Science Art and Religion Do Not Contradict One Another Because
Scientific discipline AND RELIGION have had a long, rich history of conflict, most famously with the instance of Galileo, who was found guilty of heresy for discovering one of the basic truths of our solar system. Too, Charles Darwin has been vilified for the final 150 years for discovering a cardinal concept that underlies all of biological science and medicine and unifies all of the life sciences. Certainly, there was a time when almost all scientists were theists. Just that was as well a fourth dimension when almost all people at every level of society were theists. To publicly disavow the beingness of God was, at best, to ensure ostracism and, at worst, to be forced to choose betwixt death and renouncing the evidence compiled through a life's worth of work.
Certainly, this is no longer the instance, and many scientists today don't believe in God in a traditional sense. (According to a 2009 Pew Enquiry Eye survey, 41 percent of scientists don't believe in God or a college power). Simply the issue at hand isn't i of conventionalities, which by definition is subjective and prone to intense biases.
Instead the issue is an epistemological one: Can scientific discipline and religion exist reconciled, or are they contrasting concepts at their very cadre? A quick Internet search will yield hundreds of articles falling on either side of the issue. Nigh notably, Stephen Jay Gould—the renowned paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, and the 2001 Humanist of the Year—argued that the two comprised non-overlapping magisteria. In Gould's view science and organized religion were mutually sectional, the onetime dealing with the natural globe and the latter with questions of a spiritual nature, and thus the ii shouldn't be in disharmonize. There are currently many scientific discipline communicators who have a similar view, which I suspect is a function of their desire to come across science more widely accustomed by a religious populace—ane that may not be well educated in the field and is likely to accept some resistance to it.
Beyond the questions of the origin of the universe and of life, all religions make claims that their deities influence events in the natural world. A "miracle" is believed to be just that—when a god or a saint intervenes in some way in the natural world, and thus scientific discipline tin can gather prove as to the accuracy or the lack of legitimacy of those claims.
At a more than mundane level, well-nigh religions assert that their deity regularly intervenes in daily occurrences by pick or in reaction to followers' prayer requests. This may transpire when their god influences the outcome of a natural disaster or a life-threatening accident, which would require a manipulation of physics (a tree not falling on the sleeping accommodation where someone is sleeping, for example, or a car crash that destroys the vehicle but leaves the commuter'due south expanse intact.) The intervention may come up in the grade of someone recovering from an illness or disease, which would require the deity to tamper with biology and/or chemical science. Just the act of prayers being answered in any way suggests that the person is using thoughts in the form of language (cognitive psychology) produced by chemical and electric activeness in the brain (neurobiology) to telepathically communicate with a supernatural existence who will then alter events in the natural world by influencing physics, biological science, chemistry, and so on.
Theists cannot simultaneously insist that they accept answers to fundamental questions regarding natural phenomena while too insisting that their claims cannot be examined by science. If such claims are examined, theists can't reject the findings because they're inconsistent with their subjective beliefs. And of form, religious assertions have never stood upwardly well to scientific scrutiny. Never has a scientific theory, or even a hypothesis, been replaced with a more viable supernatural explanation. You won't find any studies on intelligent design published in any credible scientific journal anywhere. Its proponents don't even have testable hypotheses. Thus, intelligent design doesn't come close to qualifying as scientific discipline, nor can its explanations be viewed as legitimate in whatsoever objective way.
Some claim that inquiry has shown that prayer is beneficial to people's psychological well-being. While there are correlational studies that may conclude this, let'due south not forget in that location are many activities that have been shown to be positively correlated with psychological health or knowledge in some style, such as solving puzzles, learning a new language, sleeping, reading, exercising, and so on. So theists shouldn't deceive themselves into thinking that such findings are evidence of a supernatural being.
There are also experimental studies, the type of studies that can place cause and effect, that accept tested the power of prayer using command and treatment groups to encounter if in that location was some measurable impact due to prayer. Without exception, those studies have found no effect of prayer, and those individuals in the control groups who weren't prayed for really had better outcomes in most cases. Across that, the hard sciences have consistently falsified a long list of claims from religious texts: the historic period of the universe and of the world; the origins of humankind; the orientation and construction of the solar system; the possibility of stars falling to World; the possibility of a serpent talking; the possibility of a worldwide inundation and all the animals on Earth descending from pairs that were placed on a boat together only a few thou years ago; and the listing goes on.
