So today for the blogging Challenge I wanted to say a few words about the relationship between the Bahá’í faith and science.

I studied chemistry at university so I consider myself a man of science but a lot of people don’t think that it’s possible to have faith and believe in science. I get that, I totally understand where they are coming from. 

For centuries, science and religion have often been at each other’s throats, but we Bahá’ís don’t think that they should be at odds. We believe in harmony between science and religion, `Abdu’l-Bahá said that without religion science leads to materialism and with science, religion is just superstition, and that a true religion must conform to the conclusions of science, and that science and religion are both aspects of the same truth.

So for a Bahá’í we accept that scientific knowledge is true, we don’t see there being a need for conflict at all. We believe that man evolved from more primitive forms, we believe the earth is ancient, we believe that humans have been gifted with reason so we can through independent investigation discover the truth for ourselves.

`Abdu’l-Bahá teaches us that science is a progressive field and we are encouraged to push its boundaries in a continual search for a more full understanding of the truth of our universe.

“Mathematicians, astronomers, chemical scientists continually disprove and reject the conclusions of the ancients; nothing is fixed, nothing final; everything is continually changing because human reason is progressing along new roads of investigation and arriving at new conclusions every day. In the future much that is announced and accepted as true now will be rejected and disproved. And so it will continue ad infinitum.”