Science and Religion

The Listless Lawyer writes of the relationship between science and religion:

In particular, requiring religion to yield to science is dumb, because "science" does not interpret itself - what can science tell us about when life begins, for example? Nothing. Science can tell us when the heart starts beating, or when brainwaves are detected, or when the fetus can survive without the mother, but it cannot resolve the conflict between the "right to life" and the "right of the mother to control her own body". These sorts of questions, what might be called questions of "meaning", are never scientific questions.

So religion (at least in the modern Western nations) virtually never conflicts with science, it almost cannot conflict with science, because one’s religion (I am using the term broadly) is generally the framework within which the "facts" of science are interpreted and given meaning. What’s clear, then, is that the word "science" is here being used as a code for "scientism", which is the fetishization of science paired with the moral values and interpretative judgments of secular humanism. That is not a truce between two opposing interpretive strategies, but a victory of one over the other.

So often we are subjected to the myth that science and religion are in conflict. This myth is driven by the fervently religious and by the fervently scientific. But the two deal in different domains that do not overlap. As I wrote before,

Fundamentally, we're comparing apples and oranges. On the question of the origins of the universe of or life on Earth, science looks at the "how" and religion looks at the "who" and the "why." As a Christian, I say God created the universe and created all life on Earth. That statement does not address the question of how He created the universe. Science attempts to provide an explanation of the how.