Only because the existence of a god is ultimately a question of scientific discipline, one should not mistakenly recollect that it's incumbent upon scientists to disprove all religious claims. Only equally it is inappropriate (not to mention illogical) to enquire for empirical research to prove the nonexistence of mythical creatures such as leprechauns, mermaids, and ogres, it is likewise inappropriate to claim that science must prove the nonexistence of a god. The burden is on the believers to provide valid replicable evidence for their contentions, and neither religion nor their holy book qualifies as meeting the threshold for that evidence. This is a point that has been emphasized advert nauseam in a multifariousness of forums, and one theists often just reject to admit because doing and so would get out them with ii options, both unpalatable to their conventionalities system: they would either have to provide verifiable evidence for their claims or they would accept to question and/or abandon them.
"Eve" past Henri Rousseau
A common tactic of apologists is to find an area of science that has been shown to exist inaccurate or that nosotros accept yet to figure out and and so debate that it's testify of God. This is different from the "God of the gaps" in a subtle style. Near commonly, the God of the gaps argument suggests that for each phenomenon as yet unexplained by science, the possibility exists that a god is hiding somewhere in that vacuum of knowledge and that this god is ultimately responsible for those unexplained occurrences. But as human cognition increases, those gaps decrease, ensuring an ever-tightening window for the possibility of supernatural forces. For example, because scientists tin can simply speculate about what occurred, if anything, prior to the expansion of the universe (or Big Bang), theists who don't turn down the science outright concur out hope for the possibility of a deity who got the ball rolling, so to speak.
But a more ominous extension of the God of the gaps, and here'south where the subtle difference lies, is when theists argue that a gap in scientific knowledge non simply allows for the possibility of a deity, simply is straight evidence of i. In this scenario the theist attempts to observe a flaw, a single incorrect information point, such as a long debunked hoax in the historical fossil record for development, and affirm not merely that that single error invalidates a scientific theory that has been verified past several different fields of scientific discipline, merely that the only other plausible explanation is that an invisible, undetectable deity is responsible for all of being due to some unexplained machinery such equally using mental telepathy to create all life and matter. As absurd as this logic would appear to the rational thinker, it lies at the cadre of a groovy deal of denial of scientific evidence—not just for evolution, but for the expanding universe, for climate change, for the very definition of a scientific theory. And in one case denial has set in, then confirmation bias takes hold and the denier begins to search for pieces of information, no matter how defective in brownie, that volition support his or her worldview. This is the essence of indoctrination—to be convinced of an absolute truth sans evidence of any sort and then to retain those views at all costs in the face of substantial evidence to the contrary. If the theist is to take the findings of science in general or sure fields in particular, and then he or she would be confronted with the cognitive racket of their belief system not matching the reality that they accept.
Ultimately, in that location is no conflict between religious claims and science. The conflict is in the mind of the theist who desperately attempts to preserve his or her belief system. Because religions brand claims near the natural earth and their god's manipulation of it, scientific discipline can examination those claims just like any others. We tin exam whether prayer works, or the age of the earth, or whether a person could breathe for days inside a large fish. When science tests these claims it does so objectively, with accurate findings every bit the only goal. Yet over the history of humanity, religious claims have been shown to be spectacularly defective. If, however, a claim cannot be tested, if there is no testable hypothesis, such as the claim that in my attic lives an invisible magic dragon that is entirely undetectable to humans by any means available in the natural world, and so such a merits should have no place in rational discussion and should not be given credence as having any relation to reality. It is a prospect not worthy of serious consideration.
Science volition continue to advance. Predictions will be fabricated and conclusions drawn, many that are authentic merely others that will be in demand of revision as further prove is compiled. Humans will continue to gather data nigh every aspect of the natural world, and if findings don't stand for with or back up religious beliefs, as has happened throughout history, and then the theists do themselves and humankind a disservice by denying objective evidence. The scientific process is neutral; information technology is objective and seeks only to discover new data, and thus is not in disharmonize with any entity also itself as information technology self-corrects and achieves greater accurateness over time. If there is indeed a conflict, that conflict was made by those whose agenda is driven by subjective beliefs and who fight to preserve positions that are no longer tenable in the confront of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Source: https://thehumanist.com/magazine/may-june-2016/features/science-not-conflict-religion/
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