By Henry Christopher, UTS Class of 1980

◊ Second in a series of his commentaries on an ideal world ◊

Although many religious people consider themselves the “children” of God, the gap between God and His children is so wide, one wonders if an ideal world can ever be achieved. However, if we consider the origin and nature of God and ourselves as his children, there is ample reason to believe humankind will one day cast off its selfish nature and establish a long cherished world of peace and harmony with God, the creation and ourselves—the long awaited “Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.”

To understand why we can have confidence humankind will establish an ideal world, let’s first consider some fundamental questions about God: Who is God? How did God originate? Why do we say that God is love? Is God and His creation really eternal?

Over my years as a Unificationist, I have explored these questions. Some ideas I present may have little support in most scientific circles where atheism dominates, but they stem from a belief, shared with some of the great Western philosophers, that God exists, is an eternal being, and is the Creator of our eternal universe.

Although today many scientists assert that there is no God and the universe came about randomly, Aristotle, considered one of the first Western scientists, argued for the existence of an eternal God in his observations of the universe. In his book, The Metaphysics, he calls God the “Unmoved Mover”— a being of everlasting life who is the cause of the universe. His argument, taken up later by one of the greatest Christian theologians, Thomas Aquinas, is that things exist because they are in motion. Things cannot set themselves in motion, so something caused one thing to move, which caused the next thing to move, and so on. But if we follow the causal chain back, we can never discover what actually causes the first thing to move, unless it was moved by a being that is eternal: “The Unmoved Mover,” the “Prime Mover,” whom both men said was God.

If God really is the Unmoved Mover, who is the First Cause of the universe as Aristotle and Aquinas postulated, where did He get the energy to move things?

Many scientists claim the universe just happened by chance, that the origin of all things is energy, and that there exists no God who created it or who can hold it together forever.

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by Keisuke Noda, Professor of Philosophy, Barrytown College of UTS

The “unity” of science and religion is one of the central theses of Unificationism. In the Divine Principle, the “unity” of science and religion is discussed as one of the characteristics of “new truth” disclosed by the Principle. In practice, beginning in 1972, Rev. Moon held a series of International Conferences on the Unity of the Sciences (ICUS) in order to bridge science and religion. The sciences include natural, social, and human sciences, and religion includes Judeo-Christian and Islamic monotheism, non-Western religions, and various spiritual paths. Both in theory and practice, Unificationism seeks the integration of all knowledge within a theistic framework and the idea of a “unity” of science and religion  is part of this endeavor.

Recent atheist movements led by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have been undermining religion on the basis of “science.” Religious apologetics similarly attempt to justify their beliefs based upon “science.” Before we approach the question of the “unity” of science and religion, we need to clarify the nature of scientific knowledge as well as that of religious knowledge.

I challenge the popular belief that science is interpretation-free, a-historical, non-social knowledge, and argue that both science and religion have interpretive dimensions (whether there is any knowledge free from interpretation is a separate and open question). If science and religion are two types of interpretive theories, their frameworks of interpretation, including presuppositions and assumptions, require rigorous scrutiny. The hermeneutic structure of human understanding, the dynamic part-and-whole relationship between each element and the framework of interpretation, may be the most fundamental element in any human understanding.

What Does the “Unity’” of Science and Religion Mean?

There are two contrasting attitudes towards religion: one apologetic and another anti-religious. Others are somewhere in-between. Religious people often take an apologetic stance and try to find supportive evidence in the sciences. For them, “unity” means compatibility between or a justification of faith by science.

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