Less than 24 hours ago, BBC published an news article on their website which starts as such: “Every star twinkling in the night sky plays host to at least one planet, a new study suggests. That implies there are some 10 billion Earth-sized planets in our galaxy.”
I had two initial reactions:
1) “You gotta be kidding me”: because it’s a literally unbelievable statement.
2) “Wow”: I’ll explain this one. I am a Bahai, and one of the fundamental tenets of the Bahai Faith is harmony between science and religion. In fact, in the Bahai Writings one can read:
“Now, all questions of morality contained in the spiritual, immutable law of every religion are logically right. If religion were contrary to logical reason then it would cease to be a religion and be merely a tradition. Religion and science are the two wings upon which man’s intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress. It is not possible to fly with one wing alone! Should a man try to fly with the wing of religion alone he would quickly fall into the quagmire of superstition, whilst on the other hand, with the wing of science alone he would also make no progress, but fall into the despairing slough of materialism. All religions of the present day have fallen into superstitious practices, out of harmony alike with the true principles of the teaching they represent and with the scientific discoveries of the time.”
However, some things are hard to reconcile. Some scientific (or pseudo-scientific, sometimes!!) findings are hard to reconcile with religion, and some religious statements are very hard to believe given science’s understanding at any given time.
One example of a religious statement (in this case, Bahai) that I always had trouble understanding was this one:
“Know thou that every fixed star has its own planets, and every planet its own creatures, whose number no man can compute.”
I always thought that it was maybe metaphorical in some more or less subtle aspect (could the “creatures” be mere minerals? by planets could it be meant meteors?). But, believing that the Bahai Revelation, which started less than 200 years ago, contains divine guidance destined to cast light on mankind’s understanding for a few centuries more, I never totally disregarded one view (planets round every star) or the other (very few exoplanets).
Which is why this BBC news article seems extraordinary to me :) It marks, in a way, the understanding of science (and thus of humanity) of what was formerly only a religious statement - and is a very interesting example of the harmonisation of science and religion, simple interpretations of one very same Reality as they are.
Faaaantastic! :)
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