Religious people need to understand science

It helps them. Science can provide some of the most inspirational religious experiences. Consider the imagery described by Carl Sagan:

A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way

Imagine the majesty, the inspiration, the "evidence" for the glory of God shining down on us by a magnificent sunrise. Now multiply that by 400 billion. Now multiply that by 1 trillion (estimates place the approximate number of galaxies in the visible universe at 1.4 trillion). And that represents only the subset of the universe that we can see and only that which we can see with our most sophisticated instruments. God, if He exists, is greater than all that. Humans, in our weakness, can be brought to tears by the "majesty" of God evidenced by the dawning of a single star when in reality that vision represents an infinitesimally small portion of God's true glory.

The degree to which we experience God in His true glory is ridiculously, even pathetically, small. And religious people cannot understand this without science. In fact, when they limit themselves to the "science" of the biblical writers, they actually limit their understanding of God. They cannot see the promise of God accurately, though they study Him "religiously", because the ancients limited God to what they could understand. Instead, religious people should focus on this: God seems so great already with our understanding of Him, but keep in mind that we are only seeing an extremely small portion of it, something like God's Glory / (400 billion * 1 trillion). And only through science can one possibly fathom how much greater the actual God must be.

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