GENS4010 Journal Entries Note

Below are the weekly journal entries for my GENS4010 Science and Religion course. The oldest entries start from the bottom, so to track down a sense of progress, it's probably best to read from the oldest post. Click HERE to see all the entries grouped together. Otherwise, simply click each entry on the right-hand column to see them seperately.

As a closing comment after 14 weeks of the course, I must admit that I gained a substantial amount of knowledge and information on both science and religion. It has definitely helped me broaden my perspective and, through the discussion, understand some of the arguments brought forward by other students who have different beliefs and faiths.

When I look at my very first journal entry, I recorded that I consider my category to be 5 and 7 regarding the science and religion debate. While I admit that my position has not changed since, I feel I have greater understanding about both scientific and religious claims on various topics, such as evolution and creationism.

GENS4010 Week 14

I think speculating about the end of the universe is really fascinating. It's almost like gazing into the deep depths of ocean where you're not sure what lies underneath, or looking into the sky where you don't know what's beyond the dark matter. I was also quite surprised that there're actually established theories on how the universe will end, such as the Big Crunch of Big Freeze.

The two theories mentioned above seem most prominent amongst other theories regarding the end of the universe (in scientific arena, that is). So to clarify to myself, below is a brief outline of how those 2 theories work:

Big Freeze

I think the Big Freeze theory is based on the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which claims that, when seperated from other influences, complex things will break down into smaller things. This may be what's happening with the universe. If it continues to expand, then there might be no more energy left to sustain both life and light, which means the universe will just become - in my own analogy - a gigantic freezer.

Big Crunch

On the other hand, the Big Crunch theory states that the universe may actually reverse its expansion and start contracting, drawing many galaxies together close enough that the gravitational force will pull them into each other, resulting in a great collision amongst stars and planets and eventually destroying everything.

__________

In regards to religion, Christianity believes in what I think can be called a judgement day, where Jesus will return back to Earth and grant a life of eternal peace in heaven for those who believe in God, and cast the faithless into fiery pits of hell. Below is a diagram from the lecture material that I found very useful and easy to understand.

One suggestion from the lecturer was that perhaps the new age of God's Kingdom shown above in the diagram represents heaven. Being a non-Christian, I have my doubts in that regard, but it's nevertheless amusing to wonder what it would be like on the judgement day. Would people literally ascend or descend to heaven or hell? Or would those realms turn out to be just metaphorical? Or would they not exist at all? It's a shame that we can't ask the dead.

__________

The readings for this week was very interesting as well. It was written by Paul Davies called The Last Three Minutes, which explored the idea of human survival in a very long-term projection. Some of the ideas suggested were space travel and planet colonisation, and I really do believe such science fiction can come true one day. It only makes me wish that I was born a few million years later so that I could witness what it would be like to live in the age of space travel.

__________

As a final note, while I was searching for something that might easily explain some of the theories regarding the end of the universe, I found a very fascinating documentary about the end of Earth on YouTube that I would recommend others to watch. It talks about the collision of objects from space into Earth and how such collision can happen again in the future.

__________

However we might end, the truth of the matter is that the end of universe isn't something that is widely talked about now, and with good reason. There is nothing to indicate that our existence will end any time soon, and it is not a thought that occurs in my mind before I go to bed in the evening or when I wake up in the morning. But this is not to say that we should grow detached from the idea because it is nevertheless a fascinating topic to discuss.

GENS4010 Week 12

There has been a lot of assignments and exams this week and more next week, so I'll be brief with this week's entry. The lecture itself was regarding the environment, and the role religion plays in it.

In the Bible, it is said that God has created everything, including plants and vegetations. So does this mean that our environment belongs to God? Whether the answer is yes or no, it seems like a good reason for religious sacts to campaign for better environment; it has been created by God so it deserves to be preserved. Yet so far, I have not heard of any particular religion involved in a high-profile campaign to preserve the environment which continues to be degraded.

a

This is understandable, though, and I should keep in mind not to sound too arrogant with my remarks. There's probably a religious organisation that I haven't heard of which is campaigning for the rights of cleaner and better environment. And such campaigns cost money - often the large scaled international campaigns that actually make a difference can only be funded by states and government because of the high cost involved.

a

I do thnk that our environment is something that needs to be actively protected and preserved, and if religion can give us more reasons to do so, then that's truly a good thing.

