28 Answers

  1. Apart from the fact that both are abstract concepts, there is absolutely nothing in common between religion and science. There is a difference between religion and culture, but not between religion and science. Frankly speaking, I am already tired of fighting on this resource with the widespread belief that religion is supposedly a way to explain the world. Take the Bible, it's 1,300-odd pages long. The creation of the world and man – well, a maximum of 5, and the rest, in your opinion, yat, about what? Take it and read it before you write that it is about the structure of the world! Anyone who sees something in common between science and religion – write in the comments, I will explain to you why this is not common. If you don't agree, but there is nothing to object to, please set a minus sign.

  2. The question you ask usually arises when reading sacred texts literally. However, sacred texts are mostly symbolic and metaphorical texts, Philo of Alexandria and Augustine objected to the literal reading of the Bible, and in the twentieth century, the leading theologian Karl Bultmann spoke about the demythologization of the Bible. The concept of “disjoint magisteria” by Stephen Jay Gould implies that there should be no choice in this matter at all, because science and religion do not conflict until they are confronted by ignorance of one or the other.

    And to believe or not to believe in God is entirely your choice. Paul Tillich defines faith in God as “a state of extreme interest.” What is interesting for you personally – only you can decide for yourself.

  3. If you answer in this way, then I would like to pay attention to the lecture by Max Planck, Nobel Prize in Physics 1918, the founder of quantum physics. Religion and Natural Science lecture: gumer.info

    “…both of these paths do not diverge, but run parallel, meeting in infinity at the same goal.”

    And if there are doubts about modernity, then:

    In 2010, in a speech on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize, physicist Andrey Geim noted that rapid progress in graphene research “would not have been possible without Misha Katznelson, who provided us with the theoretical support that an experimenter can only dream of.” rambler.ru

    “- You are an Orthodox believer, which is quite unusual for a physicist…

    I don't know to what extent this is unusual, it's just that it's not customary to talk about these topics in the scientific community — and perhaps this is correct.”

  4. It is quite reasonable to oppose science to religion. Because they have a diametrically opposite methodological basis.

    The basis of religion is FAITH.

    And faith, in the most general case , is an uncritical way of accepting information.

    The methodological basis of science is scientific skepticism – as a REJECTION OF FAITH in favor of evidence, facts…

    That is, science is a science only if it renounces faith as an uncritical way of accepting information

  5. The juxtaposition of religion and science is the basis of scientism, which can also be classified as a religion.

    The main idea of this teaching is that religion has always hindered the development of science and that in general there is a certain uncomplicated vector of its development.

    However, this opinion is incorrect, because there are many examples when religion inspired a scientific search, and science and religion are quite peaceful neighbors for many, each doing its own thing.

  6. Science and religion are doing the same thing. They even go toe-to-toe. But the right foot doesn't know what the left foot is doing. It doesn't hurt, and thank you for that. They will meet at the finish line and be very surprised.

  7. Science and religion are as antagonistic as the plane and the bus. If you preach the desire for knowledge and faith in God as a supernatural entity without outright obscurantism like denying evolution, the spherical shape of the earth, the cosmos, and so on, they will complement each other very beautifully. Short-distance bus, long-distance plane.

  8. It depends on what you call religion.If this is a system of procedures that create social capital, it is generally outside the sphere of science, and, by the way, objectively useful. And if this is a set of explanations of the world, then, of course, religion is anti-scientific.

  9. There are several reasons, in my opinion, why popularizers of science are opponents of religion.

    First, religion restricts scientists. The typical situation with stem cells, as we know, is that the church is against any experiments with them. It was the same at a time when medicine was just emerging. I advise you to watch the movie “The Healer: Avicenna's Disciple”.

    Second, scientists are used to proving / refuting facts or theories. The existence of God or others like him cannot be proved or disproved.

  10. This is because science and religion are based on different ontologies. This is a special word from philosophy, which means something like a picture of the world… a structured set of statements about what actually exists and what doesn't… how it exists and why. Different ontologies are fundamentally irreducible to each other. There is no way to deduce the other from one. As a rule, people without special training cannot think in several ontologies, so they tend to choose one of them, and deny the rest. But this in itself is not impossible. This requires only a good humanitarian education, which purposefully teaches you to combine several pictures of the world in one head and use them as necessary, depending on the situation.

    A good example to illustrate that science and religion are quite compatible is the book “Contact” (there is also a film based on it with Jodie Foster). Its author is Carl Sagan, a well-known popularizer of science, one of the smartest people on the planet. However, instead of criticizing religion, he writes a book that allows you to understand believers and see through their way of thinking.

  11. Questions of faith and questions of knowledge do not lie on the same plane. What you can learn, you don't have to believe it. The juxtaposition of science and religion is the juxtaposition of green to salty.

