Science and Religion - Research Paper Example

What are, for instance, the fundamental characteristics of science and how do those characteristics differ from those of religion? These kinds of central questions, dealing with both metaphysics and epistemology, are incredibly relevant to modern society, which is increasingly realizing the importance of science’s contributions to quality of life. Nevertheless, while progress in scientific discoveries is being made, religion remains in the background, still likewise central to people’s lives.

The questions of science’s relationship to religion have, for all intents and purposes, existed since the classical ages when the first scientific methods were being developed. With this background in mind, it is crucial to remember that these sorts of questions have inspired lively debate for centuries, with the weight of many strong arguments behind them. The purpose of this paper is to draw the landscape of these arguments, their theoretical force, and how to resolve them. The argument is whether science is in fundamental conflict with religion, or whether there is a degree of concordance between the two realms of human knowledge.

Those who believe that religion is fundamentally different think that the scientific method is the defining feature of a scientific state of knowledge, which is a feature that is not shared by religion (Dawkins, 2003). Religion, which largely focuses on the value of knowledge derived from revelation and authority, does not take trial-and-error learning as the true method of knowledge. For those who believe there is concordance between the two, the argument relies primarily on the notion that divine creation that underwrites the empirical character of modern Western science and its greatest minds in history (Ratzsch, 2009).

The best-defended position in this debate is that there is no conflict between religion and science, but that there is no agreement between them either. Basing a concordance between religion and science on the observation that many of the earliest heroes of science were Christian (including Galileo, Boyle, and Kepler) is fallacious. Many of these early scientific heroes often experienced deep philosophical and political conflicts between their religious beliefs and their scientific theories. For instance, the well-known case of Galileo’s trouble with the religious authority over his scientific findings is a commonly given example of a scientific figure being persecuted because of that essential conflict.

Likewise, one could also argue that the religious authority that persecuted Galileo based on his scientific findings were not acting on behalf of a genuine religious belief. The Church, which had established its own scientific conclusions through centuries, took measures to enforce those scientific conclusions through coercive force. The thought there is that a religious authority can adopt science and enforce that science in the name of God, which separates it from a religious belief (Ratzsch, 2009).

The reason that this position is best defended is because it is difficult (a) to define what exactly constitutes science and religion, and (b) to define what exactly constitutes conflict and agreement. An example of the difficulty with (a) is Behe (1996)’s arguments for the theory of intelligent design based on the concept of “irreducible complexity.” Intelligent design, which is based on a theological theory of the origin of species, is taken to be the antithesis of evolutionary theory in biology.

However, the arguments are written in such a way that they are presented as scientific evidence, even though they are based on theological premises. This seeming mixture of science and relig