The Relationship Between Science and Religion
A group of scientists got together and decided that mankind had come a long way and no longer needed God. They picked one scientist to go and tell Him that they no longer needed Him. The scientist walked up to God and said, "God, we've decided that we no longer need you. We are able to clone people and do other miraculous things, so why don't you just go on and get lost." God listened patiently to the man and after the scientist had finished talking, God replied, "Very well, if you think you no longer need Me how about this? Let's have a man making contest." The scientist replied, "OK, great!"
But God added, "Now, we're going to do this just like I did back in the old days with Adam." The scientist confidently responded, "Sure, no problem." He bent down and grabbed himself a handful of dirt. God lovingly looked at him, grinned, and said, "No! You get your own dirt!" Just as the scientist was blind to the fact that there would have been no science without God, we realize that religion cannot be explained without the help of science. In other words, science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
Without God science would never have started. There are too many holes in the story of evolution for it to be believable without adding in divine intervention at some point. It is a far stretch to say that Humans, the most complex things on the face of the earth, evolved from a simple singled-celled organisms. Without some place where God comes in and breaths life into the human, there is no way it is possible.
In the same way, science is the main area where humans have the freedom to think and explore the nature of everything from human origin to the composition of the atom. Religion must also realize that science gives us a lot. The people in the Scopes Monkey trial were unwilling to accept science as a way to explain the origin of the human species. I don't think that the teacher's goal was to turn his pupils away from religion. He just wanted to show him that there are other things to take into consideration. Just as religion is the only way to do and explain some things. Modern medicine is a perfect example of this.
First, I will demonstrate Stephen Jay Gould’s argument against the overlapping between science and religion, which is as follows:
Science and faith are generally viewed as two topics that do not intermingle. However, Andy Crouch’s work, Delight in Creation, suggests that there is an approach to both faith and science that allows support of scientists in the church community. There is an approach that can regard science as a career that can reflect the nature of God.
...child is taught that man, in current form, was put on this earth by God himself and then in the science class it is explained to them how man is evolved from primates. This is not virtuous at all for society. There needs to be a defining gap between religion and science. How are little children suppose to know which is right and which is wrong when they are told two different ways of how man has come upon this earth and they are contradictory. Religion however is deemed to be necessary by many people. They feel that people need some form of organized religion. Religion does help many people get through hard times in their life and gives them hope. However, it causes problems when science is introduced into the life of a child who is experiencing life and trying to figure out the world.
The history of opposition between science and religion has been steady for about half of a century. As early as the 1500's, science and religion have been antagonistic forces working against each other. Science was originally founded by Christians to prove that humans lived in a orderly universe (Helweg, 1997). This would help to prove that the universe was created by a orderly God who could be known. Once this was done, science was considered by the church to be useless. When people began to further investigate the realm of science, the church considered them to be heretics; working for the devil. According to Easterbrook (1...
Charles Krauthammer was the author of Let’s Have No More Monkey Trials that was in TIME. This article gives the statement that to teach science and religion together would be a wrong choice because doing so “undermines” both subjects (Krauthammer 40). For example, liking ice cream and sour candy because they are both delicious might be why a person eats them....
As said by Yale professor of psychology and cognitive science, "Religion and science will always clash." Science and religion are both avenues to explain how life came into existence. However, science uses evidence collected by people to explain the phenomenon while religion is usually based off a belief in a greater power which is responsible for the creation of life. The characters Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth in Nathaniel Hawthorne 's novel, The Scarlet Letter, represent religion and science, respectively, compared to the real world debate between science and religion. Roger Chillingworth is a physician who is associated with science. (ch. 9; page 107) "...made [Roger Chillingworth] extensively acquainted with the medical science of the day... Skillful men, of the medical and chirurgical profession, were of rare occurrence in the colony...They seldom... partook of the religious zeal that brought other emigrants across the Atlantic." The people of the Puritan community traveled across the Atlantic for religious reasons, and because men affiliated with medical science did not tend to practice religion, they rarely inhabited this community. Chillingworth, falling under the category of "skillful men of the medical and chirurgical profession," would not be expected to reside in this community. The narrator through emphasizes this with his rhetorical questioning, "Why, with such a rank in the learned world, had he come hither? What could he, whose sphere was in great cities, be seeking in the wilderness?" These questions demonstrate that it was so strange for Chillingworth to appear in this community because of his association with science. Perhaps, the phrase "with such rank in the learned world" could yield the narra...
