Essay/Term paper: Can one believe simultaneously in god and the big bang?

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Religion

Where are the boundaries of our mind and soul? Is there a point beyond which we cannot look anymore, where our sights become dim and vaguely disappear in the forever darkness and quietness of eternity? Has our limited knowledge and, at the same time, undeniable need to be able to explain everything, become so obvious and intense that we have to have the answer to every question out there? Religion sometimes may present the answer to our questions, but can one sincerely search for our beginnings by strictly following His word?
Anyone who has ever gazed at the bright summer sky at night, even just for a while, can"t help not to ask himself – Where do we come from? How did all this happen? Who did this and why? Those are the essential questions to which no one up to this date knows the answer. Curiosity of our nature has launched us to the skies in search for those answers. Countless hours of sitting behind the telescopes around the world lurking for that one signal they need to reveal the grand secret and take a peek into those very first seconds of creation - what is known as the Big Bang. Nowadays there is well established idea that whole universe as we know it became from one little tiny spot and in the split of a second it inflated to enormous size and it keeps expanding ever since. How do you explain that to someone who has been raised whole his life in a belief that there is a God up there beyond the sky and the Sun and the stars and that it couldn"t be anyone but Him who created this world that goes far beyond our realms of understanding. How do you explain to such person without breaking his whole concept of existence that somehow it can all be explained logically by the laws of nature, only we don"t exactly know how just yet? Furthermore, how do you encourage them to help exploring in that direction, to contribute and dedicate their whole life to explaining something they don"t really believe in? Maybe it would be wrong thing to do.
Still, there are people who have different, modern viewing of religion and the God. To them religion is more like a clinging stone – an island in an ocean of everyday troubles and confusion; peaceful hideaway where they can be alone with themselves and spend some time with their thoughts in quiet. Such people are not to be categorized for their behavior, my opinion is that the number of such believers is growing among the religious people as we are pressured more and more with dynamics of everyday routine and don"t have time for ceremonies and traditional ways of worshipping the Almighty. They maybe don"t go to the Sunday"s mass nor have a cross hanging on their living room wall, but they need to have someone or something to believe in to help them get through in the time of adversity, so they turn to that something – God. And their God may be totally different from THE God – it doesn"t matter. It is that something inner inside of everyone of us, need to believe that pushes us further and keeps us going faster and faster into the unknown.
Ironically, maybe such faith in God helped those who created the concept of the Big Bang and the beginning of all universe. Is there more than one way of believing in God and how do we measure strength of someone"s belief? Is the one who claims to believe in God and in the theory of Big Bang the "traitor" amongst the religious people? Is the Church by its definition so crude and conservative that it mustn"t accept any way of thinking that alters the sayings of the Holy book?
The truth is one and only and can not be artificially created or made up. The fact still remains that something cannot be created out of nothing, and that the source of everything can be found, only sometimes the answer is out of our domain of knowledge and understanding. It is up to every one of us individually to decide if we are strong enough to embrace the challenge of struggle with the nature and the unknown for the pleasure of finding out the right answers to our questions or if we rather accept the traditional believing and settle for the answers we get from the past generations who got them from those before them and so on. One can"t stay true to him self if he follows those two paths at the same time, nor if he wants to move forward.
There are some things that can"t be explained and comprehended by human reasoning. Sometimes because they are so abstract and distant, sometimes because they are so obvious we cannot see them – either way, in a need for a solution some turn to religious sources and thus turn their back to the science and man"s strive for the truth that is out there. They seem to be content with the written word of something that cannot be proved or explained by human experience. However, some accept it just as an icon, a sanctuary to which they escape when they need to be with themselves and still find plenty of room in their mind for vast spaces of unexplored, allowing the possibility of another beginning. And then there are those who firmly reject any religious explanation and let the pure science lead the way.