Just for fun – I endeavoured to make a small childlike scribble of the trajectory and meeting place between science and faith just beyond our sphere of consciousness.

Mainly because I was just wondering what happens when we cast our faith and knowledge into the void? And what comes back.

The sub-atomic particular and turbulent cosmic fizz from which all things known and unknown to us are formed – and from which all things reveal themselves – sits just beyond our consciousness.

It represents the great battle-ground on which the fundamentalists of faith and science seek to prevail.

To one group – the faithful – the fizz is an immeasurable fixed expansive and spiritual state with infinite potency and multiplicity rooted in one spiritual universal truth.

To the others – the rational – the fizz is a measurable volatile dynamic and expanding state with infinite faculty and possibility rooted in one mathematical universal truth.

SCIENCE the systematic enterprise that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe is an amazing thing and it reveals new and wondrous things to us everyday. But there is still so much unknown to us in science – and the more we discover the less we know. We now know that quantum physics and the maths that science roots itself in have been found to be common in material terms and in the more obvious nuclear physical world. But they have no idea how they overlap or how to close the chasm between them. And for all the sharp cornered reason based truths of it, even the most rigorous scientific fact or data is open to misinterpretation and manipulation for much the same reason as its theological counterpart. It exists in a rare society dislocated from the populous, hidden and closed. Its arcane nature renders it as arcane as theology. Equally, the moment the human hand or mind touches some absolute scientific truth, it is sullied: subject to human flaw and spoiling

FAITH There is much to be said for faith and its emollient and redeeming features in the hands and hearts of good people. Its ability to elevate and inspire the masses to elevate our human existence and civilise our societies can be very powerful. But this confidence or trust in a person thing, deity or view is wonderful. But we need to draw a very clear line between Faith with a big prescribed religious F and the little f of that belonging to people who just believe in something greater than us and beyond our comprehension and control

The doctrines or teachings of a religion can become a tyranny, as a belief not based on proof is far more vulnerable to manipulation than one that is rooted in measurable fact. Theology becomes the intellectual plaything of a rare society closed to the people and open to politicising and empire building, much the same as science.

The application of either kind of faith in absentia of any proof demands a leap of it, which in turn can lead to a model of sightless following. Blind faith especially in the prescribed religions suffocates honest open discourse. In this the framework lacks resilience – an adaptive reflex nature – and this is rooted in an often demonstrated inability to listen and react to things they don’t agree with in fundamental terms – unsurprisingly there is no evolutionary nature to their dogmas that can respond fluidly to the flux and flow of knowledge – which is the crux of their issue.

The big beautiful Boomerang

But perhaps for the rest of us just trying to find out how best to get to the end of the month without losing our dignity, destroying our planet or bombing our neighbour in some geopolitical fit of pique, it is the arc or trajectory that should hold the greatest reassurance. Because perhaps it allows us to understand the relative nature of these polarities of our existence in a way that is palatable and slightly more understandable.

We know that if we throw our faith out there into the atmosphere and beyond the personifications and forms our various faith-based religions apply to the infinite unknown – it eventually meets an expansive indecipherable omnipotent state beyond our comprehension. And returns to us as a fact of science

We know that if we throw our current scientific knowing out there into outer and inner space far beyond the reach of the hubble scope and microscope and out of human sight it eventually meets the inexplicable chaos of scientific truths still far beyond our human comprehension. And returns to us as an act of faith.

Out of Sight Out of Kind

Perhaps in the particular throng just beyond our comprehension we spy the missing link in the story telling of our human existence in relative terms both spiritual and material.

And by that I don’t mean who owns the story – though the human condition predicts both parties will try.

The subsequent bun-fight that would ensue if the Hadron Collider did reveal that the Higgs Bosun Particle does in fact play a role in turning mass into matter – and whether that was therefore just a further demonstration of the awesome nature of god’s great mystery espoused by the men of Faith or whether it simply removes the God head from the cosmos as many scientists would like to do once and for all.    

That both sets of fundamentalists – accent on the mentalists part – might ever manage not only to appreciate but also accept that in that subatomic fizz that reaches from a sub cellular to an inter stellar dimension, there is a particular truth of such scale and magnitude that it renders both of their emphatic natures and their insistence on continually throwing stones seem simply wilful and precocious.

That either could even for a moment imagine that they control the conversation and define the absolutes in this realm is simply arrogant and ridiculous.

So I say boomerang our beautiful existence in either direction and be happy if when thrown out there, your faith returns as small spark of science and your science as a small act of faith. Both are illuminating and enriching when kept out of the hands of the lunatics who would have either dictate the shape and form of our human happiness and sense of self-determination.

G’day.