Director Roger Nygard traveled the world asking theologians, scientists, skeptics, and everyday people 85 tough questions to try to understand The Nature of Existence! Now that he’s asked the experts, it’s YOUR TURN! To offer your own insights on today’s question, “What’s the difference between religion and science?”, Leave a Reply below!
Religion is certainty without evidence; science is evidential uncertainty
Science takes demonstrable truths and requires that they be be put under suspicion of being possible lies, religion takes demonstrable lies and demands hey be accepted as truths.
Science is just a method of learning based on concrete physical evidence. It captures what we think we know based on objective experimentation and observation. Religion deals with philosophy and the questions that cannot be answered objectively. Once science comes up with an answer it is time for the religion to back off on the particular subject.
Religion is about rules of behavior and being worked by other member of the group to believe and be normal. You also have to pretend to revere common knowledge as extracted and interpreted by gamer types. You can tell they are gamers, because they have status outfits or get ups.
Science on the other hand is a good deal about modeling reality and perception.
One might say that Jesus was a scientist but was too poor to have a lab or a school, which means he had to do everything by mirroring reality with conceptual modeling.
Religious people don’t understand that at all. Religious people make up and believe nonsense, but with group support, and that tends to become a hierarchy of nonsense that will kill Jesus if he disagrees. I guess it’s that simple.
In religion the entire reality is games, rules and other hierarchal interpretations of obscure and uncertain written accounts of some events.
Oft times stories get mixed up with what a hierarchal wants to believe and then truth will be lost and replaced with a game of “God says”.
I find it interesting at best that someone could actually ask this question, but I know that there are many folks that really don’t know. It is also quite interesting that some actually believe that religion and science will someday come together.
I personally prescribe to science, then engineering. Firstly, science is the natural world. The way it is. If you drop a stone, it falls to the ground. Engineering is how we use that natural world by manipulating natural laws and re-combining it’s materials to form new ones. I see nothing supernatural or magic. Religion is belief with no proof. I really seems pretty rediculous to believe something because someone wrote it in a special book.
It would seem that religion has no place in the educated world of science, but not so. I work in an engineering department. One would think that there would be a considerable atheistic percentage of people there. Out of about 250 people, there are only 5 confirmed atheists, and more than 20 confirmed religious fundamentalists.
Science and religion are black and white. Fact and fantasy. Yet there are so many walking oxymorons. I would think they have to be pretty tormented. No wonder they seek outside support. Unfortunately, the ones sought out are usually clergy.
Two choices in life. Get with science, (proven truth and reality), or be tormented with the tales in your special book.
science is all about experiments and proof
religion is all based on god and no proof
To whom? To each person there is something different perceived about both.
While spirituality (rather than religion) and science both repeatedly present evidence of the miraculous the scientifically minded are less likely to consider spiritually based phenomena valid that the spirtually inclined are likley to appreciate the miracluous findings of scientists. It seems a little arrogant of scientists (some, certainly not all) to consider the scientific method the only valid method of acknowledging that which is or is not real.
To my opinion, religion and science are not comparable not because religion deserves a special place, but because they are not in the same plane. Religion claims that God’s realm is beyond science’s scope. (Please Wiki NOMA, Non-overlapping magisteria) Science is useful for to keep aircrafts in air or to find a cure of perkinson’s disease (so that Pope can pass God’s test) but that’s it. As Dawkins put it, “Religion always hide in the dark/unknown region of science.
My point is that science is all about how things works, including how God run his businesses. May be the scientific laws are still premature, not same in all part of universe, and changes over time, but every action must have a cause (Not necessarily there’s a first cause, the action-cause relationship could be cyclic, perpetual, better say spiral) Even there’s a working science when God wish something and it realizes instantly. May be we don’t know it yet, or never will (When ancient people couldn’t explain the science behind any extraordinary act, they would call it magic!) “God doesn’t play dice” –Einstein’s famous qoute.
Now it might take aeons before scientist can prove something. Imagine Just before the doomsday, scientists declaring that, they waited but the much sought after ‘the missing link’ has not been found, so Darwin’s theory of evolution is wrong! I can see religious people putting ‘I told you so’ smile on their face and taunting that they reached the same conclusion comfortably just by faith while scientists achieved the same by ‘unnecessary hard work’–to satisfy their skeptic ego.
