Religion vs. science

Religion and science often come into conflict on certain matters.

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Related

• Articles
  • Religion
  • Evolution vs. Intelligent Design is one particular area of conflict
• Concepts
  • God of the gaps "refers to a common theistic position that anything that can be explained by human knowledge is not in the domain of God, so the role of God is therefore confined to the 'gaps' in scientific explanations of nature."

Queries

• Violence:
  • What incidents have there been, either historically or recently, of individuals or groups being inspired to commit violence "in the name of science"? How does the resulting list compare to the record of violence committed "in the name of" God or any other religious figure?
  • Should the comparison be between (a) deeds done in the name of religion and (b) deeds made possible by science, such as Hiroshima? (Personally, I don't think this is a fair comparison, as any tool can be misused; the debate should be over whether the usage was appropriate, and if it was inappropriate we need to figure out how to prevent inapprorpriate uses – but I suspect this point will come up, so a more detailed rebuttal might be a good idea. --Woozle 09:23, 1 October 2006 (EDT))

Links

• 2006-01-03 In Praise of Godless Science
• 1999-01 Positivism: The Father of Naturalism from The Roman Theological Forum

Humor

• 2006-09-10 Beliefs (XKCD)

Quotes

from David Brin [1]:

The incantatory mind set probably STILL makes up a majority of the human species. In most civilizations, it was THE official mind set... that the greatest power is achieved through right incantations. The fact is that opponents of science cannot view science except as a competitor or rival to their own preferred incantatory systems. Hence the profound hostility toward science that you see among romantics of all stripes, including BOTH the "far right" and the "far left." In parsing their disdain for science, they reveal their inclination by constantly misunderstanding (or deliberately misconstruing) what science is about. The postmodernists say that it is just another system of incantatory semantics, and a rather oppressively bullying one. The neocons and fundies call it "just another religion" without ever pondering how this logically disses religion, in genral! It is useless to try (endlessly) to explain the myriad ways that science is simply OUTSIDE of the incantatory worldview. Indeed, there is a very real minority of SCIENTISTS who – by fundamental personality – can never escape viewing their fields through the lense of incantation.