GENS4010 Week 11

On my first year of university, I took a psychology course that introduced the main ideas of the discipline, and one of them included the idea of mind and matter, and which part comes first. One of the lectures included quite a humurous cartoon of a group of aliens trying to decide where human thoughts come from after finding it difficult that a piece of meat called brain does all the information processing.

I did an extensive search on the Internet to find this same cartoon but after hours of searching, I came up with none. So I attempted a rather crude imitation drawing of the same cartoon:
The point here is to illustrate that brain and consciouness have always been a mystery. Many theories have been developed on it, and attempts was made to find out exactly how something biological like the brain can actually create thoughts. I find the subject very mind-boggling if I actually spend some time to think on it. Descartes originally thought that, for whatever reason, human consciousness comes from the pineal gland in the brain, but nowadays I don't think anyone can say for certain exactly when and where biology changes into thought. Although the origins of feelings such as love and anxiety can be mapped to certain parts of the brain, the same cannot be said for thoughts and consciouness, and when matter turns into mind.

Something else that has been suggested in a philosophy class I've attended last year is to describe what is alive and what is dead. For example, are tables alive? This might be a very stupid question, given that tables cannot think, feel, or sense. But when broken down into enough detail, both tables and humans are made from the very same microparticles. Our brain which originates our feelings are made of same microparticles that the chairs are made out of. Given this argument, I think it becomes very difficult to judge what is alive and what is not.

GENS4010 Week 9 & 10

I've merged weeks 9 and 10 together because I think prayers and miracles are closely connected. After all, what some people ask for through prayers are miracles.

Prayer

I think prayers have been traditionally associated with paying respects to God, at least in Christianity sense. But increasingly more and more people treat prayers as simply a way to communicate, or in other religions, simply to meditate. I can really relate this to myself, as I often speak to myself to recollect my thoughts, or try to do some constructive thinking. Praying to God in a conversation style would probably take a similar form, with the exception that you're talking to your deity, and not to yourself.

I also think that talking with God is largely psychological, because you're never talking with Him, but rather talking to Him. When I used to pray, I sometimes received this warm, fuzzy feeling inside which made me feel good, and reassured myself that He is out there listening. But now, I believe such feelings were roused through my thoughts rather than by divine presence.

But like I said above, I think when praying treated the same way as talking to yourself, it is a great way to recollect your thoughts and organise your mind, and perhaps a good way to mediate as well.

__________

Miracles

Similar to prayers, I do believe that miracles are largely psychological too, unless they're events of which are so obviously divine it its nature that it casts no doubt as to the involve of God. Such events of epic proportions that break the laws of physics and science are recorded in the Bible, such as Jesus walking over water, Moses dividing the Red Sea, columes of fire and smoke erupting from the ground to the sky, et cetera.

I recently got involved in a discussion with a friend about Christianity, and she being a dedicated Christian, I asked her how come such miracles of biblical scale happened before in biblical times but not anymore (at least in the relatively modern times of recorded history). Her answer was that she wasn't sure why, but she implied that just because we're not aware of such miracles does not mean that they do not happen.

I feel that smaller miracles that are mostly coincidental in nature like the rain suddenly stopping when you need to go out or the bus running late when you arrive at the bus stop late are simply that - coincidences. When such coincidences occurs, it just feels good, and people including myself want to thank something for it. If that happens to be God, then that's fine by me. I personally feel that these coincidental miracles are simply timely incidences that makes us feel lucky, which gives a feeling that it was a divine intervention by higher powers.

Something that I heard endearing from the movie Bruce Almight is that people should not expect miracles, but rather try to be miracles. A single mother with two job who has time to take her son to the football match is a miracle. I think this statement is something that we should all strive to achieve.

GENS4010 Week 8

Suffering is probably my main reason that I renounced myself as a Christian. God in Christian sense is suppose to benign, all forgiving and all loving. But if he exists, and He has the power to to anything He wishes, then His inactions have allowed countless tragedies to occur. In other words, what was so special about the people of Moses that he chose to intervene to save their lives, yet at the same time, allowed the six million Jews to die pointlessly? Why should I get to live when roughly 3,000 children in Africa die everyday?

