Science, Religion and One Common Purpose
Ever since people have been able to realize their existence actively, they’ve been doing some kind of research, in order to unfold the secrets of life. For millennia, the most common beliefs had been based on higher authorities, like various gods and natural spirits – this changed, however, when scholars and scientists were not satisfied with the assumption that our earth played a cen-tral part in the universe any longer.
Obviously, these “revolutions” only took place in civilized cultures (almost surprisingly the majority of them was created and lead by sovereign rulers, among them pharaohs and emperors), whereas the lesser civilized ones, consisting of nomad tribes and rather primitive communities, tended to fear fate and other only vaguely definable circumstances above everything else. Nonetheless, also in the higher developed cultures, one would never dare to act against any god’s or goddess’ will, against those transcendent beings that did not belong to the very world we know directly and yet influenced it. Whether it was only their task to move sun, moon and stars or whether they were them themselves, the movement of these across the firmament was something that made people dependent on them. Therefore, it is very interesting to see that especially astronomy always had been an issue, for when it came to verification and falsification of conceptions of the world. So to say, scientists did not solely question the words of their rulers by investigating these, they also questioned the highest available authorities, possibly with the intention to discover or even produce new ones.
Today it has become common thought that science and religion are inherently in conflict, and although they convey opposed positions at times, religion has also very often stimulated the development of science. On the quest for the sense of life itself, mankind simply seems to have developed different methods to find it, among them science and religion. Thus, these two, separated by whatever there might be, still follow one common purpose: Explaining the world in all its peculiarities, and thus explaining life itself.
Just my 2 • 10³ cents