Can religion and science not be enemies?

Science and religion are only enemies in the mislead minds of fundamentalists/fringe cults and atheists.

The overwhelming majority of people from a variety of faiths have no problems at all seeing their sacred texts as SPIRITUAL guides, and are happy to let science explain the natural world.

Galileo once said: "The Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."

The Vatican now has its own observatory, and the current Pope has an MS in Chemistry.

I do agree that the power hungry greedy selfish oil/chemical moguls are using undereducated religious people as a political base. That is something we should all work to rectify.

It really depends. A firm believer in the inerrant truth of the Bible was somewhat influential in scientific circles, even though at the end of his life, he believed his greatest contribution was a treatise in which he demonstrated that the Bible was absolutely the whole true word of God.

You might have heard of him: Isaac Newton.

Truth is, religion and science talk about different spheres, so many people of faith have also been people of science. There are some who do not understand how the two can co-exist. There are some who do not understand why others have a problem with the two spheres co-existing in perfect harmony.

As you can plainly see on this forum, some folks "know" what they know, and have no intention of listening to what the other side might have to say. It's this sort of narrow-minded attitude that has led us to the problems we see today in all sorts of situations.

Folks would rather pull everything apart than admit that someone else might have a point -- let alone be right!

You have an open door to choose whichever position you would like.

Science and religion can certainly coexist - all that is required is when science discovers something new, religion can not bi!ch and moan.

There are a lot of religions that get along very well with science. Buddhism, Taoism, and the Baha'i faith (which is an offshoot of the Abrahamic faiths) actually promotes scientific exploration into our reality.

As a matter of fact, the only real religious collective that I have ever heard having an issue with anything science related is Christianity, specifically the Young Earth Creationists. And, at this point, I think the only reason they continue to argue is simply to make their museum's not absolutely worthless.

Galileo got into trouble because he was a cranky old man who couldn't stop insulting people in power. When he was put under house arrest for the last few years of his life, he spent the time writing yet another book and entertaining friends. When he was required to write out certain apologies, they allowed his daughter to do it for him, so he never had to be bothered with that.

So he might qualify as the best-treated prisoner in history.

There is no war between science and religion today. Science deals with the physical world and not the non-physical.

When religion makes positive claims about the world or the universe (God created all life, for example), these are things that can be tested with the scientific method.

Religious belief always, -always- comes up lacking when put to the test.

Prayer has been tested and shown not to work. The Earth is over six thousand years old. Plants developed -after- the sun came into being. Evolution is the best-supported theory in the history of scientific endeavour.

They are not compatible. Religion claims to have all the answers, and that all other religions that claim to have all the answers are wrong (and sinful), all without evidence.

The only difference between ten thousand religious beliefs and science is that science deals only in evidence.

Edit: Laws of Nature are definitions we put on our observations. Laws of Nature have been changed in the past when new evidence has come to light (for example, Newtonian physics does not work in the realm of quantum mechanics).

Said Laws do not exist as a "thing." They are not tangible, they are definitions only. Any scientist worth his salt could tell you that, and I am a Romance editor and politician, not a scientist at all.

Catholic Universities and the Vatican Observatories (in Rome and Phoenix) were established to verify the "truths of the Bible," not to advance science. Any discoveries they made along the way were accidental to that mission.

Catholic Spain was catapulted into a world-spanning empire that lasted five hundred years because it captured intact the Islamic library of the Emirate of Granada, which housed much of the ancient science and philosophy of Rome and Greece. That ended the Dark Ages and ushered in the Renaissance. (Spain had burned all other such libraries, but the last Queen Isabella directed be spared. Had that been burned too, it is likely that Europe would be speaking Arabic as part of the Ottoman Empire.)

When a Catholic priest first mooted the idea of the Big Bang, he was not doing it through the profound learnings of his theology: he did it with the scientific method.

When Galileo was ordered never to study astronomy again because he'd discovered moons around Jupiter and thus unseated the Earth as the centre of the universe, that order came from theological understanding, not the scientific method.

It is a fact that religion has historically opposed science and it's progress.

Bullshit! If that were the case you certainly could give more than one example. Moreover that example would be sustainable upon examination rather than the product of revisionist history.

You are right there is no war between religion and science - you are wrong in asserting there ever was such a war.

Galileo was in fact funded by the Roman Catholic Church. When it came to his results the Church did not reject them based on the scriptures, they rather deferred to Galileo's peers - the rest of the scientific community.. His work failed peer review! Instead of looking for more evidence Galileo threw a hissy fit, called the Pope an ignoramus. 100 years later when the evidence needed to make the case was discovered - The Church had no objections to the assertion of a heliocentric universe.

The simple fact is, the Church sided with the scientific consensus against Galileo..

If there were no Church and the current system existed, Galileo would have been marginalized by the scientific community, blackballed from being able to publish - this would have resulted in him being unable to get grant money, or tenure at any university and he would have been forced into retirement or some other field besides science.

NO, as long as the current paradigm exists where atheists are in charge of the media, or devil worshipers run the government or that scientists are actually atheists, it will never happen!

however there are scientists that were creationists. !

http://creationsafaris.com/wgcs_toc.htm

and of course, Walter Brown wrote a book that debunks the science of the evolution by proving the science of creation and the flood. He declared that if science were not Censored, science would ultimately prove there is a God. but devil worshipers do not want this to happen, they want all particles of faith to be deleted from human consciousnesses. such will be the worship of the beast and the new world order socialism.

but there are man like Ben Stein who invested money in a movie that states what is going on all over teh country.

and there is Michael Cremo who says as much that He is black listed in many forums and that the peer review is "corrupted".

Glenn Kimball said similar things, as well.

http://cid-fff19b48ee821aa4.office.live.com/self.a...

http://cid-fff19b48ee821aa4.office.live.com/self.a...

http://cid-fff19b48ee821aa4.office.live.com/self.a...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-168035758...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvNBYynGkXU

however i would like you to take a look at the link above. you'd be surprised at who was a creation scientist.

It never really was the case. You should probe deeper into history. You will find that Catholic universities had been teaching since the late 12th Century that there can be no conflict between science and theology. Certainly as can be seen with the Galileo incident not everyone got that message, but the message was being proclaimed nonetheless. For that matter the "Father of the Modern Scientific Method" was Francis Bacon, a Catholic priest, as was the noted physicist who first put forth the "Big Bang Theory", Georges Lemaitre.

You are correct though. It seems that corporations would like nothing better that to wait until people are dying at even a greater rate than they are now before they do something. Love of God and our fellowman has been replaced with love of money and ME! ME! ME!

Science and religion are complimentary. Each can answer questions that the other can't. They are not in conflict, although some people try to make them conflict.

Science is simply a reliable method for finding out facts about the universe.

It has no "enemies."

Religions *do* have "enemies," that they create themselves. Anything that dares challenge or show false their faith, doctrines, and dogmas, they declare an "enemy."

This "conflict" is entirely one-sided. On religion's part. Don't blame 'science.'