There are two basic positions on this issue. One position is that there is no conflict, that they address two different aspects. Steven J. Gould characterizes the situation as "non-overlapping magisteria". And no less an authority than Sir. Isaac Newton agreed with this position. In his time he was more well known as a leading theologian than as a scientist. He devotes a considerable portion of "Optics", his second most famous work after "Principia", to the relationship between Science and Religion. He believed that Science could deliver one kind of truth while Religion could deliver another. He believed that by properly combining these truths a super-truth could be created that was greater and more complete than either lesser truth could provide on its own. And he believed that there was no contradiction between Scientific Truth and Religious Truth. Francis Collins, one of today's leading scientists, also sees no conflict between his strongly held religious beliefs and his strongly held scientific beliefs. But there are few active scientists today that have beliefs similar to Collins.
Some active scientists are in the opposite camp. They are strong and active atheists whose position can be summarized as "all religions are bunk and hokum". Most scientists are in a middle camp however. In religious terms they could be called agnostics. They just don't want to engage in the battle on either side. Some go to church regularly. Some don't. But most of them just want to stay out of the fight. They want to be left alone by the religious types to do their scientific thing. And I think that most religious people are in a similar camp when it comes to scientists. They want to be left alone in their religious beliefs by the scientific types. So, since there is a great consensus (according to me), why all the hoopla?
The answer comes down to the most fundamental of questions: Is there a conflict between Science and Religion? I believe there is. In my previous post (http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2011/10/scientific-method.html) I said "Science is the pursuit of truth". In a fundamental way Religion is also about truth. Consider for a moment what would happen if God made a great revelation to his current prophet. But assume the revelation was full of lies. God would still be God but would it make sense to direct our actions based on revelation? No! All believers believe that the word of God, the revelation, is "divine truth", that God does not lie in his revelations. The word of God is sometimes referred to as "revealed truth" for this reason.
Now, just because God uses what some would characterize as an unusual method to communicate truth, does this necessarily mean that there is some conflict between religious truth and scientific truth? No! Scientists believe some truly weird stuff. Believing that God downloaded true facts directly into the brain of Paul while he was on the road to Damascus would register as "totally normal" on the scientific "how weird is this"-o-meter. Scientists would have no problem with the process as long as it worked. But the real question is: does it work?
I think that many religious people intuitively understand this. They know that there is "religious truth" and "scientific truth". They also believe that there is some overlap and that there are some situations where "religious facts" and "scientific facts" are in conflict. So it is critical to discount the conflicting "scientific facts" so that there is no alternative to the "religious facts". One technique they use is to say "religious beliefs are a matter of faith and not subject to validation". You either believe them or you don't. The problem, as I see it, is that religious people don't believe their own argument. They believe that, at least in some cases, people will believe the scientific argument, and therefore the scientific "fact", and therefore doubt the religious "fact". Religious people can disagree with me and say "faith is sufficient". The problem is that I see a lot of religious people in a lot of places and at a lot of times acting like they doubt their "faith based" argument.
The earliest example of this that most people are familiar with is the fight between Galileo and the Catholic Church in 1616. The fight was over whether the Earth was at the center of the universe, as the Church believed, or whether it revolved around the Sun as Copernicus had suggested. Now most people would wonder what Celestial Mechanics has to do with religion and they would be right. But church people at the time decided that the Bible was a source of reliable information about Celestial Mechanics and that the Bible said that the Earth was at the center of the Universe. So "the Earth is at the center of the universe" became revealed truth. And if one revealed truth was determined to be false then the whole edifice of belief in the Bible tumbled down.
A less drastic solution is possible. One just decides that Celestial Mechanics is not part of revealed truth and the problem goes away. But somehow there is always a reason why that solution is deemed not feasible by religious authorities. The modern version of the heliocentricity conflict is the evolution conflict. Again religious people have decided that the Bible is a good source of information about how plants and animals and people came into existence and how long ago that happened. Scientists in the form of Evolution and related ideas say that the interpretation of this Biblical information by a number of religious authorities, namely that all plants and animals were created at roughly the same time about six to ten thousand years ago, is wrong.
Again there is a way around this. Many religious people have long believed that the Bible is not meant to be taken literally. Instead it should be used as a general guide. The problem with this, the biblical literalists say, is that you can no longer draw a bright line between what is revealed truth and what is general guidance. And they are right. But the alternative, the literalist interpretation, means you are stuck with all the nonsense in the Bible, and there is a lot of nonsense in the Bible. So Christians are stuck between a rock (literalism) and a hard place (fuzzy general guide with no way to draw a bright line). Even if you go with the "general guide" school Science represents a problem. Science keeps evolving. Scientists keep coming up with more and more scientific truth. No one worried about Evolution in Galileo's time. Who knows what piece of new Science will pop up (God particle anyone?) to trouble a currently non-controversial religious belief.
So far I have characterized the issue as being one between Science and Christians. But there are lots of religions out there. Many of them are "prophet" based. God speaks directly to one or more prophets (Mary Baker Eddy, L. Ron Hubbard, etc.). The prophet then spreads "the word of God" to the flock and off we go. As I said previously, one of the key foundations of Science is "whatever works is right" and especially it's reverse, "whatever doesn't work is wrong". Some part of the theology of every religion I am familiar with can be subjected to scientific investigation. There are lots of religions out there. And I am only slightly familiar with a few of them. But Scientists have developed a lot of tools for ferreting out what works and what doesn't. If just one of these tools ferrets out just one falsity in one particular religion's doctrine then the whole edifice falls down for that religion. I contend without proof (e.g. you'll just have to take me on faith) that the doctrine of every prophet based religion has a problem that can be found by applying scientific methods. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to examine non-prophet based religions to see if they have a similar weakness.
It is only necessary for a few people in the community of a faith to be familiar with this weakness. Over and over these people decide that Science is a threat and therefore that it must be attacked. It doesn't really matter what most people of faith or most people of science think. Attacks on Science by people of faith will be made because they must be made.
Science does not have this weakness. It is normal for disagreements to arise between scientists. There are conflict resolution mechanisms built into Science. For those unfamiliar with them they work like this. A Scientist makes an assertion that others disagree with. Einstein famously said "God does not play dice with the universe", for instance. In a faith based environment this would be the end of things. As an authority, Einstein would be deferred to and the Einstein's statement would become accepted doctrine. Instead scientists behave differently. They say "Is there any way we can determine whether it is true or not?" This actually happened. Scientists were able to convert Einstein's general statement into testable specifics. They then devised and executed experiments to examine the testable specifics and determined that Einstein was wrong. The scientific version of "God does play dice with the universe" is true. And so it goes. It is considered normal for accepted ideas in Science to be overturned. So proving some Scientific statement false does not overturn all of Science. It only overturns a small part of it. Such evolution in scientific beliefs is considered to be the normal progress of Science. That's why most Scientific beliefs are called "Theories". The possibility must always be entertained that a particular piece of accepted scientific wisdom will prove to be false in whole or, more likely, in part.
This is a classic case of asymmetric warfare. Religious people must attack Science "by any means necessary" perhaps violating the very standards of morality they purport to believe in (e.g. "thou shalt not lie"). Scientists, on the other hand, do not on the whole feel a need to attack religion. But there is an asymmetric attribute to warfare. It is only necessary for one side to want to go to war for there to be a war. So we have and will continue to have a war between Science and religion.
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