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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

GENS4010 Week 6

To be honest, I found the lecture material for this week a little difficult to comprehend, but one analogy which I think is good that helps me better understand the concept of God and chaos is by thinking of an analog clock. A clock that has different cog wheels and moving parts inside, which is comparable to the laws of physics and science that govern this world, and God could be considered the watchmaker, who simply watches the cog wheels turn and function, and doesn't intervene unless a part of broken.

There was several mentioning of chaos in this week's lecture, but the term is a little ambiguous for me. What does chaos really mean? Something that breaks the laws of physics? Something that is unpredictable? Merriam-Webster online dictionary describes chaos as the following:

'A state of things in which chance is supreme'

Doesn't this imply that we live in a world of chaos, then? When the sky is grey, there is a chance that it could rain. And when it rains, there is a chance that there could be lightening. But I suppose they can't really be called chaotic situations unless the possibility of raining or lightening is left to supreme chance.

So how do I believe God interacts with the world? If given the option, I'd like to say that I don't think God intervenes at all. And if he does, all the tragedy in the world such as the Holocaust would mean that they were caused by God's inaction. I think, He Himself having created His own rules on how His world works, He's aware that interference could create great imbalances in the world, thus afraid to break His own rules in fear that He might damage His own system.

For this reason, I don't really believe in the miraculous incidents of epic proportion that are accounted in the Bible either, such as a colume of flame striking down the Egyptian army chasing after Moses and his followers.

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One thing that I found rather fascinating is the flatlander idea.

I was very surprised that someone could conjure up such an idea to criticise the Victorian class system, let alone introduce the idea of a new dimension. But it encourages the readers (I actually haven't read the book myself, but I plan to) to think about the incomprehensible. One suggestion by the lecturer is that maybe Jesus's resurrection is related to living another dimension that we're not aware of, like a 5th dimension - similar to how the sphere is beyond incomprehension for the flatlanders. Under such circumstances, anything could be thought as possible: resurrection; levitation; time travel; metaphysical existence; and everything else. Perhaps heaven and hell is simply another dimension as well.

GENS4010 Week 5

Creationism is something that I find really interesting but at the same time, too difficult to comprehend fully. So I'd like to take a step back from the lecture material and jot down the steps of creationism that's easy for me to understand, at least its basic concepts. Below is a useful video clip I found from YouTube to help me understand it easier.



Creationism in Science
In very simplistic laymen's terms, there was a massive explosion some 16 million years ago, which released energy that eventually formed into matter. This matter clogged into each other, which formed galaxies, and within these galaxies, stars were formed from hydrogen atom energy. Then nuclear fushion created heavier materials, which were able to create other matters including carbon and oxygen. This created the conditions necessary for life to form. The heavier matters then eventually formed into gas and ice in space, which, according to the laws and physics, created enough matter to start a life.


Of course, there are other steps involved in the creation of universe, such as echoes of cosmic microwave background, inflation of matter, and the existence of antimatter. But what is important at this stage is that science claims that everything was created by chance. This claim is a direct challenge against creationism in the eyes of most popular religions, such as Christianity and Islam.

Creationism in Religion
The Genesis describes how the universe was created. In the beginning, God said, "Let there be light," and there it was. Some of the important excerpts that I think from the Bible are:

Genesis:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (1:1). In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (1:2). Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light (1:3). God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness (1:4). God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day (1:5). God called the expanse heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day (1:8). Then God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years (1:14); God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night; He made the stars also (1:16). Then God said, "Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens." (1:20) God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarmed after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind; and God saw that it was good (1:21). Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind"; and it was so (1:24).
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I always believed that the accounts written in the Bible and the scientific accounts can be complimentary. For instance, God said, "Let there be light," and there was the Big Bang. However, one of the students pointed out in the discussion that God first created the flying creatures, but fossil records clearly indicate that the flying creatures were not the first to exist. From memory, I think it was the sea life that began first, which destroys my point that Genesis and Big Bang can coexists.

