A lot of science can be learned through religion itself. If you believe in a Creator, you're very likely to believe in a lot of science because religion is what confirmed a lot of what scientists are discovering way before science was really well-studied.
What is the difference between Science and Religion?
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Shai Gar
Everything I think on this subject has basically already been stated, Religion is basically based on faith and it's pretty set on stone, there's no arguing in what you believe in, at least in most religions, Science on the other hand is not constant, it's always changing and it's still being discovered, being perfected, Religion it's no longer being perfected..It's just there..Science can be proven logically, a lot of stuff in religion can't. Science is the quest to find the unknown, what shapes this world. Religion is believing in something absolute, does not participate in this quest, on the contrary, it will do anything to contradict anything that science can come up with to try and keep their set on stone values.
I keep saying this, but one of the basic tenets of science is that you can't "confirm" knowledge...you can only disprove alternatives to your predominate theory (and since you can never know if you have all the alternatives, you can never know if you've eliminated all them), and put your predominate theory through obscene amounts of tests. However, at no point is it "confirmed."
The only knowledge that is "confirmed" are the theorums of mathematics and logic. However, those are based on a priori axioms, which are a whole topic in themselves.
And religion certainly never confirms anything. It only postulates or speculates...but never confirms.
This. This. This. 100%.
Science bases things on observation and measurement (valid forms of discovery).
Religion bases itself on philosophy and theology (well, any religion worth its salt, in my opinion... prime examples being older Christian sects and older major religions like Buddhism or Hinduism).
My problem is that people unquestioningly believe a scientist when they say Earth is 93 million miles away from the sun.
Then they turn around and say "I can't believe in God. SHOW me why I should!!"
I've never heard of anyone demanding an astrophysicist to teach them physics and astronomy before accepting scientific facts.
You might say that religious explanations are based on fundamentally flawed/unverifiable philosophical/theological presumptions. But isn't science? How do we know there's an objective reality, for one? And even scientists admit that a scientific "law" isn't guaranteed to be true 100% of the time.
Science tries to discover how things work. That's really its whole job.
The main quality of science is to give answers that are unambiguous (if not perfect) and don't depend on who you are or what your history or beliefs are. Our best scientific results are repeatable for everyone (e.g. toss an apple and it'll fall pretty much the same way regardless of who you are). So science tries to give us the most shareable, inclusive and robust knowledge it can.
You can apply as little or as much faith as you want to science. You can take it as read that others have done the working, or you can train up and do the working yourself if you want to check it. About the only faith-based proposition that science relies on is that the rules are the same for everyone -- i.e, nature doesn't play favourites with us based on who we are. So far, that's been very true.
I think it's harder to characterise what the 'point' of religion is, because people get a lot of different things from religion. But if we focus on just religious dogma -- the codified stories and beliefs -- we can find the same kinds of things appearing time and again:
- How did we get here?
- Where are we going?
- What happens when we die?
- How should we live?
Theoretically science and religion can co-exist very amiably: one focusing on 'how'; the other focusing on 'why' and 'so what'. Agnostic scientist Stephen Jay Gould proposed such a thing, for example, in his idea of Nonoverlapping Magisteria or NoMa. An unusually large proportion of scientists are agnostic or atheist, but some of our very best scientists have been quite religious too, so in practice there doesn't need to be a conflict between the two.
However, conflicts do occur.
Religion often claims absolute authority over the 'how', and frequently gets it wrong. Science never claims perfect authority over the 'how', yet consistently gets it right. I personally believe that the 'why' is really for each of us to decide, and that if we are to live an examined life, it must also be informed by our growing knowledge about the 'how'. In my view, religious dogma needs constant re-examination and revision against our growing body of scientific knowledge, and this makes me very skeptical about anyone (religious or otherwise) who claims an absolute monopoly on truth.
So I'm very skeptical of religious dogma, yet very encouraging of religious journies -- even when they are not my own.
Hope that helps.
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Religion to me is any fundamental belief about the nature of life that one chooses to adhere to.
Science can be a religion to some. I don't think that the two are interchageable, nor do I think that they are equal.
Science can be a religion to some. I don't think that the two are interchageable, nor do I think that they are equal.
Contrary to popular opinion, I think religion and/or any religion in particular is not a set in stone idea that never changes. Take Christianity for example. Much of the understanding, and expression of that has changed sooo much over the past millennium, and the one before for that matter. The dominant theory of atonement for example has gone from the original "Ransom Theory" to the "Satisfaction Theory" in conservative circles, while a lot of today's liberal Christians are moving from the "Moral Influence Theory" back to the original "Ransom Theory", or in this case "Christus Victor." The idea of an old age of the earth, and evolution has shed light on the understanding of Genesis settling the debate on the issue of interpretation that was going on in the first and second centuries with the Early Church Fathers. Theology debate goes on today, and clergy try to correct mistakes of the past as well. What do you think goes on in Theology technical journals?
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