My point is, nobody has been able to prove or disprove God’s existance. Though extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof, for arguement’s sake, I assume that both party have some responsibility to solve the enigma. However, religion claims that the case of God’s existance is beyond our ability to prove or unprove so there’s no point in submitting any proof. Likewise, Scientists claims that we should only account for that part of the reality which is measurable by our sense organs and we shouldn’t be bothered about finding proof on a subject beyond our physical world. Now, How do theists know that we will never be able to unprove it? Or how do scientists know that there’s no other dimensions just because we can’t sense it? Even if they can prove something, how to confirm that it is flawless? Didn’t Einstein prove Newton’s life works wrong?
The solution? To scientists, sitting on the fence and wait for the advancement of science. To religion, the case can’t be postponed till doomsday, either choose side (to believe or not to believe) or risk burning in hell forever. So let’s take the only option left, faith.
Now, faith is pure bet (unless you believe that if people collectively believe in something everyday, it will become a reality.) One might end up worshiping the wrong God, or even the satan! Religion also need science/logic, otherwise how can they be sure that something came from God and not from Satan? On the other hand, Science also resort to kind of ‘belief system’ or imagination called hypothesis at the initial stage.
So end of the day, which path should I take? Faith or scientific research? my choice is Science. It’s worth fighting till the end and be proved to be wrong rather than to gamble and win. Is there a guarantee that God will keep his promise? He might say “Did I say that the righteous will enter the heaven? Well, I lied…we have recession going on here, so I recently merged heaven and hell to save operating costs…I am afraid I have to treat you all equally my son!”
If there is a God, he is too powerful to argue with anyway!
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I think in a general sense:
Religion is what you do and think in reaction to what you perceive truth to be, and science is, so far, the only consistently dependable tool you can use to discover what truth is. And this is only so because the universe appears to be comprehensible to us. Stuff appears to happen for reasons which, so far, we can discover if we keep digging. We’re probably never going to get the total picture on reality but, since the universe seems to be structured along general rules which have never seemed to be arbitrary, we can at least learn things about how it works and turn what we learn to our advantage. So far, so good.
Only one is defensible in the real world. The other must rely on things neither seen nor agreed upon.
Science is a method of rational inquiry. Asking questions, ideally, with no bias toward a particular answer and building upon the results.
Religion is the fitting of square-shaped suppositions into the round pegs of natural law.
Science is the systematic study of the physical world only, and even though it is extremely powerful, it is limited in scope. It is like the particle theory of light, absolutely necessary but it does not tell the whole story. If science was the answer to everything, then every comment that came before mine was the effect of chemicals in the writer’s brains and not conscious deliberation. Every idea was predictable. How boring. Again science is the objective study of the whole thing.
Before going to religion I would like differentiate between religion and churches. In my opinion there is very little religion in churches. They are more interested in the bottom line than helping the individuals grow. In many instances they do harm. I get the feeling that some of the writer’s are using this site for deprogramming therapy.
Religion is the cultivation of the relationship between a person and the whole thing. The two forms of this relationship that are most common are the loving relationship, middle eastern, or as a manifestation of the whole thing, eastern. Religion is the maintainence of this relationship.
Both are necessary and neither is going away. Religious individuals should render unto Einstein that which is Einstein’s, and intellectuals need to render unto Jesus that which is Jesus’.
Religion is now left to pick up the pieces of the questions that have not yet been answered by science. Once, tens of thousands of years ago, there were an infinite number of questions and the only answer was “God did it!”
Then the scientific method was discovered by very early man, and one by one many of those questions have been answered by science with a very high degree of proof. Each time a question is answered scientifically, within a reasonable tolerance, religion should back off of that question. Spherical Earth, Heliocentric Solar System, Continental Drift, Vast Age of the Universe, Germ Theory, Speed of light as a measuring device, Natural Selection and Evolution as the only reasonable explanation for cellular change, Geologic Record, Man’s role in climate change, lack of corroborating evidence for existence of Jesus from Roman records – these are all “proven” much to the chagrin of the religious leaders of their time. Many are still being fought over, and there are thousands more issues of contention where religious people hold on by their fingernails to their belief in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence.
