A philosophy is a particular set of theories or beliefs about subjects such as the nature of existence and knowledge of how people should live. Science is the study of nature and behavior of natural things and the knowledge that we obtain about them while religion is belief in a good or gods and the activities connected with the belief.
Saint Thomas Aquinas once stated " Philosophy is the maid of the religion. " But as a time - honored saying has it : " Philosophy is the mother of the sciences. "
Einstein, who rejected the biblical idea of God, once state: Sciences without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
One, who is interested in these statement, will not miss " The Brief History of Time, " written by Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant minds since Einstein. This is a book about God or perhaps about the absence of God, that Hawking embarks on a quest to answer Einstein's famous question about whether God had any choice in creating the universe. Hawking is attempting, as he explicitly states, to understand the mind of God. And this makes all the more unexpected the conclusion of the effort, at least so far; a universe with no edge in space, no beginning no end in time, and nothing for a Creator to do.
The Origin of Religion
Most of religions derives from theological position, which based on ignorance, fear and in awe of some natural phenomena, so in the earliest time, they attempted to describe and explain the universe involved the idea that events and natural phenomena were control by spirits with human emotions who act as a very humanlike and unpredicable manner. These spirits inhabit natural objects, like rivers and mountains including celestial bodies like the sun and the moon. They had to be placated and their favors sought in order to ensure the fertility of the soil and the rotation of the seasons as well as the security of human race. Gradually, however it must have been noticed that there were certain regularities, the sun always rose in the east and set in the west, whether or not a sacrifice had been made to the sun god. Further the sun, moon and the planet followed precise paths across the sky that could be predicted in advance in considerably accuracy. The sun and the moon might still be gods, but they were gods who obeyed strict laws, the law of natural, apparently without any exceptions.
Philosophy versus Religion
Before 340 B.C., most people would find the picture of our world is really a flat plate support on the back of giant tortoise. But the Greek philosopher Aristotle believe that the earth was a round sphere rather than flat plate. Also he even quoted an estimate that the distance around the earth was 400,000 stadia [ 1 stada equal to about 200 yards - twice the currently accepted figure! ] Aristotle thought that the earth was moved in circular orbit about the earth. He believed, for mystical reasons, that the earth was the center of universe, and that the circular motion was the most perfect. This idea was elaborated by Ptolemy in the second century A.D. into a complete cosmological model. The earth stood at the center, surrounded by eight spheres that carried the moon, the stars, the sun, the five planet known at the time, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The outmost sphere carried the so-called fixed stars. This was adopted by the Christian church as the picture of the universe that was in accordance with Scripture, for it had the great advantage that it left lots of the room outside the sphere of fixed stars for heaven and hell !
Until the year 1514, the Copernican model got rid of Ptolemy's celestial sphere. His ideas was the sun was stationed at the center and that the earth and the planet moved in circular orbits around the sun. Nearly a century passed before this idea was taken seriously, the two astronomers, Kepler and Galileo started publicly supported the Copernican's theory. The death blow to the Aristotelian/Ptolemiac theory came in 1690. In that year Galileo found that the stars, the planets and satellites did not have to orbit directly around the earth, as Aristotle and Ptolemy had thought.
Consequently, Galileo was put on trial by the holy Inquisition and force to react his theory that the sun, not the earth, is the center of the universe. Galileo was house arrest until his death in 1642. During the inquisition, he said that the Bible was not intend to tell us anything about scientific theory, and that it was usual to assume that, where the Bible conflicted with the common sense, it was being allegorical!
Galileo remained a faithful Catholic, but his belief in the independence of science had not been crushed, so he was claimed to be responsible for the birth of modern science, His renowned conflicted with the Catholic Church was central to his philosophy, for Galileo was one of the first to argue that man could hope to understand how the world works, and, moreover, that we could do this by observing the real world.
Philosophy versus Science
Before Galileo and Newton, the people believed Aristotle, who said that the natural state of body was to be at rest and that it moved only if driven by force or impulse. It followed that a heavy body should fall faster than the light one, because it would have a greater pull toward the earth.
The Aristotelian traditional also held that one could work out all the laws that govern the universe by pure thought: it was not necessary to check by observation.
Galileo later demonstrated the Aristotle's belief was false by dropping weight from the leaning tower of Pisa. According to Galileo experiments, as a body rolled down the slope, it always acted on by the same force [ its weight ] and the effect of a force is always to change the speed of body, rather than just to set it moving, as was previously thought. It also meant that whenever a body is not acted on by any force, it will keep on moving in a straight line at the same speed. This idea is known as Newton's first law of gravity in 1678. This is the big difference between the idea of Aristotle and those of Galileo and Newton. A philosopher believe in pure thought while scientists believed in what had been proven by experiment.
Science versus Religion
Newton, a great science, had lots of faith in god. He was the father of the law of gravity, but like Aristotle, he believed in absolute time and absolute space although there is no unique standard of rest, according to Newton's law!
