Religion and Science Introduction
To explain life, we have turned to two disciplines that are almost diametrically opposed, science and religion. Science is very formal and rigid in the determination of its principles and theories. A scientific theory must survive a regimen of testing and re-testing by any observers and testers at any place and produce identical results time after time before it is accepted as fact. Science is almost perverse in its methodology of testing in attempts to get its theories to break. Yet, science is a very open process that welcomes and celebrates change when new discoveries are made.
Religion, on the other hand, is an untested collection of dogmatic principles. It is derived typically from supernatural sources and that which is referred to as “divine revelation.” It’s a phenomenon that was born when “priests” and “priestesses” invented themselves, which they continue to do today. Religion does not like challenges or changes to its dogma. The alteration of a few words of so-called “revealed religion” can unravel and splinter religions into smaller groups. These in turn unravel and splinter into even smaller groups. Christianity, for example, we know from a recent survey, has approximately thirty-three thousand sects and denominations.
Evidence of religion, art, and recorded events dates back thirty to forty thousand years. There have been an estimated one hundred thousand religions. From the aforementioned survey, we know there exists about ten thousands religions today. One hundred and fifty of these have a million or more followers.
Some of the better known religions include Hinduism, which originated six thousand years ago; Judaism, four thousand years ago; Buddhism (and Confucianism and Taoism), twenty-six hundred years ago; Christianity, two thousand years ago; and Islam, fourteen hundred years ago.
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