So all that is left for the religious folks to talk about are the few unknowns that remain, or they can rail against the scientific method and the findings of science, or they can pick fights with other religions, or they can do good for their fellow humans and other life on the Planet, form communities and take care of their fellow creatures.
I think it is ironic that those with the most hierarchical view of the universe are also the ones who do not believe in Natural Selection, a hierarchical system imposed by Nature, whereas those who are more loving, inclusive and egalitarian tend to reject the philosophy of “mere belief” being enough to answer life’s persistent questions, and acknowledge the persistence of a process by which only the fittest, or the most cooperative, survive.
What we need now is a scientific alternative to organized, God centered, belief-centric religion so that those of us with a scientific perspective can have nice songs to sing, and nice ceremonies, and fellowship to reinforce our mammalian and human need for community.
It is time for a new way of getting together even more liberal than Unitarianism, a truly scientific gathering for uplift and sharing. Any ideas on this?
I would also add -
Science has found that the most egalitarian societies are also the societies that have the best record with regard to all the important social indices – lowest crime rates, lowest divorce rates, lowest rates of teen pregnancy, lowest rates of mental illness, lowest rates of drug abuse, lowest rates of incarceration, lowest rates of obesity, highest measures of social mobility, highest rates of education, highest rates of child well-being, highest index of trust. Religion should go along with this set of scientific findings. But because so many religions have been co-opted by authoritarian or hierarchical leaders and are themselves against the idea of egalitarianism, they find it difficult to create the sort of egalitarian society that will improve all these social indices. That is where a truly scientific philosophy might be most helpful.
Might it all start with those at this site tossing off the yoke of mere belief and opting for rationalism? Do we have a message for the larger society?
Science is a form of religon too..
Like it or not, in science there are still things that remain unsolved up to this day, and probably will not be solved in our lifetime, yet we still believe that one day those questions will be answered, thus we have faith in it. We don’t know when we will truly understand our existence through science or if it will ever be understood, but nonetheless we believe in it. There is no guarantee saying that we will succeed, there is no theory just yet that can define the whole nature of our existence, but still, we believe…
What difference will that make between science and religion?? Doesn’t science require faith, the way religions do?? Religions have done good things to society, and so has science…Religions have led people to creating terrors, and science has invented the atomic bomb. Religions sometimes turn the collection boxes to a source of tax-free income, and science sometimes works on how to sell the most expensive drugs to the patients rather than the most effective ones….
Which one is better? Well to me, both are simply vehicles, driven by people. Driven well, it can take you to your destination, but driven recklessly, it can kill you….
Sciene – if history has taught us anything it is that science is always wrong! If not wrong, certainly missing some pieces. It is those pieces that will always elude us as finite beings. We cannot possibly comprehend the infinite. The more we think we understand the more complex we find our universe to be on both the largest and smallest scales. Having said that, I don’t consider it “wrong” to pursue science as a way of understanding our universe. I think that is one of the reasons we exist.
Religion – Simply put is mankind’s attempt to explain that which he doesn’t understand with supernatural or mystical explanations. There is no “one way” that is “right”. It is one’s belief in a particular faith/religion that gives meaning to one’s life. If you believe it to be true, it becomes true for you.
Science and religion could both be defined as philosophy, one based on observable, measurable methods (sience), the other on contemplative and meditative methods (religion).
Whether you subscribe to science or religion, here is a thought for each to consider:
- Truth is perceived and perception becomes reality.
Religion requires faith; unquestionable obedience in spite of proof.
Religion is a systematic pseudo-philosophic set of ideas that answers fundamental questions. It has the answers wrong because it requires faith but it does offer up answers.
Science requires reason based on reality.
Science does not (and shouldn’t) offer a systematic philosophic view of the world. Unless you want to count philosophy in the social sciences, then that is the job of philosophy.
One demands that you renounce the mind and take everything it says on the basis of faith, the other demands that you use your mind to understand the world and to improve your existence. Seems to me to be a no-brainer.