are in some ways a derivative of this basic question.  In my view, though, the religions have answered this question wrong by being too egocentric in the answer.  The main answer I have heard to this question is "to give glory to God" which, to me, is very egotistical in that it gives us far more importance than we probably deserve.  To think that God has created all of this reality for this one little tiny dot in one small corner of the galaxy which is yet another small part of the universe is, to me, the highest definition of hubris that I could imagine.  Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot probably expressed this best.

I actually have a larger answer to the Big Question.  My answer is that we are here to become God!  It may take us billions upon billions of years to achieve this, but evolution says that we should eventually achieve this.  This is where I think science and religion can come together.  The religious idea that some higher power created everything and kicked it off then becomes compatible with science.  My answer to the Big Question gives us something to aspire to and continue to use our (some would say God given...) free will to attempt to achieve.

However, there are still questions that I've left unanswered in this that I will explore in the future.