Throughout history, conflicts between faith and reason took the forms of religion and free thinking. In the times of the Old Regime, people like Copernicus and Galileo were often punished for having views that contradicted the beliefs of the church. The strict control of the church was severely weakened around the beginning of the nineteenth century when the Old Regime ended. As the church's control decreased, science and intellectual thinking seemed to advance. While the people in the world became more educated, the church worked harder to maintain its influential position in society and keep the Christian faith strong. In the mid-nineteenth century, the church's task to keep people's faith strong became much harder, due to theories published by free thinkers like Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, David Friedrich Strauss, and others. These men published controversial theories that hammered away at the foundation on which the Christian church was built. As the nineteenth century progressed, more doubts began to arise about the basic faiths of the Christian church.
Christianity has no conflict with science but it does with the idea of scientism. Science is based on observation and methods; whereas, Christianity is based more on personal experiences. Our world is very vibrant and distinctive and just one perspective cannot fully explain the world. Our planet is unique because all the natural laws are in harmony. By observing our planet people have concluded that every law is perfect and right for people who live on it. All the forces and elements are in balance to sustain our life. Every detail was has a specific purpose to it. Science supports that everything in the world is surprisingly “fine-t...
...wever, in the best interest of advancing education and an enlightened society, science must be pursued outside of the realm of faith and religion. There are obvious faith-based and untestable aspects of religion, but to interfere and cross over into everyday affairs of knowledge should not occur in the informational age. This overbearing aspect of the Church’s influence was put in check with the scientific era, and the Scientific Revolution in a sense established the facet of logic in society, which allows us to not only live more efficiently, but intelligently as well. It should not take away from the faith aspect of religion, but serve to enhance it.
Many atheists have used science as a way to disapprove the existence of God. Science is not an accurate way of disapproving the existence of God(2). Scient...
While some people may believe that science and religion differ drastically, science and religion both require reason and faith respectively. Religion uses reason as a way of learning and growing in one’s faith. Science, on the other hand, uses reason to provide facts and explain different hypotheses. Both, though, use reason for evidence as a way of gaining more knowledge about the subject. Although science tends to favor more “natural” views of the world, religion and science fundamentally need reason and faith to obtain more knowledge about their various subjects. In looking at science and religion, the similarities and differences in faith and reason can be seen.
'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light…'(Gen 1:1.5) '…then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. '(Gen 2:7) This part from the bible is a typical example of what people used to believe before scientists came and gave logical explanations to the questions of mankind.It is possible, of course, to define a non-supernatural "religious" worldview that is not in conflict with science. But in all of its traditional forms, the supernatural religious worldview makes the assumption that the universe and its inhabitants have been designed and created by "forces" or beings which transcend the material world. The material world is postulated to reflect a mysterious plan originating in these forces or beings, a plan which is knowable by humans only to the extent that it has been revealed to an exclusive few. Criticising or questioning any part of this plan is strongly discouraged, especially where it touches on questions of morals or ethics. Science, on the other hand, assumes that there are no transcendent, immaterial forces and that all forces which do exist within the universe behave in an ultimately objective or random fashion. The nature of these forces, and all other scientific knowledge, is revealed only through human effort in a dynamic process of inquiry. The universe as a whole is assumed to be neutral to human concerns and to be open to any and all questions, even those concerning human ethical relationships. Such a universe does not come to us with easy answers. We must come to it and be prepared to work hard. According to Thomas W. Clark science and religion are in a battle from the day that scientists got in the fields of the theologises
...eveloped, and especially during the Enlightenment, God and religion were relegated to a lesser role because it was thought that science could explain everything. Now, though, the farther we plunge into science, the more questions we find that can only be answered by religion. When science and Christianity are both studied and well understood, especially in the context of their limitations, it is possible to integrate them, or at least for them to complement each other, in my view of the world.
First off, it is important to realize that religion and science have to be related in some way, even if it is not the way I mentioned before. If religion and science were completely incompatible, as many people argue, then all combinations between them would be logically excluded. That would mean that no one would be able to take a religious approach to a scientific experiment or vice versa. Not only does that occur, but it occurs rather commonly. Scientists often describe their experiments and writings in religious terms, just as religious believers support combinations of belief and doubt that are “far more reminiscent of what we would generally call a scientific approach to hypotheses and uncertainty.” That just proves that even though they are not the same, religion and science have to be related somehow.
Drawing from the arguments, it is clear that god’s existence is not in line with humanity, logic, or science. This is because logic tends to disregard the arguments that are stipulated in religion. Similarly, science disapproves religious arguments on the existence of god.