  12. I will not touch on the word “reasonable”, but I will only say that sometimes religion and science are not only not opposed, but also try to unite, find parallels. And the most amazing thing is that they really are, these parallels)

    If you are interested in this topic, then I suggest reading Fridtjof Capra's book “The Tao of Physics”. Fridtjof Capra studied theoretical physics for a long time, and then became interested in Taoist mysticism. I decided to try to put them together. It was quite entertaining!

  13. I don't know, but this is a huge mistake for me, because many scientists believed and knew Jesus intimately.
    I have a friend who is very good at proving the theory of relativity from the Bible, which is very funny)
    I myself do not oppose science and my faith in any way (not religion!!!)

  14. I see in this question a person who is confused and is looking for his own path, trying to learn the truth of the world around him.

    But even so, of course, the question was asked incorrectly.

    Unlike religion, faith is alien to science.

    Gravity does not depend on the number of people who are convinced of its presence or absence.

    If you really care about this topic, please refer to the book by the outstanding astronomer and popularizer of science of the twentieth century Carl Sagan – ” The world is full of demons. Science is like a candle in the dark.”

    Despite the terribly strange title, the book is simply amazing.

  15. Science and religion are two ways to describe the picture of the world. Science, describing the picture of the world, takes as a basis empiricism, logic, axioms, theorems and sometimes philosophy, assumptions. Religion describes the picture of the world through the connection of man with God based on the historical facts of the interaction of man with God, man with man, which are recorded in the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Scriptures. There are different ways to know the truth.

  16. Because they talk about God from certain religions, and certain religions have sacred scriptures on which they are based, and it is precisely the text of these sacred scriptures that contradicts science. But when you use the term “god”, you are talking about a unique concept of a supreme being, and not a particular god from a particular religion, which is why this paradox arises.�

    You ask, is it possible that any process that science has explained happens by the will of such a god? How then can we explain the fact that we are constantly finding new laws by which the universe works, and that we can not only predict the outcome of certain events based on our theories, but also control it? If this god himself controlled something, then we would not be able to deduce clear laws and axioms, twice two, depending on the will of God, could equal anything. Or is it the same higher entity that controls us too, so that we think that we do everything ourselves? Or is this entity that created the physical laws and now just observes? In this case, it turns out to be another meaningless assumption that we can neither prove nor refute, just like everyone's favorite kettle of Russell.�

    We will not be able to know this God, we will not be able to register his influence on the world. And if we can't, it means that this knowledge is absolutely useless and will not affect anything, even if we accept it as a real fact. But the need for further scientific study of processes and phenomena will not disappear.

    I mean, even the presence of a supreme being in the form of God does not change the fact that everything works according to some laws, and the need to study them completely does not disappear. We know what makes you more likely to get cancer, and we know how it works, so there's no point in saying, ” Yes, it's God's will.” Regardless of what controls these processes, we see patterns in them, which means that we can act on their basis, for example, by quitting smoking. And it works, which means that even if “God's will” is there, its influence doesn't matter. And Occam's razor tells us that it is not necessary to produce unnecessary entities. It's useless.

  17. As Paul Sabatier used to say: “Natural sciences and religion are opposed to each other only by people who are poorly educated in both.”

    The greatest evil of our time should be recognized that Religion and Science are two hostile forces that are not connected with each other. This evil is all the more pernicious because it comes from above and invisibly seeps into all minds like a volatile poison that is inhaled along with the air. And yet every sin of thought inevitably turns into a spiritual evil, and consequently into a social evil.

    As long as Christianity established the Christian faith among European peoples still semi-barbaric, as they were in the Middle Ages, it was the greatest of moral forces, it shaped the soul of modern man. As long as experimental science sought to restore the legitimate rights of reason and protect its boundless freedom, it remained the greatest of intellectual forces; it renewed the world, freed man from the chains of centuries, and gave his reason an unbreakable foundation.

    But since the church, unable to defend its fundamental dogmas against the objections of science, has shut itself up in them as in a windowless dwelling, opposing faith to reason as an unquestionable absolute commandment; since science, intoxicated by its discoveries in the physical world, has turned the world of the soul and mind into an abstraction, has become agnostic in its methods and materialistic in its principles and goals; since philosophy, confused and lost between religion and science, is from their rights in favor of skepticism-a deep discord has appeared in the soul of society and in the soul of individuals.

    At first this conflict was necessary and useful, since it served to restore the rights of reason and science, but not stopping in time, it also eventually became a cause of impotence and ossification. Religion responds to the demands of the heart, hence its magical power; science responds to the demands of the mind, hence its irresistible power. But it's been a long time since the two powers stopped understanding each other.

