by Joseph Whalen

Created on: June 16, 2008

The concept of God means many things to many people, and to some it means nothing at all. Spirituality and faith in a higher being is something that drove the lives of primitive man. It has served as a guide through most of human civilization in one form or another. In today's society religion and spirituality in the traditional has a much less dominant place than it has in any other time in human history. Is this because humans have evolved to the point of no longer needing something divine to believe in, or is it because over the past few hundred years traditional religion has been replaced with a more mainstream version of religion in the form of the natural sciences?

It is counterintuitive for a rational thinking human being to simply take something on faith. Humans are skeptical by nature; we naturally question things we do not understand. When we cannot find these answers we attribute them to some mystical power or higher being and religion is born. As our sciences have evolved over the centuries we have found ourselves capable of explaining more and more of the things that were once the left to the realm of religion. The movements of the stars, the workings of the human body and the manipulation of the world around us were all considered the purview of the gods or God until humans learned more about these things through objective rational observation and experimentation. We quickly learned that many of the things that were previously explained as the work of a higher deity were in fact explainable and calculable phenomenon of nature.

Modern science draws many things into question that our religious leaders once held a monopoly on. As a result there has been a steady rift between science and religion starting back in the days of Galileo and before. Religious authorities have struggled to mend this rift in recent years. Recognizing the increased threat to their influence over the masses most organized churches understand the dangers of divorcing themselves from the mainstream scientific establishment by clinging to outdated and antiquated views of the universe. This attempt to mend the relationship has taken on many forms from formal declarations of apologies for accused heretical infractions to adoption of scientific explanations into religious preaching's.

Being a person of rational, systematic and scientific thought I find my views on God and religion differ greatly from what modern religious leaders would have me believe. Raised as a Roman Catholic I

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