SCIENCE AND RELIGION
For ages, a deadly conflict has been waged between a few brave men and women of thought and genius upon the one side, and the great ignorant religious mass on the other. This is the war between Science and Faith. The few have appealed to reason, to honor, to law, to freedom, to the known, and to happiness here in this world. The many have appealed to prejudice, to fear, to miracle, to slavery, to the unknown, and to misery hereafter. The few have said “Think” The many have said “Believe!” - Robert Ingersoll, Gods
Science
Science is very formal and rigid in the deter-mination 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.
Where knowledge ends, religion begins. – Benjamin Disraeli
Religion
Religion 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 (sects and denominations).
“Search as you may through the traditional stories of all cultures, sacred or secular, you will find no mention of quarks, DNA, plate tectonics, or quasars. If visionaries have lived who have seen things that ordinary people could not, why did none of them get even the most basic facts about nature correct: about the evolution of life or the place of the earth in the universe?
”Rather, these so-called visionaries got just about everything wrong. Uniformly, they placed humankind and the earth at the center of a universe populated with angels and demons, with the human being occupying a special place just below angels. This picture bears no resemblance to that which science has provided, with the earth revolving around a relatively minor star off in the corner of a relatively minor galaxy of a hundred billion stars, in a universe of a hundred billion galaxies, and homo sapiens no more than one particularly successful mammalian species.
”The revelations in sacred books look more like the product of vivid imagination, superstition, and wishful thinking than any factual representation of the real world. If sacred revelations were so wrong about this world, how can people still believe that they tell us anything about other worlds, worlds beyond the senses, and ultimate reality?” – Victor J. Stenger, physicist and astronomer, Physics and Psychics
Filed under: Earth and Life, global remedies, quality of life, religion, sustainability