The lack of an absolute standard of rest mean that one could not determine whether two events that took place at different times occur in the same position in space. For example, suppose our Ping Pong ball on the train bounces straight up and down, hitting the table twice on the same spot one second apart. To someone on the tract, the two bounces would seem to take place about many meters apart, because the train would have traveled that far down the tract between the bounces. The non existence of absolute rest therefore meant that one on the tract, and there would be no reason to prefer one's position to the other's
Newton was very worried by this lack of absolute position or absolute space, as it was called, because it did not accord with his idea of absolute God. In fact he refused to accept lack of absolute space, even though it was implied by his laws! Also the Bishop Berkeley's belief that all material object and time are an illusion, was ended in 1905, when Albert Einstein pointed out that the idea of absolute time was not really existed, according to his famous theory of relativity.
Religion versus Science
The beginning of the universe had, of course, been discussed long before. According to a number of early cosmologies and Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition, the universe started at a finite, not very distant, time in the past. One argument for such a beginning was the feeling that it was necessary to have " First Cause " to explain the existence of the universe. In his book " The City of God " St Augustine accepted a date of about 5000 B.C. for the Creation of the universe. When asked: What did God do before he create the universe ? Augustine didn't reply. He was preparing Hell for people who asked such question. Instead, he said that time as a property of the universe that God created, and that did not exist before the other Greek philosophers, on the other hand, did not like the idea of Creation because it smacked too much of divine intervention.
Hubble, according to his observation in 1929, brought the question of the beginning of the universe into the realm of science. He suggested that there was a time, call the big bang, when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense. Under such conditions all the law of science, One may say that time had a beginning at the at big bang, in the sense that early times simply would not be defined. It should be emphasized that this beginning in time is very different from those that had been considered previously. In an unchanged universe, a beginning in time is sometime that has to be imposed by some being outside the universe, these is no physical necessity for the beginning. One can imagine God created the universe at literally any time in the past.
On other hand, the universe is expanding, there may be physical reasons why there had to be a beginning. One could still imagine that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang, or even afterwards in just such a way as to make it look as though there had been a big bang, but it would be meaningless to suppose that it was created before the big bang. An expanding universe does not preclude a creature out his job!
At first, many people who felt that the whole idea of singularities was repugnant and spoiled the beauty of Einstein's theory, including some scientist, who believed in scientific determinism, do not like the idea that the time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention. [ The Catholic Church seized o the big bang model and in 1951 officially pronounced it to be in accordance with the Bible ]. Until 1970 " the Friedman model had been confirmed that there must have been a big bang singularity provided only that general relativity is correct and the universe contains as much matter as well observe.
Einstein once asked the question " How much choice did God have in constructing the universe ? " If the no boundary proposal is correct, he had no freedom at all to those initial conditions, He would, of course, still have the freedom to chose the law that the universe obeyed. This, however may well be only one, or a small number, of complete unified theories that are self consistent and allow the existence of structure as complicated as human being who can investigate the laws of the universe and ask about the nature God.
Einstein's general theory of relativity, on its own predicted that space - time began at the big crunch singularity [ if the whole universe recollapsed ] or at the singularity inside a black hole [ if a local region, such as a star, were to collapsed ]. An if so, does the universe in fact have a beginning or an end ? The following paragraph is an answer from Hawking who wrote in his book, A Brief History of Time.
" Throughout the 1970s, I had been mainly studying black holes, but in 1981 my interest in question about the origin and the fate of universe was awakened when I attended a conference on cosmologies organized by the Jesuit in Vatican. The Catholic Church had made a bad mistake with Galileo when it tried to lay down the law on a question of science, declaring that the sun went round the earth. Now centuries later, it had decided to invite a number of experts to advise it on cosmology. At the end of conference, the participants were granted a audience with the pope. He told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he did not know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference - the possibility that space - time was finite but had no boundary, which mean that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation. I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I feel a strong sense of identity, partly because of the coincidence of having been born exactly 300 years after his death!"
Science without Religion
According to the astronomical knowledge of today, the oldest planet detected, is almost 13 billion years old and more than twice the size of Jupiter, compared with the relative youth and stability of our own celestial neighborhood, where Earth and other planets orbit a single 5 billion year - old star in the quiet part of the Milky Way. This ancient planet was dragged with stars, aged into a red giant and a white dwarf, toward the core of a globular star cluster some 5,600 light - years from Earth, in the constellation Scorpius. It is among than 1,000 planets known outside our solar system. According to the Pennsylvania State University scientist, this planet formed with its star, 12.713 billion years ago, when the Milky Way galaxy was very young just in the process of forming. It is the example of the first generation of the planets formed in the universe. By comparison, Earth and the rest of our solar system is the third generation affair.
In a nutshell
According to Buddhism, there is no " Being ", there is only " Becoming ". The phenomenal world, therefore, is in a state of continuous flux. All things, without exception, are nothing but chain of momentary events, instantaneous bit of existence. They are momentary, not only are eternal entities such as God, or matter, denied reality, but even the simple stability of empirical objects is regarded as imaginary. A belief either in absolute being or in absolute nothingness is therefore considered to be an extreme view. All conditioned states [ material and non - material ] including space and time, bound by the law of nature. They are dependently originated - arising, persisting with alteration, then subsisting and passing away. Everything is soullessness. This is the Buddhist philosophy
By THE BUDDHA'S CORE TEACHINGS
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