Since Galileo turned his telescope to the stars and said publicly what Copernicus said quietly and posthumously, religion and science have been at odds. Man has gone from being an ancient and the most important development at the center of a small Universe to being a lately developed skin rash on a speck of dust in an incomprehensibly large and old Universe.
While many or even most people have attempted to avoid conflict by separating religion and science from each other, saying you can be a scientist and also be religious, aren't religion and science really diametrically opposed to each other?
Doesn't religion try to interpret, explain, and understand nature and the physical world? Isn't the Book of Genesis, for example, simply a paper, thesis, theory, story, whatever you want to call it, explaining how the Universe, Earth, and everything around us came to be?
And doesn't science offer a directly competing and opposed explanation?
As the power of science has increased, different religions have delt with it differently. Many Creationists have doomed their dogma by stubbornly insisting that the Bible must be taken literally -- that the Earth was created in six days, is only 6,000 years old, etc. Like the manufacturers of buggy whips, these individuals have withered in the face of progress and development, and, although they may not face complete extinction, they are certainly headed for ultimate obscurity.
Other religions, such as the Catholic Church, have taken a different approach, embracing science and saying that the Bible cannot be taken literally, and even that certain scientific theories, such as the Big Bang, in fact validate non-literal religious dogma. And while this approach may place a band-aid over the wound, isn't the wound ultimately destined to open up and kill religion?
If parts of the Bible, Genesis, for example, are not to be taken literally, but rather only metaphorically, what about the rest of the Bible? Why are the Gospels, for example, considered to be literal? Won't taking them literally be more and more difficult to do as more and more of the Bible is relegated to metaphor?
Won't all of religion, other than that part of it which simply wonders whether there might be intelligence behind the existence of the Universe, ultimately be forced to either make the transition to metaphor or to perish? And doesn't the metaphorical road lead, ultimately, to obscurity and unimportance?
Can religion survive in the face of science, or is it doomed?
While many or even most people have attempted to avoid conflict by separating religion and science from each other, saying you can be a scientist and also be religious, aren't religion and science really diametrically opposed to each other?
Doesn't religion try to interpret, explain, and understand nature and the physical world? Isn't the Book of Genesis, for example, simply a paper, thesis, theory, story, whatever you want to call it, explaining how the Universe, Earth, and everything around us came to be?
And doesn't science offer a directly competing and opposed explanation?
As the power of science has increased, different religions have delt with it differently. Many Creationists have doomed their dogma by stubbornly insisting that the Bible must be taken literally -- that the Earth was created in six days, is only 6,000 years old, etc. Like the manufacturers of buggy whips, these individuals have withered in the face of progress and development, and, although they may not face complete extinction, they are certainly headed for ultimate obscurity.
Other religions, such as the Catholic Church, have taken a different approach, embracing science and saying that the Bible cannot be taken literally, and even that certain scientific theories, such as the Big Bang, in fact validate non-literal religious dogma. And while this approach may place a band-aid over the wound, isn't the wound ultimately destined to open up and kill religion?
If parts of the Bible, Genesis, for example, are not to be taken literally, but rather only metaphorically, what about the rest of the Bible? Why are the Gospels, for example, considered to be literal? Won't taking them literally be more and more difficult to do as more and more of the Bible is relegated to metaphor?
Won't all of religion, other than that part of it which simply wonders whether there might be intelligence behind the existence of the Universe, ultimately be forced to either make the transition to metaphor or to perish? And doesn't the metaphorical road lead, ultimately, to obscurity and unimportance?
Can religion survive in the face of science, or is it doomed?
