The Conflict between Religion and Science

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David Morrey

The Conflict between Religion and Science

        Widely speaking we regard science as the matter of reason; religion is a matter of faith. In science things can be proved. In religion we have to take things on authority.

Keith Ward

  • Three Stages of religious thought and understanding.

  1. Tribal religion, imaginary cosmologies, rituals.
  2. The founding of the great scriptural (written) traditions – Holy texts which began to claim final and universal truth.
  3. Developments since the 17th and 18th century, a new way of understanding God and the world. (Birth of modern science).

Since the 17th and the 18th century the Christian faith in the world west has been transformed by three great movements of thought.

  1. The rise of the natural sciences as epitomised by Galileo and his conflict with the Roman Catholic Church. Everyone knows that Galileo won the argument and the church was no longer contempt to disagree with all experimental science. Hence forth all factual claims about the nature of the universe would have to be tested, by proper experimental techniques and to appeal to some authority like the church.
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  1. In the second phase he associates with Isaac Newton who invented the machine model of the physical world which appears to exclude any non-mechanical principles from its working. God seems to be exempt as the creator of the machine.

  1. Darwin explained how all complex forms of life have originated by chance and the accidental mutation of nucleic acids. This seemed a major blow to the religious view that God had purposely created human beings intending to be just as they are.

The conflict between religion and science is now clear: is there a ...

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