Religion and Science is One

Religion and Science is One
Anyone who listened to Something Understood on radio recently [29-9-13] must realize that it is no longer rational to stand religion and science in opposition. If those fundamentalists, who still cling to pronouncements on cosmology as the substance of religion, are set aside what is left? Some form of spiritualism, relating to which, rational statements can only be made as suggestions that all the sciences will consider and may agree to, or leave aside as unproven. The idea that the universe has some form of consciousness at its heart, or permeating it, may have sprung from spiritualism, but it is not contrary to science. Whether that conscious heart is called 'God' or not is a matter of choice. What is very peculiar about some religious prejudice, as indeed voiced, is that rational science deals with 'things' that move about and clash in space. That purely mechanical idea of the universe must surely have been laid to rest. Nor is ethics the reserve of religion. Religion cannot say 'God is good' [as a being separate from the universe] without having a prior concept of what is 'good' such that God might not be good. And on the other hand, if whatever God is must be called good, then a suicide bomber may after all be virtuous. An altruist is an altruist with or without an omnipotent being - as if 'God' should have more power than is sufficient.