Reflection Paper 3 - Book Report/Review Example

Dichotomy of Science and Religion The first of these to truly develop was religion. Prehistoric and ancient civilizations believed in supernatural deities and spirits, which dictated the variables in a person’s everyday life. As mankind began to get a more physical and experimental perspective on the themes of the world, basic science and inquiry began. Then the war between the dominance of science and religion began, often leading to excommunications, such as Galileo from the Christian church, and suppression of all scientific knowledge.

As technology began to develop and human society developed, the value of religion in the active lives of people began to decrease and science began to increase. In my opinion, science has played a critical role in everyone’s life, including my own. Many of the technologies, such as computers and the Internet, would not be around today if it had not been for science. Science has also allowed me to understand ways in which the world operates. This ranges from how the world was created, from a biological and astronomical perspective, to how the weather works and being able to predict it.

The reason for the dependence on these answers is that they are tangible facts that can be observed and understood quantitatively. While science give the answer to how things occur, it does not give the answer to why things occur. While scientists have been able to observe processes, such as gamete formation and star formation, they are still unable to explain how these tedious mechanisms evolved. In addition, the question as to why they occur in that particular way also is brought up. So even though science can tell me how the natural world works and is able to describe it, the questions of meaning and why do these processes occur the way they do come into the mind, bringing up the question of was there a greater power that designed these systems to work in the way that they do.

In a sense of wonder, it always brings back to my mind that I might not be alone in the universe and that maybe there is some force, which influences our lives every day, whether we are aware of it or not. In contrast, religion has been able to give me answers that science hasn’t. Religion is able to answer questions about morality and how to live one’s life in code of the doctrine of the religion they observe. For example, in the debate of stem cell research, this is where the fight among the morality of religion and the advancement of science clash.

Religion has also given me a different type of energy that the tangible world cannot. It gives me something to strive to be by living through the values it promotes. In addition, it gives me a spiritual sustenance, which is incapable of being acquired from any other portion of the world. Religion has also made me realize how temporal the world really is. The other past experiences of my life have long buried the memories I have of being a child. I have been to funerals in which I have had to say goodbye to loved ones and friends.

It reminds me that life on this world is limited and that one should enjoy every moment of it because it will never come again. It also reminds me in that even though our world is temporal, my spirit will continue to thrive after my biological body has died, resulting hopefully into a transcendence with some other realm of being. This leaves a lot of big questions as far as to what is going to happen once the threshold of life and death meet. I think that because science and religion approach the world in two different ways, it is impossible to integrate them.

This is because the mechanics of which the questions are asked are different and the way these questions are investigated are different. The largest moral conflicts and conflicts that occurred in history have many basis between the differences in which science and religion approach investigations. Science is good at explaining the physical mechanics of the world, but religion is able to transcend that in order to explain the way in which we should live and the world that cannot be seen.