It's probably not entirely wrong of me to say that, assuming God exists, He speaks through suffering and pain. After all, he allowed his son Jesus to go through so much suffering on our behalf. But if this is so, then what can we possibly gain from pain and suffering?

A lot of students in the discussion have continuously pointed out that suffering that doesn't kill us strengthens us, and the experiences we gain from such event will help us be strong in the future. To be honest, I think such statement is very naive, and, after hearing it repeatedly, somewhat frustrating as well. As I've mentioned in the discussion, not all experiences are worth it. What marvellous experience do parents learn from having their baby born with life-threatening defacts? Not to have a baby? Given the choice, I think people will gladly subtitute the experience for no suffering.

a

A student brought forth an argument using a passage written in Roman, saying that it is our freewill that has caused these tragedies, and not God. This is a valid point indeed. God doesn't control every aspect of our lives. But then again, I'd like to raise my previous point and ask why he saves some people and let others die. I honestly can't see him as a just God or all loving as Christians would like to claim.

GENS4010 Week 7

As with my journal entry on creationism, I'd like to take a step back from this week's lecture about evolution and jot down in simple laymen's terms of how evolution really happened, so that I can better understand it.

But before the actual explanation, here's a video clip depicting the steps of evolution which I find quite entertaining:

The idea of evolution and natural selection was, of course, proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, which was greeted as a dangerous idea when much of Europe was dominated by Christian thinking. Nobody would have welcomed the thought that humans are no longer special, but only an evolutionised versions of chimpanzees.

The chief ideas proposed by evolution is that, firstly, there are hereditory elements to a species, and the more contribution these elements make to the survival of the said species, the better chance it has of it being passed on to the future generations. If this continues on, then, mutations will continue to evolve with the features that are best suited for survival in their environments as they continue reproduce.

The following is from Howstuffworks website:

"The change brought about by a mutation is either beneficial, harmful or neutral. If the change is harmful, then it is unlikely that the offspring will survive to reproduce, so the mutation dies out and goes nowhere. If the change is beneficial, then it is likely that the offspring will do better than other offspring and so will reproduce more. Through reproduction, the beneficial mutation spreads. The process of culling bad mutations and spreading good mutations is called natural selection.

As mutations occur and spread over long periods of time, they cause new species to form. Over the course of many millions of years, the processes of mutation and natural selection have created every species of life that we see in the world today, from the simplest bacteria to humans and everything in between."

In a nutshell, the process looks like this:

And the history of evolution of animals looks like this:

As for humans, this is how the picture looks like:

Of course, this is a quick attempt to explain the theory of evolution and natural selection in simple, laymen's terms with a few slap of diagrams, which doesn't do justice for the much complicated theory. There're other concepts within the theory of evolution that I have not recorded here such as microevolution, genetic drift, adaptions, and other things. This is because what is principally important here in the debate of science and religion is that, similar to the scientific view on the creation of universe, everything happened through chance. In fact, according to the lecture notes, the chance of matter evolving into what we are now is thought to be 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. A feat that just seems downright impossible to achieve.

__________

Religion and Evolution

Religion - principally Christianity and Islam - denies that humans are one of the products in a long chain of evolution because the scriptures speak that we as human beings are made in the shape of God. Besides, the chance of us having evolved from tiny matter is so small that it seems improbable.

Once again, I can't help but tinker with the thought that maybe religious view and scientific view can be complimentary here. Perhaps what God created in the first place is not the final product of species, but single-celled organisms, which evolved into what we are now. But that would, of course, make it difficult for Genesis to have a lot of weight on its texts, as the Bible actually depicts Adam and Eve speaking with God. Perhaps the two views cannot be so complimentary after all.

I do remember reading in an article on the Internet that Genesis and the creation of species recorded within its scriptures should not be taken so literally. While we are indeed made in the image of God, it should not be the physical aspects that should be on our mind, but rather the conscience, psychological aspects, such as the ability to make moral judgements, have a soul, et cetera.

In the end, being a non-religious mind, I find myself siding with the theory of evolution. Apart from the fact that there is such a slim chance of it all happening, there seems little dispute on the validity of the theory. Besides, I don't think it's really right to say that, because something is so complex and difficult for it to have evolved, someone must've created it.