  |
|||
|
|
|
||
|
Posted by Katharine M. J. Osborne Oct 27, 2006 |
In many respects the conflict between religion and science is completely understandable. Religion is about faith and the acceptance of authority (I define faith alone as a form of spirituality), while science is about exploration and the challenging of authority - though authority too often creeps in as well.
People of science often can't understand why someone wouldn't change their position on an idea in the light of new information, while people of religion (this isn't to say someone can't be both) can't understand why you would give up an idea held to be true. That essentially is the crux of the problem, you are either someone who values the process of intellectual adaptation at the risk of having an incoherent or incomplete ideology, or you are someone who values the authority of a particular canon of knowledge at the risk of ignoring important new ideas.
Science itself is often viewed as another form of religion (I disagree with this strongly - it is specifically secular) and as such is viewed as a challenge to many forms of religion. Even Galileo, in an attempt to prevent the banning of heliocentrism by the Catholic Church, tried to show that the passages in the Bible that asserted that the Earth was the center of the universe only reflected the scope of the human knowledge of the writers of the passages, and heliocentrism did not in fact conflict with the Bible. His adaptive perspective clashed with the absolutist perspective of the Church.
In our current times, this adaptive/absolutist conflict is illustrated in the current stem cell debate. It's will surely be a hot political issue for decades to come.