A question that Science and Religion can come together around

As the war between sects of Islam heats up again, it becomes ever more important to find a common ground we can all move to while preserving our most crucial interests.

Sunni versus Shia,  Catholic versus Protestant,  Christian versus Muslim, Muslim versus Hindu,  it's pretty much the same old battle we've had for tens of centuries, but with frighteningly more and more advanced weaponry.

Then we have the battle heating up between all of the above and the institution of Science,  which may be losing ground far faster than it realizes.

This is not good, given that passions are high and willingness to destroy entire countries and cultures is already on the table.

So let me present an alternative.   A middle ground.   A place in which, as in the Harvard Negotiation Project's book  Getting to Yes, we can each protect our interests even if we have to relax our "positions" somewhat.

 If we take science's numbers and Drake's Law, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, there have been "billions and billions" of civilizations others than ours that not only made it to this point of technology, but did so before the Earth was even born.

Even if most of those self-destruct, at least ONE probably survived and has therefore been around for over 5 billion years. One is all it takes.

If we assume that (a) faster than light travel is possible and (b) they have the same tendency to put sensors everywhere as we do, then "they" have not only already been "here", but their sensors and probably their intervention agents are still here, busy at work around us.

For reasons of pure hubris, humans seem to want to avoid counting "1, 2, 3, ..." to get to infinity ("God"), but prefer to count "1, infinity" as if God is only one short step above mankind. That's unsupportable logic.

The far more scientific question, rather than investigating infinity with theologians, is to investigate the nature of "2", i.e., what's right here, all around us, that's higher than us but still way way lower than God?

You in the back row? No, "Congress" doesn't count as an answer.

The burden of proof, it seems to me, is on proving that we are NOT surrounded by a consciously managed framework, no more mysterious than our interventions to sustain the coral reefs.

In scientific terms, religion becomes mostly people sensing that framework and adding fanciful details.

A task on which both Science and Religion, as institutions, could and should agree on is figuring out what the shape and nature is of the real but non-mystical active and adaptive framework that surrounds us.

In fact, documenting such a framework might, in fact,  be a major step in defusing the perpetual and very destructive wars of different religions, or even different sects of different religions, over what are essentially minor cosmetic details compared to the massive framework we will find if we simply stop fighting,  develop and calibrate suitable tools for "looking" for such a framework, and take the time to look.

If nothing else,  good tools should prove their capacity by revealing a number of places where external, but very real, human agencies are messing with affairs we always suspected but couldn't prove.

* The image above is from Harvard's Kennedy School