While I am generally on the side of science regarding its findings, I don’t think that either science or religion can negate the other.
To do so would require that religion was the equivalent of science and vice versa. The two would also have to be interchangeable and supply the same needs of the other. I also think science and religion would have to make claim to same goal.
While I have met a few people who think that science and religion are destined by their nature to be in this type of conflict, I don’t see how accepting the finding of one negates the other.
Also, except for the horrid religion of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and few others, I don’t know any religions that take issue with the following questions or give any hinging importance to these:
Why there is something rather than nothing?
Where did the universe come from?
How did life arise?
What was the origin of morality?
While these are the arguments of some religious folks who like to debate the subject of the validity of religion, these same religious folk are shunned by the religious community as a whole. Judaism itself has no problem with the findings of modern science. What about the Pontifical Academy of Sciences of the Holy See? If science can do without religion and religious people, why did science eventually embrace the “big bang theory” which was discovered and formulated by a Catholic priest? And one has to be quite ignorant of history if we are to ignore the great advances and connections between science and the Islamic faith!
Some religions don’t even claim to be fonts of or concerned with morality or giving an answer as to how life arose, why matter exists, etc. What about the many Eastern religious faiths? How do any of these subjects raised and discussed disprove Buddhism?
Again I am on the side of science and its findings, but not on the side of the belief that one negates the other. The two are not equivalents. There are also different forms of religion that do not concern themselves with answering any of the questions of science and vice versa.
And while it can never be said that all people who like to consider these issues are this way, type of debate is a favorite of those with ambiguity intolerant personality traits. They serve the needs of those who find religions like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Fundamentalism appealing (as well as some aggressive anti-religious movements). The ambiguity intolerant has a drive to compartmentalize all aspects of life, to have definite answers even for the most complex questions. For this type of personality all issues are settled, and anything that suggests otherwise is attacked, hated, even demonized regardless if the person is religious or not.
There is no “science vs. religion” debate on the larger scale of things. It’s as big a money-making racket as those who make a buck off of religion. It tickles the ego of those who like to feel that they have all the answers and that the views that they have selected for themselves are right. It endorses their beliefs because it teaches that those with the opposite view are wrong, thereby elevating the individual. And this individual is pandered to, some from a religious side that claims it has conquered science, and some from a scientific side who feeds the ego of the person who needs to hear that religion has been conquered.
It’s just Watchtowerism—the perception that one has found an objective set of principles which supplies the answers to everything and disproves all others that we put aside—Watchtowerism under another brand name, feeding it’s “panacea philosophy” to those who, like the Watchtower, like to find fault with everyone else except themselves, feeding the ego of those who want to make science it’s Truth just like they did religion.
And again, it only fuels those who will now follow my post with demonizing of me and what I claimed, because whether religious or secular, the person with ambiguity intolerance traits has a need to “make war” on anyone and anything that tells them life, whether viewed through religion or science, life gives no complete and definite answers on these issues raised at the beginning:
Why there is something rather than nothing?
Where did the universe come from?
How did life arise?
What was the origin of morality?
Sure these may have been "selling points" that may have made the Watchtower sound attractive to some us who got duped by its twisted bag of tricks, but these aren't questions people have that become the driving force for them to seek religion.
And anyone who thinks they have found such panacea, religious, scientific or otherwise, that gives us all these answers in such a way that the final bell has been sounded is only making a mockery of both science and religion.
