The Meaning of It All Read Online Free PDF Page B

is worthwhile to attempt to attain the consistency.
    There are two sources of difficulty that the young man we are imagining would have, I think, when he studies science. The first is that he learns to doubt, that it is necessary to doubt, that it is valuable to doubt. So, he begins to question everything. The question that might have been before, “Is there a God or isn’t there a God?” changes to the question “How sure am I that there is a God?” He now has a new and subtle problem that is different than it was before. He has to determine how sure he is, where on the scale between absolute certainty and absolute certainty on the other side he can put his belief, because he knows that he has to have his knowledge in an unsure condition and he cannot be absolutely certain anymore. He has to make up his mind. Is it 50-50 or is it 97 percent? This sounds like a very small difference, but it is an extremely important and subtle difference. Of course it is true that the man does not usually start by doubting directly the existence of God. He usually starts by doubting some other details of the belief, such as the belief in an afterlife, or some of the details of Christ’s life, or something like this. But in order to make this questionas sharp as possible, to be frank with it, I will simplify it and will come right directly to the question of this problem about whether there is a God or not.
    The result of this self-study or thinking, or whatever it is, often ends with a conclusion that is very close to certainty that there is a God. And it often ends, on the other hand, with the claim that it is almost certainly wrong to believe that there is a God.
    Now the second difficulty that the student has when he studies science, and which is, in a measure, a kind of conflict between science and religion, because it is a human difficulty that happens when you are educated two ways. Although we may argue theologically and on a high-class philosophical level that there is no conflict, it is still true that the young man who comes from a religious family gets into some argument with himself and his friends when he studies science, so there is some kind of a conflict.
    Well, the second origin of a type of conflict is associated with the facts, or, more carefully, the partial facts that he learns in the science. For example, he learns about the size of the universe. The size of the universe is very impressive, with us on a tiny particle that whirls around the sun. That’s one sun among a hundred thousand million suns in this galaxy, itself among a billion galaxies. And again, he learns about the close biological relationship of man to the animals and one form of life to another, and that man is a latecomer in a long and vastevolving drama. Can the rest be just a scaffolding for His creation? And yet again there are the atoms, of which all appears to be constructed following immutable laws. Nothing can escape it. The stars are made of the same stuff, the animals are made of the same stuff—but in some such complexity as to mysteriously appear alive.
    It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its long history and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are fully appreciated, to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to view life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is very rare, and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing—atoms with curiosity—that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders. Well, these scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all