First of all we have to acknowledge that not all scientists are atheists or agnostics, perhaps majority of them have a certain degree of faith, however it is a prevalent opinion in the mainstream scientific circles that faith and scientific method do not go hand in hand. So, the question is, why did we come to this point? It was religion that encouraged science when it first started to objectively study the world and try to explain how God made and structured it and how it functions; the first scientists were deeply religious people…
Let us ask ourselves if we all believe in one and the same God? As we examine the major religions of the world, we will find out that most of them teach that the Lord is all-powerful, omnipresent, omniscient and eternal.[1] Based on the premise that there could be no two (separate) omnipresent eternal beings, we should conclude that we indeed believe in the same Almighty, because to have two (or more) separate omnipresent eternal beings is an oxymoron (i.e., impossible).
They cannot be separate because they would mutually exclude some “living” space from each other and hence they wouldn’t be omnipresent. If they are separate and omnipresent at the same time, the only possibility for this situation to occur is if they would exist at different time intervals (and hence they wouldn’t be eternal).
Apart from this philosophical approach, let us see if we could find any additional links between the major religions. There is an obvious link between Judaism, Christianity and Islam; they all believe in the same, one, God. Also, if you look at the major religions of the East, they all have similarities and touching points with Hinduism, so the major question is if there is a link between the religions of the East and those of the West?
In his book The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You Paramhansa Yogananda writes about the unknown years of Jesus (see Discourse 5), “In the New Testament, the curtain of silence comes down again on the life of Jesus after his twelfth year, not to rise once more until eighteen years later, at which time he receives baptism from John and begins preaching to the multitude. We are told only:
And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man. – Luke 2:52
“For the contemporaries of such an extraordinary figure to find nothing noteworthy to record from his childhood to his thirtieth year is in and of itself extraordinary.
“Remarkable accounts, however, do exist, not in the land of Jesus’ birth but farther east where he spent most of the unaccounted-for years. Hidden away in a Tibetan monastery priceless records lie. They speak of Saint Issa from Israel ‘in whom was manifest the soul of the universe’; who from the age of fourteen to twenty-eight was in India and regions of the Himalayas among the saints, monks, and pundits; who preached his message throughout that area and then returned to teach in his native land, where he was treated vilely, condemned, and put to death.”
Paramhansa Yogananda also writes how these ancient records were found by a Russian traveler, Nicholas Notovitch and how his enthusiasm (for this discovery) was not matched “by the Western Christian orthodoxy, which was loath to support such a radical revelation.” However, Yogananda also writes that in the early and mid 1920′s two other reputable persons visited the same Himis Monastery and reported that the manuscript about Saint Issa does really exist. They were Swami Abhedananda and Nicholas Roerich.
So, religious establishment didn’t want to hear about the possibility that Jesus mixed with “pagans” and “unbelievers” throughout Asia, and that there is a potential that his teachings might actually contain a lot of “stuff” he “learned” while living in India, Nepal and Tibet.
Obviously, these records should be seriously checked, verified and studied, with an objective heart, so that the world would know the truth. But, it is equally obvious that this task cannot be delegated to religion, because it’s too biased.
Hence a need for the (unbelieving) science. Because (unbelieving) science is (generally) not burdened with what it might loose in the process of acquiring new knowledge, (in theory) it would never hesitate to start investigation of whatever area of knowledge comes under its spotlight. One other thing that unbelieving science is good for is inter-religious study, no matter how strange that might sound, because of it’s unbiased position.
From this perspective, it is also interesting to know that science has provided a theory that, if proven valid by a larger scientific community, will confirm that there is one God and that He is the Universal Substance that everything is made of. I do believe that in the process of the validation of this new theory, science will have to ‘dig deep’ into the religious scriptures and will consequently find a lot of similarities between them, because, after all, we all believe in the same God.
Perhaps, it is an irony that unbelieving science is necessary to ‘glue’ religions into a harmonious fold, nevertheless it is suitable to do so because of it’s objectivity. One would also hope that after the mentioned new theory is positively verified, science would stop being so suspicious about God and would embrace it’s proper place in God’s scheme of things.
So, the short answer to the question written in the title is that something was needed to unify and harmonize all religions.
(more about harmony between all religions and about the philosophical and religious background for the mentioned new theory can be found in the book Whence Do We Come?)
[1] The exceptions are Buddhist scholars who argue that these attributes apply to the Creator-God, in whom Buddhists do not believe. They believe in God as the Impersonal Truth, pure Existence, pure Consciousness and pure Bliss (Sat-Chit-Ananda). Hindus believe in such a God as well, but they do also acknowledge that this impersonal Spirit-God (Sat-Chit-Ananda) created the universe, and by the virtue of having done that, He automatically assumed the role of the Creator, Father-God.
