A thought recently occurred to me the other day about the relationship of science and religion. Much has been written about how religion and science occupy different spheres of thought, or they overlap, or they are at opposite poles. Stephen Jay Gould was famous by proposing his “Non-Overlapping Magisteria”, or NOMA, which didn’t get a lot of press. In it he proposed that religion and science operate in two distinct realms – science covers the empirical realm and religion covers the ultimate meaning of life and moral values. That maybe somewhat true today but religion operated in the realm of science many, many years ago. And still tries to do today.
John Loftus, in “Why I became an Atheist”, makes the point about how religion, two to three thousand years ago, tried to explain how the world work at a time when (a) most people were illiterate and (b) we simply didn’t know much about the world in which we lived.
Religion back then was really the only “science” we had while people were trying to make sense of why plagues hit, why the earth shook, why storms killed people and why disease was prevalent, amongst other things. They looked to their priests and shamans to provide answers to many of the terrible things we experienced while we were trying to survive on a planet that really didn’t care about us.
As we grew in our knowledge about the world and as we opened our minds more, we began to see that we didn’t need gods to explain how things worked. Over time the need to invoke a god wasn’t needed. Today we can explain why plagues hit, why the earth shakes, why storms form, and how diseases come about. We no longer have to consult a witch doctor or priest when we get sick, we go to the doctor (at least most of us.)
Karen Armstrong, in “Battle for God”, talks about how fundamentalists are turning the mythos of religion into logos, and in turn they do a disservice to both religion and science. Creationists insistence that Intelligent Design is science makes a mockery of religion and diverts time and effort away from real science. So as religion tries to make claims that science has a pretty good answer for, religion starts to look foolish. Just look at the trial at Dover Pennsylvania as an example of how Intelligent Design couldn’t stand up to rigorous examination.
It may take many generations until religion is shoved aside but in the meantime it is still raising it’s stupid head.