Either way, both sides don't seem all that open-minded the way they go about discussing the mysteries of life. I've always been pretty quiet on the issue, mostly because the internet could really do without another pointless religious argument, but I think I'll at least attempt to throw a wrench in the cog of the internet hate machine by trying to find a third argument.
See... the way I see it, people aren't necessarily after truth. I think what people are really trying to do is to create a belief system so they can make sense of the world. Some choose religion, some choose science, some live by rationalism, others by empiricism. But what they all have in common is that they set down some ground rules for what constitutes truth, without any real consideration of what truth even means. Science made some major headway into solving the universal predicament of what to agree on by simply declaring observations based on repeatable experiences. Seeing is believing, as it were, and thus, if spinning makes you dizzy, clearly it must be so.
But I'll take it one step further... what exactly is happening that makes observation possible? It's a byproduct of consciousness, of course. It's basically the thing that happens when a system collects enough information to analyze a declaration in the form of an observation. Even further, that observation only makes sense in the realm of language, in which the rules of logic and mathematics can apply, which might I add are also systems in and of themselves, granted very sophisticated ones.
Now while an argument could theoretically be made that analyzing information doesn't necessarily filter for truth, I definitely don't want to talk shit about how amazing the brain is when it comes to these kinds of tasks. I'm just noting that information is being processed before the notion of truth is even a tangible concept. I doubt the universe even cared about what was true or not before we came along. For all we know, physics lived a carefree and reckless life before we came along and made sense of it.
The way I see it... ever since our very first complete thought, we've been figuring out a puzzle. If something didn't make sense, our curiosity would force us to deal with it, even if it involved tagging it with a name and throwing it in a folder in our brain titled "mysteries of the universe", never to be thought of again. The older we get, the more accustomed we become to organizing information in such a way that we are intimidated by the notion of a complete re-structuring of our brain. It's one thing to find out that a tomato is no longer a vegetable, it's another thing completely if the world turned out to be round instead of flat. Just imagine how you'd feel if you found out your belief system was actually the complete opposite of true, how would you deal with re-structuring that to make sense of the world again? Where would you even start?
But, perhaps truth as a concept is elusive by it's very nature. Perhaps there's no set way the universe actually operates, perhaps the rules change as the universe expands, perhaps the universe is a collective dream in which we all decide what the rules are, perhaps only you exist and the world is a manifestation you made up to make sense of your own personality and inner struggles, or perhaps a lot of atoms exist and magnetism is the ruling force of all interactions forever incomprehensible by the human mind because of the nature of chaos theory.
And you know what? Maybe it doesn't matter. I think regardless of what the truth actually is, if there's a truth to begin with, we're all going to pick the one we like the most anyway. Because in the end, it doesn't matter what truth is to the subjective experience. People existed just fine before they knew anything about astronomy and physics, hell, they still do. It could even be defeatist to attempt to corral everyone together into a single belief system, just think of all the alternative paradigms we'd miss out on! I mean... take for example, somebody who believes the world has only existed for a hundred years. You could tire yourself out trying to explain to him how advanced civilizations and cultures could have formed so comprehensively in such a short amount of time, or you could think about the implications of such a specific worldview. If he actually created a robust and logical internal worldview, he'd probably be filled to the brim with novel ideas, as crazy as most of them would sound, but the profundity levels would be off the chart.
However, I digress... I honestly believe we'd rather attempt to find an ultimate truth because our experiences - the realization of 'truth' - is what fuels our own levels of insight. If something seems to be true, even if it later turns out to be false, we can't deny that feeling that our world opened up a little bit more, offering all sorts of new possibilities. I mean, think about games, or movies, or virtually any form of fiction. Sometimes they offer us things we're more willing to accept and believe in because there's something about their internal system we find attractive. Is it any wonder that people end up in all sorts of different religions and belief systems?
In many ways, any sort of belief system, even one deeply rooted in logical thinking and sound reasoning is much like a prison system. How easy is it, even for the most brilliant of us, to feel disheartened because we feel like our own worldviews had led us to cell, inherently limiting us to never truly break free? I know I've personally felt the weight of the world crush down on me as my childhood aspirations and idealistic notions about the universe got reduced to scientific concepts. Each time I made sense of the world, I felt a rush of euphoria as I picked up on the implications, only to be followed by a sense of dread as my mind slowly reduced the revelation to simply yet another mind numbing factoid. How filled with delight and imagination when I first pondered the mere insignificance of Earth in relation to the trillions of galaxies in the known universe, only to later ponder the same thought with nothing more but a sense of apathy.
And just like a prison system, in order to break out of it, you first have to understand what a prison system truly is. I don't want to take this metaphor too far, but think about it, what exactly *is* a prison system? A bunch of walls, some security systems, you got your prison guards and of course the inmates. You have whatever tools disposable to you within the prison, and you have the combined experiences and worldviews of all the guards and inmates inside the prison system. If no combination of those experiences and tools lead you to a solution on how to break out of the system, then you have to re-think the system, turn it into abstractions until you can reform the picture differently, then perhaps you can find a way to break free.
Anyway, I'm starting to feel a bit cheesy here, but just to go full circle... next time you find yourself engaged in a science vs religion debate, I urge you to just stop for a second and analyze the nature of the conflict... you might be able to dig a little bit deeper and satisfy everyone. I mean, we're just trying to make sense of things, right?
