Religion and science 'autonomous' fields

Editor:

It is easy and all too common today for science and religion to be blurred together or set at odds, as I fear Jessie Fillerup did in her column on Feb. 5. I have come to believe that any tension between these two equal, but distinct, spheres of knowledge is both unnecessary and hampering. Science is the active pursuit of knowledge through the objective analysis of empirical evidence. While religion is a set of beliefs accepted on faith that explain the purpose of mankind's existence and God's role in it.

Both have been intimate parts of human culture from the beginning, since the first Hominid peered up at the stars or erected the first stone altar. Yet history contains scores of incidences when these two areas of knowledge bitterly conflicted. For example, when the Soviets sought to achieve unity of vision by forcibly squelching religion with state-imposed "scientism," or when Galileo was sentenced to house arrest by the church for reporting that the earth was not the center of the universe. In both of these cases, either religion or science attempted to adopt a role that it is not capable of holding.

Science, if it is to remain science, cannot answer the pressing "why's" of our existence. And similarly, religion cannot be used to answer the "how's" of the mechanical universe. Science can explain how life originated from a primordial organic soup, and how every known species precipitated from a few single-celled organisms through the process of natural selection. But it is unable, unless it is distorted, to explain why this occurred, what it means to us as emotional beings, capable of love, or what the meaning of this existence is. Religious faith develops out of mankind's inexorable cravings to answer these questions. Science cannot disprove the presence of God, who transcends the boundaries of time, space, and matter, to which science is confined. It is also a mistake for religion to be used to fill science's holes. For example, just because evolutionists have not yet been able to explain the evolution of complex structures such as the human brain, does not mean that they were created by direct divine intervention. There is simply more for the scientific method to show us. Religion is not a substitute for science, nor is science a substitute for religion. They are two autonomous spheres of knowledge, one empirical and the other spiritual, with distinct procedures and principles. If God is the author of both human reason and revealed truth, as most major religions maintain, there need not be any antagonism between these two realms. Like a marriage where each partner, through mutual respect, brings out the best in the other, science and religion together, in their respective roles, will allow us to acquire the true knowledge about the world in which we dwell. As Albert Einstein said, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

Jeremy Loverich
chemical engineering junior

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