Religion has in its days of revelation always benefited from the established science of its day. Or perhaps the cosmology of revaeled religion has been fitted to the prevalent cosmology. Even so I have been amazed at how accurate revealed religion of all kinds has been, under an appropriate interpretation, when compared to modern science. You just cannot take it literally word for word.
For example, Genesis predicts the stages of evolution in the correct order if you just switch two days. Abraham's Book of Creation predicts the fundamentals of string theory. Hinduism's Cosmic Egg universe creation is consistent with Smolin's black hole baby universe creation. The Bagavata describes the form of the quark and its three fold groups to make the proton or neutron. The Koran describes black holes and an expanding uniuverse. A poem of the Hottentot Tribe of Africa describes the conversion of a black hole into a new universe.
However, 19th Century science did make the existence of a supernatural seem impossible. That is, classical science makes life after deatrhg seem impossible. Only the physical world can possible exist according to classical physics, and this paradigm was extant even as relativity and quantum physics was developed in the early 20th Century.
But modern astronomy more or less proves that the known, detectable physical world is a very small perecentage of the entire universe: 1-5%, depending on definition. Most of the universe is what is termed dark matter and dark energy. For physicists and astronomers that means that almost anything can be true. There is plenty of room in the universe for supernatural worlds.
Some of the theoretical descriptions of what could constitute dark matter even suggest that it could be primarily a frictionless superfluiud. That would be the perfect medium for the supernatural, for a heaven where work is not necessary, but which could support intelligent life- or is that intelligent death.
I published physics a paper at QuantumMind 2003 available on the internet on how consciousness and dark matter may be related. It lists all the supporting scientific evidence for such a medium and reviews the physics theories that suggest how it could be true. Care for the link??
Richard |