    Religion without proof and science without hope stand incredulously and hostilely against each other, powerless to defeat each other.

    Hence the deepest division and hidden hostility not only between the state and the church, but also within science itself, in the bosom of all churches, and also in the depths of the conscience of all thinking people. For whatever we may be, whatever philosophical, esoteric, or social school we may belong to, we carry in our souls these two hostile worlds, seemingly irreconcilable, although both of them have arisen out of the same inherent, never-dying needs of man: the needs of his mind and the needs of his heart.

    Shure Eduard. Great Initiates

    1889

  18. It could be that we're all living inside some monster with twenty-five dicks.It may be that after death, people's souls go to live in a world where Elvis Presley is currently king in the truest sense of the word. Only there is no scientific evidence for this.Science unlike religion is built on more or less reliable evidence and not on blind faith in what there is no evidence.I don't want to offend religious people.But there is no reliable evidence for the existence of God.Maybe someday there will be such evidence.In this case, it will be possible not to oppose science and religion.

  19. Please note that science and religion are simply tools of knowledge: both are built on experience, observations, assumptions, and a series of proofs. Science is only an extension of religion, just as one scientific theory is an extension of another.

  20. It can be different.

    It is possible that the juxtaposition of science and religion also occurs by God's will – God wants to go on vacation and asks us to forget about it for a short time and start solving our problems on our own.

    “Maybe this is…” is not an argument. Maybe you're doing group gay porn. Well, it can be, how do I know, I don't know you.

  21. Here we must proceed from the goals of science and different religions – they were all invented by Man to interpret natural phenomena.

    Science was invented by man as a form of observation, systematization of knowledge and knowledge of the nature of the surrounding world, everyday life and the inner world of people. It is based on Knowledge.

    Religion was invented by man as a collection of dogmatic norms, a system of beliefs in supernatural forces, miracles, spirits and ghosts. It is based on Faith.

    Science is our everything, it also studies different religions. Religions are a small area of study for science, but since for thousands of years people have used religion to control their subjects, now religion resists-it does not want to become an object of research from dogma and folklore.

    Knowledge and Faith-they are of course opposed.

    Religion is designed to spread and dominate, to sow irrational dogmas. Science is designed to look for rational explanations. Their juxtaposition is natural.

    not contrasting, but merging them is just a great advertising move by Dan Brown to sell a series of books about Robert Langlon (The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, Inferno).

    It's just that for some reason people are afraid to say out loud that religion is a human invention. Apparently they are afraid to fly on 148 UKR and 282 UKR.

  22. Many religions are based on” sacred texts “that were most often” dictated ” from above. These texts, in turn, often describe the process of creation – which should emphasize that the world was created by this God, and not by any other.

    The problem of religion and science is inconsistencies between the religious axiom of the universe and scientific theories on this subject. The theory of evolution, for example, itself crosses out the myth of the universe from the Bible. But Buddhists have no problems with science.

  23. I do not oppose them. In my head, they are perfectly combined and no one bothers anyone. You just need to be able to read the holy scriptures. Understand what a metaphor is. I am a very religious person, but at the same time my friends consider me a walking encyclopedia

  24. These are methods of cognition-a need for a high-level mind.

    Religion appeared much earlier. Science needs a foundation (facts, observations, special language, means of analysis…). Science used a lot of data collected at the religious stage of progress.

  25. Of course, it is necessary to contrast – but not any particular science, but the picture of the world offered by natural sciences, and other pictures of the world. There is such a modern philosophical trend as naturalism, which requires that any explanation of a certain phenomenon must show the correspondence of the phenomenon to a certain “physical” state. For example, different mental states must correspond to different brain states.

    Science, indeed, always has a definite subject, unlike, say, philosophy. Therefore, really scientific methods to refute the “core research program” of any religion is a difficult task. However, often the opinion of religion on this or that account was in conflict with science. And “theories”, although they have a “core”, should be taken together. That is, religion is also partly intended to explain what is happening in the world. And the natural sciences are constantly pushing religions in this field, which ultimately shows that religion has little relation to reality.

    For the perception of theories in the aggregate, there is the term “holism”. An ardent holist was the American logician and philosopher Quine. He wrote that the Greek gods were as much about explaining reality as the atoms in modern physics. That is why he has to choose between the Greek gods and physics, and he chooses the atoms of physics.

    I was once given this example: a math teacher who was suffering from hallucinations asked students “do devils exist?” And he himself replied that they do not exist, “because we live in a wonderful Euclidean space.” (The students had already become mathematicians themselves, but they still didn't understand this phrase.) In fact, the laws of conservation in physics follow from certain symmetries laid down in the mathematical apparatus used (in space). And the laws of conservation, in my opinion, do not allow much of, for example, Christianity.