Something else that was mentioned in the discussion which I found quite interesting is that God did not create the solar system and the stars until the 4th day, which meant that, even though the previous verses speak of light and day, the 24 hour system as we know it could not have existed until the 4th day. This could mean that the days mentioned in Genesis chapter 1 are metaphorical, and it took Him more than just 24 hours to create the things He created. Perhaps, prior to the creation of solar system, one day represented a million years. This is only a musing speculation, but nowadays, not many people take Genesis literally anyway.

Being a non-religious person, and with little knowledge of creationism from other religion's perspective, I think the theory of Big Bang holds true for me. But then again, does it really matter? When it comes to discussing the beginning of the universe, it is an important subject, but I hardly consider the topic during my normal everyday hours.

GENS4010 Week 4

The Holy Bible. Is it really true? I think what we have to carefully scruitinise here is not whether the accounts of the Bible is true or not, but what is truth? Truths can be subjective, and something that is a farse and a false to someone can be very real and true to someone else. Religion is a perfect example of this. To lots of people, God is a lie. But to a lot of other people, He exists.

Uncovering the truths of the accounts written in the Bible is a fascinating task, mainly because it's the world's most popular religious book (sells more copies than Harry Potter). Indeed, many people have tried and are trying to prove its stories to be true, such as uncovering evidences of Noah's Ark in Turkey:

Many of these attemps are unfortunately only speculations, and some stories are more difficult to prove than others. What would really cast away every bit of doubt for Christianity is if the resurrection of Jesus can be proven. There have been many debates regaring this, including in our tute discussions. Some theories that were suggested by the lecturer as well as some of the students is that Jesus was rsurrected, and the way he could walk through walls was because he was revived in another dimension - a dimension that we cannot comprehend. Another theory is that there was simply a mistake - Jesus did not die, or he was not buried in the right tomb.

These theories can probably never be proven. I'd be very impressed if a universally convincing argument for this was brought forward.

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Something that I came across as very interesting which was not specifically mentioned in the lecture material is the discovery of the Gospel of Judas, which explains why Judas' Gospel was never selected. In fact, there are many gospels which were not selected to be included in the Bible, and Judas' Gospel happens to be only one of them.

GENS4010 Week 3

The history of the relationship between science and religion isn't something that I'm too familar with. So below in an account of the clashes and conflicts between the two disciplines:

Before the scientific revolution took place, much thought was based on Christian & Greek philsophy thinking, e.g. The Celestial Spheres.

1543 - Nicolaus Copernicus challenged this notion by publishing a celestial sphere diagram that is based more on observation and less on philosophy:

1600 - William Gilbert discovers magnetism on both humans and the earth.

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Late 1500s to Early 1600s - Sir Francis Bacon conducted research based on inductive reasoning, including observations and experimentations. This was a huge step forward in the realm of science.

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1637 - Rene Descartes created deductive reasoning.

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1698 - Galileo Galilei made various astronomical observations through telescope.

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Early 1700s - Sir Isaac Newton studied gravity on earth.

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The Church's position at that time has always been critical to many of these scientific discovers because they challenged the religious theories and philosophies, such as Copernicus's celestial spheres that doesn't have Earth at the centre. It's probably this long history of rivalry between science and religious that makes the debate very popular even nowadays.

Despite what the Church has done against science (e.g. persecuting Newton for discovering gravity), I can't really say I blame its position. Among other things, the church was trying to protect its power from disolving through all these scientific discoveries. I'm not saying that it did the right thing, of course, but hypothetically, if I was placed in the same situation (e.g. a powerful priest of the Catholic Church during the age of scientific revolution), then I probably would've made similar decisions (persecute the scientists) to protect the Church's power.

GENS4010 Week 2

The ways in which science and religion develops are very different. Science develops through testing various observations, hypothesis and theories, whereas religion develops through paradigm shift. Science is lot more methological in its development, therefore easier to understand. Below is a diagram I've put up to help me understand:

On the other hand, religion develops in a much more dynamic fashion, and the way it develops itself continues to develop. As Colin Russell's reading of Converging streams: science and biblical analogy illustrates, beliefs in deities and mythical beings such as ghosts and apparitions were popular before the modern science became a lot more prominent, and before that animism existed in primitive forms. But now, religion seems to develop through seperation. That is, creation of various sacts within a religion.

