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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baháʼí views on science | 2/5 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baháʼí_views_on_science | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T07:04:33.477017+00:00 | kb-cron |
For the vast majority of the world’s population, the idea that human nature has a spiritual dimension—indeed that its fundamental identity is spiritual—is a truth requiring no demonstration. It is a perception of reality that can be discovered in the earliest records of civilization and that has been cultivated for several millennia by every one of the great religious traditions of humanity’s past. Its enduring achievements in law, the fine arts, and the civilizing of human intercourse are what give substance and meaning to history. In one form or another its promptings are a daily influence in the lives of most people on earth and, as events around the world today dramatically show, the longings it awakens are both inextinguishable and incalculably potent. and further:
Future generations … will find almost incomprehensible the circumstance that, in an age paying tribute to an egalitarian philosophy and related democratic principles, development planning should view the masses of humanity as essentially recipients of benefits from aid and training. Despite acknowledgment of participation as a principle, the scope of the decision making left to most of the world’s population is at best secondary, limited to a range of choices formulated by agencies inaccessible to them and determined by goals that are often irreconcilable with their perceptions of reality. The scholar Graham Hassall summarizes that statement saying it "demonstrates the breath-taking scope of the Bahá'í program of governance reform, from local to global levels, and encompasses not only political and legal fundamentals, but the roles of science and technology in the global distribution of knowledge and power." and university professor Sabet Behrooz called "…a brilliant statement … (showing) the necessity of harmony between science and religion …(which) must be the guiding light and the organizing principle of our endeavors in integrative studies of the Bahá'í Faith."
== Implications == A number of scholars have offered commentary on the Bahá'í teachings on science and religion. Saiedi outlines several implications of the Bahá'í view of an agreement between religion and science or reason:
religious evolution of understanding laws and institutions. religion is not a substitute or competition with science but have a mutual reciprocity because of their individual qualities rather than take religious statements literally, the Bahá'í Faith provides a lexicon of interpretations or allegorical relationships of past statements an acceptance of the laws of nature as an expression of divine will and so called miracles are not evidence otherwise. Phelps lists the following three points: