SCIENCE VS RELIGION!

In this essay, I am going to argue against the motion that science and religion are incompatible and outline my argument as to why they can coexist. To help defend my opinion, I am going to examine a quote from Albert Einstein when questioned by the atheist Alfred Kerr.! Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will nd that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious. (Einstein 1927)! I think that Einstein's response is based on two core principles that my argument that science and religion are compatible. Firstly this quote tells us that not everything can be explained by our limited means, namely experiments or observations of the physical world. Einstein is referring to the fundamental laws of nature, which according to science, are set in stone, immutable and unchanging throughout time. He describes something about them that is inexplicable and intangible. Science is the objective study of how fundamental laws affect the physical world; Einstein has moved beyond this and described the mystery of why the laws of nature are the way they are. This is something that cannot be explained by traditional science and indeed by any method at all and that is why something else, different to science, is needed to offer an answer.! The second theme is that religion and more importantly god is not a personal entity. Instead it is the belief in a higher power or higher process that is ultimately responsible for why the laws of the universe are as they are. This is important as it describes a deity that is non intervening, the inner workings of the universe have been designed and set in motion and they cannot be changed, to do so would be to contradict the laws of modern science, which relies on repeated data to prove hypotheses. Taking this idea further we arrive at a fundamental denition of religion, it is nothing more than a belief in the underlying processes of the universe that are impossible to explain. The accompanying ethics and morals associated with religion are by-products from forming a community with a unied belief system. This is important, as if god does not continually change the laws of nature, then our science will remain unaffected by the presence of his existence. It is in this way that science and religion are compatible; they are not mutually exclusive and so they can coexist together.! Using these concepts we can begin to see how science and religion are compatible and can coexist. If we examine the rst concept that science is unable to explain the phenomenon that religion attempts to answer, then we can see there is a fundamental difference between science and

religion. Science is concerned with the physical world such as how things work, it is objective and most importantly it aims to answer a different question to religion. Religion is the process of thinking about why things are the way they are, it is subjective and is the expression of morals and ethics. These two denitions are not mutually exclusive; when taken at face value, there is minimal overlap between the realms of religion and science and so they are able to coexist without attempting to answer each others questions. ! The notion that religion and science are at war is incorrect, indeed there is a large amount of evidence that amongst the scientic community for example, a large proportion, 30%, believe in a religion and another 30% are agnostic. Although some may see a contradiction many scientists view god as the higher power that dened the universes laws. As human knowledge continually approaches a universal theory of everything there is always the underlying question of why is this like it is. Many scientists see god directly through this question, for example in the extremely elegant and simple inverse square law, which denes many properties in modern physics, from gravity to electromagnetism.! Ultimately due to the relationship between religion and science there is in fact no way for science to prove scientically and methodically that the abstract idea of a divine creator is impossible. This is because religion itself is dened to be inexplicable by science and therefore it is evident that religion and science cannot overlap and so they are compatible.! Some might argue that if we take a more literal translation of the bible or holy scriptures then rstly science and religion contradict on scientic ground, for example creationists will argue that god designed all living things and therefore the widely accepted scientic theory of evolution is wrong. This exposes more fundamental problems; as if we take a more literal version of the Holy Scriptures then my initial denition of a religion itself is invalid. Not only is the god personal, but also it is able to continually change and alter the laws of nature. It could be argued that this shows the incompatibility of science and religion; if god is continually altering the universe then science surely cant exist, if supposed fundamental truths changed then they are evidently not correct.! This is where I believe the common misconception that science and religion are at war originates. It is the fundamentalists that interpret Holy Scriptures as supposedly given facts, on both sides that denounce each other and are seen at the forefront in the debate on compatibility. The noise they generate overshadows the genuine symbiotic relationship between science and religion. I disagree with the above argument that as a matter of principle, the Bible and other religious texts are clearly not

supposed to be taken literally. The suggestions that the universe was created in 7 days and that dinosaurs did not exist are clearly are not correct and I think that it is important to stress that the bible should not be taken literally but read allegorically.! Therefore, I think that religion and science can coexist, my main belief in this stems from the fact that fundamentally they are trying to answer two different questions. Science aims to explain how something occurs or takes place whereas religion offers an reason as to why things are the way they are. The fact that in the past, religion and science have conicted is irrelevant when you consider that that the number of people believing in the literal translation of the bible has greatly diminished, due to the advances in science over time. This allows for a belief system that doesnt try and explain objective observations, but instead allows science, whose methodology is more suited to research, to explain the physical world. In this way religion and science operate in different realms and therefore due to the absence of contradiction between the two, compatibility is innately possible. Furthermore, religion is suited to explaining the impossible mysteries of nature that science cannot answer and so science and religion complement each other in proving a complete view on the universe.