Is science v. religion a false dichotomy?

[MaC]

Yes, it's a false dichotomy.  The existence of the universe is based upon a higher being-the laws he governs by are scientific.  Get it right people.

[Gabu]

Absolutely.  The quote by Albert Einstein that I posted in that other sums up my opinion on this nicely.

[dazzleman]

Yes, it's a false dichotomy.  Science and religion are not necessarily in conflict.

[angus]

yes, one deals with the soul, the other with the body.  But no gods need ever act according to scientific laws, and no science need ever subjugate itself to any gods, and so I disagree with your statements that gods work within the framework of natural laws.  Both Natural Laws and gods being invented by men, they need not correlate, since men are not perfect creatures.  The Inca tied the sun every night to a big stone pole to make sure it didn't get away, and in that sense they understood centripetal acceleration.  At the same time in Western Europe, Tycho Brahe was busy collecting data to account for the retrograde motion of Mars within the geocentric model of the universe.  But no religion need ever be in competition with any science.  They simply attempt to answer very different questions, and since they're answering different questions (ethereal versus corporeal) they needn't be in conflict.  For example, I'm sure you can find priests who have studied and understand and use the Standard Hot Big Bang model of the origin of the elements in the universe.  This in no way inhibits their ability to guide young people toward the path of righteousness.

[Inverted Things]

Not a dichotomy... at least it need not be. Religion was very big and very powerful back in the middle ages, and it overstepped itself a little (sun goes around earth, world is flat... that type of thing). Science has been claiming about half of religion's former territory for itself, and is going to basically leave the rest alone.

So, there WAS and IS a conflict between religion and science, but it's just over territory, so to speak. No religious scholar would oppose that the earth goes around the sun. And any intellectually honest scientist will defer to a religious scholar when asked about souls. However issues such as human cloning are claimed by both religion and science.

The appearence of a dichotomy stems from the fact that there are (non-intellectually honest) scientists out there who swear that souls don't exist. It cuts the other way too, for there are religious fundamentalists who swear that evolution is completely false.

[John Dibble]

Depends on how you look at it. There is no one answer to this question - sometimes they conflict, sometimes they agree, sometimes they overlap but don't interfere with eachother. The essential difference as I see it is that, in general, science bases its conclusions and theories off of empirical observations through expirmentation and other means of data collection while religion bases it's conclusions on faith(sometimes this faith is 'blind', other times it's based off casual observations or even conclusions with their basis rooted in science or some form of logic). In this sense, a dichotomy exists between the two in that science, ideally, does not draw conclusions without sufficient evidence while religion will be more likely to do so - there is a dichotomy in the methodologies of drawing conclusions, but that is the only inherent difference.

As I said, sometimes there's conflict, sometimes not, and sometimes there's no relation in the conclusions draw. An example of the first is evolution vs. creationism. An example of the second is a church believing that the Earth is not the center of the universe, that it's not flat, ect. An example of the latter is that science, at least currently, can neither prove nor disprove the existence of a god - so the idea of an all powerful creator does not conflict with science since good science shouldn't be taking a stance on the issue due to lack of empirical evidence one way or another.

There is not inherent dichotomy in the conclusions of science and religion. If there's a dichotomy between religious and scientific conclusions, it's between an individual religion and science, as all religions, and even people within a single religion, have different beliefs. One therefore can't lump all religion into a ball and say it conflicts with scientific conclusions.

[angus]

Science has been claiming about half of religion's former territory for itself, and is going to basically leave the rest alone.

So, there WAS and IS a conflict between religion and science, but it's just over territory, so to speak.

Interesting POV.  I like the way you expressed that, as I hadn't thought of it exactly that way before, but it seems reasonable.  I'd thought of the concept before but not given it a name:  fight over territory.  Once many years ago an Indian colleague and I were discussing Hindu.  Specifically, we were talking about the Trinity, Sree Rama and its three manifestations Brahman, Vishnu, and Shiva.  Shiva is the destructor.  I immediately always think of Entropy.  The Hindu had a name for entropy long before Western scientists did.  Perhaps I was guilty of immediately looking for thermodynamic principles to associate with the various gods.  Entropy/Shiva was an obvious connection to me.  But later it became clear that no mathematics or testing went into Shiva's mythology, and so Shiva isn't a scientific concept.  Any resemblance between Shiva and entropy was purely coincidental.  And I later realized my Indian friend was patronizing me when she smiled and said, "Yes, you could think of it like that:  Shiva is sort of entropy."  The way I patronize chinese folks when they stumble upon some uniquely chinese way of thinking about a Western concept and I say, "Yeah, you can think of it like that."  Even though I know it's just heuristic, but justifiable in the sense that it works out well enough for sorting things out in one's own head.  What I'd not thought of was the fact that the thermodynamic concept of entropy and the religious concept of Shiva merely fight over the same territory, in this case an explanation of nature's destruction.

[MasterJedi]

Yes, it's a false dichotomy.  Science and religion are not necessarily in conflict.

^^^^^

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

For normal people, yes. For fundies and creationists, no.

[Michael Z]

Option 1. To me science makes the possibility of the existence of God more, not less likely. If there are laws governing the universe - such as the laws of gravity, and indeed the laws of evolution - and there is an order to everything around us then the next question we need to ask is where these laws come from and what has devised them. The idea that a higher entity, call it God if you like, did so makes more sense to me, personally, than the idea that they just came out of nowhere.