    On the other hand, religions are often built in such a way that they have enough resources to master a certain fact. We can say, for example, that God scattered the remains of dinosaurs on the ground to test our faith. But, in my opinion, very few people will like this idea. Therefore, religion is most often forced to agree with the opinions of natural sciences. Answer the question: are you able to accept the opinion of a religion that contradicts science? Are you able to accept the opinion of a religion that has not been confirmed or refuted by science? If so, why?

    My answer will be incomplete if I don't mention the evidence for the existence of God. Sometimes philosophers and scientists come up with certain arguments for the existence of God, which are not easy to refute.

  26. The previous answer was very comprehensive, I'll just add a little bit of myself. From the point of view of science, such an opposition is incorrect and illogical, in other words, “unsportsmanlike”.

    I often encounter a lack of understanding of what science is. Science clearly defines the boundaries of its field of activity. It does not deal with issues where it is impossible to conduct an experiment that clearly proves or refutes. Such theories are irrefutable and, consequently, unscientific. “The ways of the Lord are mysterious”, ” there was an incident with a friend of mine…”, ” there is something that we don't know yet…”, “explain to me…” and “why doesn't she call me?”-all this lies outside the scope of science.

    Think of science as an imposing lady of age, experienced, extremely strict and meticulous. She does not tolerate mistakes, does not take anything for granted, finds fault with every little thing, and at the same time, does not owe anyone anything. The burden of proof is on the approver's side. And the lady's favor must be earned, and with very hard mental work.

    In science, this is the case — any hypothesis is not true until proven otherwise. That is, if you are told that there is a theory that explains everything, but science does not accept it, know that there is simply no evidence in it, which means that the weight of such a theory is no more than speculation, no matter how correct it may seem. By the way, there is even the principle of “presumption of naturalness” — any phenomenon must be explained by natural causes, as long as there are ways that can explain it.

    Science is concerned with studying the world around us, cause and effect, but will not answer the question ” why is everything like this?”. This is why you should respect science.

    Some people think that a lot of scientists are believers, but I want to point out that the opinion of any scientist about religion is not related to his profession and is purely personal. Again, Einstein did not believe in the implied God at all, as he repeatedly said.

    The attitude of religion to science may not be so well known to me, but I note that some faiths are quite adequate to science and, at times, even encourage it. For example, Islam (the same, non-aggressive, peaceful), as far as I know, does not condemn the acquisition of knowledge, if they do not blaspheme the name of Allah (sorry for possible inaccuracies). And science, as I wrote above, will not do this.

    As a result, I would compare the juxtaposition of science and religion with an attempt to arrange a fair competition between a biathlete and a boxer. It would be fair and correct, don't you think?

    I have often met believers and communicated with them. I believe that religion is a personal matter for everyone, and not a reason for discrimination.

    PS I thank the previous commentator for a high-quality, tolerant comment, and wish him good luck.

  27. It depends on what you mean by “contrast”. If this is a question in the format of “who is really right?”, so to speak, ontological, then no. Science and religion deal with fundamentally different things and cannot be “refuted” by each other, since they do not have a common, let's say, battlefield.

    If we put the question methodologically, then perhaps we can: religion is based on faith, which in some ways is more apodictic than experimental knowledge. That is, in religion there is some solid universal truth, on which the particulars are built. And the main theological disputes and the development of religious ideas just concerns these particulars (albeit very important). Thus, we can say that religion, if we keep in mind its development, proceeds from knowledge and develops a method.

    Science, on the contrary, is based on a fundamental ignorance of universal truth (and even confidence in its existence is not present), but at the same time it has clear criteria for constructing models and a methodology for collecting experimental data to build these models, which allow accumulating and systematizing knowledge about the world around us (whatever this phrase means). Thus, we can say that science proceeds from the method and develops knowledge.

    You can also contrast the “ethics of science “and the”ethics of religion”. Anyway, the “doubt” aspect. For science, this is the main virtue, the most important quality of a scientist. A scientist who has no doubts died for science in general. For religion, however, doubt, although in a certain sense a very important thing, is still something to be overcome and eventually even condemned.

    Since I myself am related to science, but I am not related to religion, it is likely that my terminology will seem very strange to believers, but you can catch the main idea.

  28. Of course, you must believe in religion! Science always has seven Fridays a week, it always claims different things and doubts its own statements, while religion is stable and unchangeable in its dogmas: it still claims that the earth was created in six days, and Eve was made from Adam's rib.

    But if you reject science when choosing between science and religion, then you should also reject the achievements of science. From the tempting radio, the devilish Internet, and the devilish toilet.

    Otherwise, the position looks somewhat inconsistent.

Leave a Reply