Second, we have to bear in mind that what we are dealing with is a pretty big thing. We’ve got this universe thing which apparently came from nothing and is expanding in something that is bigger than itself even though the universe is infinite.  Now physics says that there could be many universes and dimensions[2] but that it really doesn’t mean anything (i.e. nothing mystical going on here).  Physicists are struggling hard to make sense of it all and correlate the theories of quantum mechanics and field theory into one big unified theory so that all the parts move in a mutually consistent way.  I do not discount science.  I love science.  I am a scientist myself.  I just wish I had a mind better suited for understanding the mathematical language.  I have read many books on relativity and all that I have realized is that I am an avid reader.

            Third, we have a complicating factor in this situation in that  “we” are here. “We”? We are active participants in this system.  Us, pain, love, hunger, desire, fear, feed the chickens, kick the dog and holy moly we have been doing this for thousands of years.  As inextricable atoms of endlessly convoluted systems within systems, we lack comprehensive perspective, and can't easily distinguish confused or blended principles.  Some people get a wild hare and presume to try to make sense of it all. Trying to make sense of it all is fine. The problems seem to come when we think we have actually succeeded.  Freud, for example, thought he had human psychology all figured out, but Carl Jung came along and climbed onto his shoulders, presuming to expand the Freudian horizons.  Dr. Freud rejected Jung’s elaborations and tried to ruin his career.  Even luminary Einstein, rejecting the physical indeterminism and what he saw as the incompleteness of quantum mechanics, famously huffed, "God does not play dice!" and spent the rest of his careeer trying to rig God’s game.  (Niels Bohr, Heisenberg’s colleague in developing quantum mechanics theory, implored Einstein to “stop telling God what to do!”)  In the most extreme cases you can add every tyrant, despot, free thought- and liberty-destroying wacko to this list.

            Fourth, the universe, including our self, is inherently enigmatical. We are and live in an enigma, wrapped in a conundrum on the horns of a dilemma in a martini of chaos. From the conflicting nature of light (behaving as a particle yet simultaneously as a wave[3]), to the contradictory nature of quantum mechanic and field theory, to the apparent non-dimensionality of self (e.g. dreaming, remote viewing etc.[4] ) we find nothing but opposites and polarity and particles that all run down a rabbit hole and come out the other side as their polar opposites.

            The complicated nature of things seems to be the gist of the problem. It is all just too darn complicated and some people have a problem with that. Some people try  to simplify things. In fact we all have to simplify things. If we did not simplify things we could not function. Nevertheless, by the very act of simplifying things we are prone make ourselves miserable because we cannot understand everything (another one of those conundrum deals). So then we have the basic human history of the majority of people spending all their effort and thought on survival and the few elite who are the ones who do most of  the thinking and tell everyone else what is going on. It is not a bad system really. It is pretty synergistic. Not everyone can sit around with his head in the clouds, otherwise no one will eat. But then you get the ego thing, the control of the masses by fear thing, and the go to war and serve God thing, which of course is really the get the king more gold thing. After a few thousand years of this, people pretty much figure it out and say to hell ( or purgatory or Gehenna etc.) with all this religion stuff and say “ I am gonna be smart.” So they become scientists and measure things and develop new languages that nobody but themselves can understand. They proclaim themselves to be the only keepers of knowledge, and before you know it the earth is ripped to shreds and stands on the verge of obliteration by technology run amuck. Pretty much sums it up. Thus religion hates science and science hates religion. Ironically, many of the religious people who hate science think we have a God-given right to destroy the earth with science, but that is another topic.

            Basically religion has to realize that it uses science and science has to realize that it uses faith. Faith can be defined many ways.  To many religious people faith is a mental ascent to a historical fact or an alleged historical fact.  They then seek to convince others of the historical fact and beat each other over the head as to what exactly this historical fact actually was and means. Religious people use science as much as anyone else. Science is nothing but observation and analysis. Obviously, no one would make it very long without the use of observation and analysis. Try walking down a flight of stairs without it.

            Among scientists, faith arises as a trust in the consistency of nature in spite of the fact of the inherent inconsistency (e.g. light as a particle and a wave; Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) that they have demonstrated time and time again. Nevertheless they have faith that somewhere down the road they will figure it all out and achieve the Nirvana of Grand Field Theory, or the Grand Unified Theory, or the Grand Grand Theory or whatever. They don’t seem to have realized that as soon as they get the Grand Unified Theory figured out they will discover something even more bizarre and they will have to come up with something bigger (kill the gods and they just keep coming back).  In the meantime they are content that as long as they follow all the laws and rules of nature, and don’t get their wires crossed, they can trust that insulators will always work as insulators and that they won’t fry their pocket change every time they flip a light switch.

            Of course many religious people will say that it is not just this historical fact or that fact but rather they feel it and know it at a different level, therefore it must be true.  Science says the same thing.  Scientists talk about the atom but say it is just a model, a concept of something indefinable. It is just a symbol of something much greater. Of course, this something greater has no inherent intelligence or consciousness as we do or we would be approaching something like a —well, a god. Religion has its experiments, proofs and failures, and science has its experiments, proofs and failures.  Science has its principles, and religion has them also. Religions seem to work for a lot of people, and even though they can cause great destruction, you can’t really ban them.  Science works for a lot of people, but it can cause great destruction, though it is not inherently evil.  Greedy people misuse it and religious people misuse it and unfortunately many times they are one and the same. The point is that religion is as much a science as science is a religion.

            It is well and good that people be allowed to experiment with feeling and thought-provoking things.  It kind of makes up for all this grinding survival that has occupied us for the last thousands of years.  The problem is, again, when people become wise in our own conceit and we are not willing to listen to outside sources and recognize a proven failure. Therein lies probably the biggest difference between science and religion. Science is willing to recognize a doomed theory and move on.  Well, actually it is not very good at that either. Science gets stuck in the graft game as much as religion does. Take any grant-seeking professor and he or she is as likely to come up with a convenient answer as any profit-seeking prophet. Even the Catholic Church has admitted that it is okay to believe in evolution and even extraterrestrials.  That is a big change of direction for a massive inertial body of thought. Now if they would just figure out that zero population growth (i.e. sustainable but not exceeding the earth’s carrying capacity) is being kind to one’s neighbor, we might just survive this epoch. But that is another subject..

            So what is the final answer? There is no final answer. Enjoy the martini of infinity. Be kind to dumb animals, fools and drunks. Learn everything you can about everything but realize there is always an infinite more to learn. Could it be any other way?