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Going back to my idea of the religion developments being very dynamic, I did a very simple experiment. The above diagram regarding science was obtained from the Internet in only a matter of seconds, so I searched for a similar diagram for religion. While I didn't find anything that might be called a comparable diagram of religion to the diagram of science shown above, there were a few interesting results. One of them included the one below:

It's probably not very clear what the words say. The Blogger programme makes it difficult to increase the size of the image larger than that. But the diagram basically categoriese the purposes of religion, some of which are linked to one another. For instance, 'be happy' and 'love' are all part of wanting to 'learn' from the religion.

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And since there was a mention about gestalt in this week's lecture, here are a few more images for entertainment value:

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The point, of course, which is admittedly irrelevant to the above gestalt images, is to say that religion and science develop very differently.

GENS4010 Week 1

According to Richard Bube's book, Putting it All Together, there're 7 categories on a person's opinion of science versus religion. They are:

1. Science Reigns Supreme
2. Religion is Pre-eminent
3. Science and Religion have Nothing to do with Each Other
4. Science Demands Theology
5. Science Redefines Theology
6. A New Synthesis of Science and Theology Must be Made
7. Religion and Science give Complimentary Insight

I never really liked typologies. There's just something inadequate about forcing someone's opinion to belong to a specific category. But if I had to choose from the above, I would say that, while religion and science give complimentary insights (No. 7), I also think that science redefines theology as well (No. 5).

Religion and Science give Complimentary Insight
The reason why I think this is simple - science and religion have two different purposes. One is not trying to outdo the other, but science seeks to prove or disprove certain things while religion offers a peace of mind. It is only because some of the explanations that they offer overlap that a debate of science versus religion has started. But of course, there're instances where religion has been sought to explain things that can and should be explained by science, which is where the 5th category comes in.

Science Redefines Theology
When I say theology, I don't mean the modern views of Christianity or any other religion, but the primitive age where various natural occurrences such as lightening and floods were believed to have been caused by God of Thunder or God of Water, et cetera. This 'God of Gaps' instances needs to be address.

It will be interesting to see whether my position changes throughout this course or my belief in those two categories only strengthens.

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Before I progress further with my journal, it might be useful for me to outline what my thoughts are on the subject of science and religion:

SCIENCE
To me, science isn’t something that exists to contend with religion, nor is it always right. It is important to remember that being right or wrong is entirely subjective, and while the evidences may look clear to some people, zealously religious people may think that other explanation – a more theological explanation – is right. What science is and does, therefore, is subjective depending on whom you ask. To me, however, it is the study of factual data, and I believe it weights more than religious theories.

RELIGION
Religion has always been a psychological factor for me. It offers the believers a peace of mind and guidance on the issues of morality and ethics. I do find most religions sceptical because no God has communicated so clearly that we as human beings are left in no doubt as to their existence. The way they communicate to us are large through personal interpretations of various events or signs, like miraculous incidents.

Even the idea of heaven and hell are psychological to me. People are generally most afraid of things that they do not understand (hence the God of gaps), and at the moment, such thing that is beyond our understanding seems to be our death. Because we have no clue what happens after we die (something that is quite terrifying to lots of people, in addition to the horror of dying itself), it is easy to invent such place as heaven to comfort ourselves. And hell is there as a moral compass.
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At this point, it is probably very clear that I’m not very religious. But this is not to say that I do not tolerate religion. Religion simply offers different things (psychological comfort) than science (facts).

GENS4010 Journal Entries

In this blog, I will upload the journals for my GENS4010 course into blog format. I prefer this way because, not only is it easier to organise pictures and format into more presentable forms than Microsoft Word documents, it is also easier to use after getting used to the functions.

It should be noted that the dates here will not correspond to the actual days of the journal entries because I will be moving the journal from Word document to here. And it should further be noted that the formatting in Blogger goes a little 'off' sometimes, causing pictures and texts to misalign. I'm not sure how to fix this problem fully yet.

Testing

I joined the Blogger website today because it looked like a useful tool for uploading my journals for my university classes. This very first post is just so I can get used to how it all works.