How Science Can Be As Comforting as Religion

BY- JAYA CHOUDHARY

For decades, it seemed as if religion was attempting to teach us truths about the universe and just got things a bit wrong. Consider the age of the universe. It said that the planet was 4000 years old and that there is only one sun in the universe. In reality, religion was never really interested in doing the sorts of things that science does. It may have thrown off the old ideas, but at a deeper level, it was concerned with a different mission altogether. Religion desired to tell us stories to make life more bearable for us. It was involved in providing us with something to hang on to in order to help us get through the journey of life.

At the same time, science, when interpreted properly, has never been an enemy to spiritual growth. We can usefully look to science for the sort of ideas that we used to seek in religion. Here are four big consoling ideas that can be found in science.

Perspective

In the modern world, we are constantly at risk of losing focus, i.e. making more of our problems and worries than is healthy for us. One of the most valuable aspects of science is that it can make us feel small. Science has told us that the Milky Way galaxy contains approximately 100 billion stars and that the observable universe contains 10 billion galaxies, implying that there are billions of stars out there. When we lose perspective in the course of our everyday lives, we can take a few moments to look at photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and note that we are, in a glorious and poetic way, what we have always feared: nothing.

All is vanity

Many of our actions are aimed at ensuring our long-term survival. Religions used to gently remind us that all is vanity as we aspire to live on through our work and create something more lasting than our biological self. Science provides us with a more powerful version of this definition. It claims that given enough time, our universe and galaxies would all collapse, leaving behind nothing but gas. With NASA's help, we can surely claim that all truly is vanity.

Forgiveness

It's all too easy to lose our cool and eventually become disgusted with ourselves as well as judgmental toward others. Science, on the other hand, maybe able to teach us the art of forgiveness and free us from the need to judge more effectively than religion. The last 250 years is the period since we became urbanized and began living with technology encompasses a mere 0.1% of our history. Naturally, the majority of our instincts are geared toward making us more adaptable to more simple situations. It's a wonder we're able to be respectful and courteous at all. As per science, we are doing well. So from next time think how worst we humans could be before you hate on yourself or even others.

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Existence

Science is supremely capable of nurturing feelings of gratitude in humans because of a basic truth about the way gratitude works. It comes from a realization of how much worse things could have been, and science teaches us that we have a lot to be thankful for when it comes to our lives on this planet. As in the case of gravity, which drew stars together to form galaxies, including our own. It also happens to be responsible for placing our planet at the proper distance from the sun for life to develop. We should be thankful for comet collisions that resulted in the formation of DNA.

Science has so much to be worshiped, to be awed by, and be consoled through. Nevertheless, the curse of the modern world is that it is yet to have understood all the amazing things one might still do with science.