I would agree with Dr. McLelland’s view that science and religion should not be treated as opposed to each other, they should be both able to correspond with and compliment each other; their relationship is more subtle and intimate than generally acknowledged.
The function of science is to discover the truth piece by piece as it were. To move logically from one step to another until you can prove without any doubt what you set out to discover.
The function of religion on the other hand is to reveal the truth as a whole. Science gives us part of the answer, religion attempts to provide the complete answer. And the answer we really seek is the answer to the enigma of what we are. Science believes in a reality which can be critically tested and proven true, religion believes in a reality which cannot to date be critically tested and proved to be true. The belief of science is in the scientific method, the belief of religion is in subjective knowledge alone. This does not mean that one is truer than the other, it simply means that the approaches to a problem are different.
I suspect that the difference between science and religion is the terminology, the language each uses to describe itself. The insight of religion will eventually be neurologically explained to the satisfaction of both. Even what we term the will of God could be understood as some form of innate, purposeful energy dynamic within the species and established by the earth’s planetary position within the solar system and subject to conditions or laws yet to be understood. If we can postulate an interpretation of religion in some like manner then we could see our way to viewing religious experience in the full light of reason and discard its supernatural elements or at least understand them for what they are. Religion is always playing at “catch up” with science, to explain itself to a modern world but it has the final answer to the enigma of what we are in terms of faith and it is the nature of faith that science will be destined to discover.
Bearing the scientific method in mind there is a strong possibility that in the origins of Christianity an experimental idea, distinct from an error which was exploited, was introduced into the hypocritical God accented period of that time, in order to facilitate man’s relationship with God.
In other words the Christianity that we have come to know could have been an ingenious fabrication of making the truth known to us, by creating a person in history as if he was the Son of God in order to create a temporal bridge between God and man, to promote an understanding of our connection to God. The fabrication was not intended to falsely deceive but such was the success of the Son of God in history that the creators found that they could not transpose the historical fiction back to a reality of the mind, of which it was the metaphor.
The historical Jesus had fateful consequences in the origin of early Christianity.Once he was formed there was no escaping the consequences. The Jesus story took on a life of its own and the world was changed.
Either they had to proceed with a historical Jesus or they would find themselves alone and persecuted. New scribes arose to fashion and promote the new reality; Christianity developed the way it did and the more profound meaning remained generally hidden until the rise of science, the progeny of religion, the exercise of reason, could be in a position, scarcely believable to itself, to gradually reveal the truth of what religion really is ‘the truth’ and in the case of Christianity,the solution to the real meaning of Christ Risen.
