Science and Relgion
Science and religion have not always peacefully coexisted. There have been many issues where scientific discovery and religious belief have clashed. Religion is based on ancient belief passed down through generations. As humans discovered more and more about themselves, they found that many of the things that religion told could not true. This caused an incredible crisis between the pious religious and the scientific world, especially in the Western world where Christianity dominated society, and where these scientific discoveries were being made. It was difficult for people at first to believe in God and at the same time except these new scientific findings that negated many things that religion had told them.
Astonomer Kepler
During the scientific revolution many religious issues were taken up. One was the issue of the earth being the center of the Universe, which the Christian doctrine held up as the truth. Through the work of astronomers like Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, much was learned about our universe. One thing that was learned was that the earth revolved around the Sun, along with all the other planets of our solar system. Also it was learned that the sun is only one star among hundreds of billions of other stars of different shapes and sizes. This discovery baffled the church. How could we be only a tiny part of something greater? It was believed that God created the Universe to accommodate humankind and that everything in that Universe revolved around this. It now became apparent that this is not true. During the seventeenth century the Catholic Church was quick to reject these findings. Galileo didn’t understand the conflict, and pointed out that scripture is very old and is meant to ...
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... science, and who feel that the bible should be taken literally. On the same hand there are many people in the science community who read the bible literally and announce there could be no God since the facts of the bible are so far removed from what scientific discovery has told us. There will probably never be day when science and religion completely agree, and there are no conflicts between the two sides. It is natural for men to question discovery, and when something tells you that thing you have believed in are wrong, it is natural to reject these things. Still, there have been considerable advancements in the understanding between religion and science.
Links to web pages concerning science and religion:
Http://salon.cma.univie.ac.at/~neum/sciandr.html
http://homepages.tcp.co.uk/~carling/main_sci.html
http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~newman/sci-faith.html
During the Scientific Revolution, the struggle between faith and reason was exhibited through Galileo and his discoveries. The Catholic Church during the time period of the Scientific Revolution did not approve of any outside scientists who came up with new theories and observations. The Church believed that all information about how the world worked was in the bible and that was the only right source. In an excerpt from “What is Scientific Authority?” written by Galileo in 1615, it states, “Showing a greater fondness for their [Catholic Church’s] own opinions than for truth, they sought to deny & disprove the new things which, if they had cared to look for themselves, their own senses would have demonstrated to them…” Galileo Galilei himself knew that the Church was not willing to approve of new ideas from other scientists, but only from the teachings in the Bible. Later on in the excerpt, Galileo writes, “They [Catholic Church] hurled various charges &…made the grave mistake of sprinkling these with passages taken from places in the Bible which they had failed to understand properl...
First, I will demonstrate Stephen Jay Gould’s argument against the overlapping between science and religion, which is as follows:
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...
Religion and science have always been conflicting studies. Religion, being based on faith, relies on the supernatural to explain life and being. Science, on the other hand, cannot do this. Scientists need to eliminate the possibility of the unexplainable in order to maintain and control group by which to measure other groups. The unexplainable I refer to are the miracles that are commonplace in all supernatural religions. Galileo lived in a time where church was state. The land was ruled according to the words of the bible, and anyone in opposition would be in contempt. Galileo's scientific findings were therefore strongly shunned by the church. In 1615 Galileo attempted to explain how these findings came to be in contradiction with the teaching to the Church with a letter to Christina, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany. Galileo felt there needed to be a line between what philosophical questions should be answered by science, and which scripture should answer. This does not mean that Galileo himself was not religious. Nor did he feel that the Bible was a complete falsity.
Although across the world there were pockets of scientists in China, India and Arabia, the basis of modern science and technology was established by people like Copernicus, Galileo and Descartes in 15th Europe. But the Church controlled the freedom to think. The Church governed most everything, including scientific theories. Scientists like Galileo and Copernicus pushed ideas that went against the doctrines established by the Church. The Bible was the word of God and therefore could not be wrong. Copernicus said that the Earth was not the center of the solar system, but rather the sun; this was considered heresy. Copernicus had to then refute his findings by swearing on the Bible(Fact Check). Over hundreds of years, many scientists continued to build on their predecessor’s findings disprove the way the Church was interpreting the Bible. Once the Church backed down, progress was able to
Conflict between science and religion has been around way before Charles Darwin’s published book, Origin of the Species, came to be (“The Evolution, Creationism, and Intelligent Design Controversy”). Which is a book that is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology, featuring the idea of ‘natural selection.’ Some people believe that we as humans have evolved as the most intelligent and advanced species on the planet, while others think we have been placed here and designed for a reason. Many debates and court cases have come to be because of these two ideas of science versus religion. Although there are many debates between the two, the ideas overturn when the parties overlook the distinction between that which cannot be proven (faith), compared with that which has not been proven (theory) (Lipman, Robert M.). Theories, including evolution, can and should be investigated with appropriate scientific diligence (Lipman, Robert M.).
I've always been surprised how much faith people put in science, though. Many of the greatest scientists believed in God, and my speculation as to why, is that those scientists knew just how amazing it was that they could discover an equation to measure gravity, or one that made energy and matter that same. People, of course, had no idea what they had on their hands and worship it today as if it were God. Those scientists knew very well, after all their work, that any theory they produced was only awaiting its demise. The values that when put to the test, would prove it wrong. And then they'd find their mistake and fix it.
In 1633, Galileo Galilei was placed on trial for suspicion of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church of the era. The trial was in response to Galileo’s publication of Dialogue, a book which propounded Copernicus’ theory of heliocentrism, or more simply known as the Earth’s movement around the sun. The church believed the common biblically founded view that the Earth could not be moved. Copernican theory is common knowledge these days, and Galileo’s efforts to prove the theory have earned him the title of father of science, but the Church’s opposition to science has remained largely unchanged. America is a largely religious nation, and nearly 40% of the nation believes the world is less than 10,000 years old. Throughout history the religious counterparts of society have shown little understanding for the natural world. Instead they have clung to a very precise viewpoint of their dogma, but this lack of understanding is fatal because it obstructs scientific progress, and dissociates the individual from the realities of our modern world.
While science is viewed as the pursuit of truth, it is all a myth and therefore points to a belief in faith. Science itself can be a religion; yet, it does not provide answers to everything (such as guilt, meaning in life, right and wrong, love) but the Bible does have those answers. Some people argued that there can be truth in everything or that truth is truth if it is to truth to that person. This shows how people believe that is obvious truth in the physical world there but there is not in the moral and spiritual. Christianity teaches cohesion between the physical and
Clashes between the two do exist, yet it is conceivable that these contentions can help clear up inquiries and issues that relate to both science and religion. They both look for truth and comprehension, and I trust that there are a wide range of approaches to discover truth. Religion and science are two altogether different ways, but since neither religion nor science will stop to exist, they will need to coincide and inevitably cooperate to achieve their
There have been generations of debating over whether God exists and how the universe was made. Many atheists and theists/creationists have argued over scientific proof that the Bible is accurate and that God exists. People have said that science and spirituality are separate, and cannot coexist. The world has so many mysteries concerning this and the earth's creation. All people can do is debate, and choose what they put their faith in.
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.
...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.
...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.