Science and Religion Explained!

From Wikipedia: Science (from the Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge") is the effort to discover, understand, or to understand better, how the physical world works, with observable physical evidence as the basis of that understanding.

From Wikipedia: A religion is a set of beliefs and practices, often centered upon specific supernatural and moral claims about reality, the cosmos, and human nature, and often codified as prayer, ritual, or religious law.

So if we looked at science and religion on a spectrum with science on the right and religion on the left, there would be a line somewhere in the middle where science stops and religion takes over.

Science uses tests and observations of our physical environment to make a conclusion. Most times, science doesn't get it right on the first try, as it is a trial and error process. But eventually it gets to the right answer

Religion makes observations about our world and uses no tests to verify the claims. Religion then holds these observations as immutable absolutes.

A lot of times, religion and science collide where religion has made a claim, based on no evidence, and science comes along, runs a test and finds evidence to the contrary.

In cases like this, religion usually tries to shut down science, as was the case with Galileo in the early 1600s when the Christian church told him not to "hold or defend" the idea that the Earth moved around the Sun because clearly the Bible stated that the Earth was fixed and did not move (Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and 1 Chronicles 16:30 - "the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved." Psalm 104:5 -"the LORD set the Earth on its foundations; it can never be moved." Ecclesiastes 1:5 - "And the sun rises and sets and returns to its place, etc.")

Galileo's books were banned by the church until 1741 and only then printed in a "censored" form. It wasn't until 1835 when the books were totally removed from the Church's blacklist.

But Galileo wasn't the first to come up with this idea of the Earth moving around the Sun. Copernicus, in 1514, was the first one in the Western world to discover it and he was subsequently condemned by the church because it contradicted the Scriptures.

So the church set us back, on that one issue alone, 300 years, denying what we know today to be a common and simple fact. And so the church did this without a single shred of evidence other than what was written in the Scriptures.

Now think about science and religion in the field of evolutionary biology. And it doesn't stop there. The evolution vs. creationism debate expands into geology, palaeontology, thermodynamics, nuclear physics and cosmology.

Moving back to our spectrum mentioned previously, the line between science and religion has been slowly shifting, science encroaching on religion's turf.

Religious types, subscribing to an absolutist idea, have no choice but to refute evidence contrary to their views or come up with ridiculous web sites like this to try to reconcile science and religion.

I'll be the first to admit that science does not have all the answers. For example, science cannot even begin to touch the idea of a God right now. There's no way that we can see something to test.

All science can do is look at things we can see and test them. We can see that the Earth is billions of years old, we can see fossils in the layers of earth dating back millions of years, we can see how the process of evolution took place over those millions of years.

But of course science does not, and likely will not in our lifetimes, have all the answers. But then science doesn't claim to have all the answers. Only religion makes ridiculous claims like that.