sorry, it’s just not working out…

For many years now, people have tried to answer the question whether science can be compatible with religion. Could the two coexist and live happily ever after? Or are they so different that trying to fuse them is like combining matter and antimatter? Usually, we diplomatically say that science is secular and doesn’t set out to prove or disprove some sort of supernatural conception of the universe. But under that diplomacy is a little white lie that we tell to avoid a big, messy semantics fight. Science and religion have opposing goals, work on a completely different set of rules and reach different conclusions by different means.

Science really is secular and doesn’t deal with a god or gods in any way, shape or form. If there is some sort of divine intervention which has no other possible explanation, scientists will duly note that in a certain part of the experiment is a supernatural being turns X into Y in some odd, mysterious way that we can’t discern and which violates pretty much all known laws of physics and chemistry. There hasn’t been such a case for a very long time now. Why? Because science’s goal is to find answers to questions. Scientists start from a position that something happens in a certain way by a certain force and then do experiments to figure out if it’s true or not as well as investigate any questions they find themselves asking along the way.

Religion on the other hand already has an answer to anything and everything. It’s all in a hidden chapter of some dusty tome or buried under the metaphorical meanings of a certain quote in a dusty tome. Priests assume that everything happens because a god willed it so and virtually all other explanations are just humans being pretentious and nitpicky by trying to figure out what is a mystery of the god’s ways. I would quote my interview with Daniel Florien who put the issue this way: “religion already has the truth. It’s not seeking it. It’s defending it.” Basically, in matters of defining a worldview, religion uses an opposite method to science. It reaches a conclusion to which it then tries to match evidence.

So let’s say we put a priest and a scientist in one room and ask them to figure out why the Earth is in its current orbit of 93 million miles away from the center of the Sun. The scientist will start working on formulas about gravity, the nature of space and time and calculating the probability that our planet ends up in its current orbit during the violent formation process. The priest will state that God willed it this way and we can see that by the fact that Earth is where it is. Hence, to the priest the probability is 100% and the answer was decided upon with no investigation past a personal opinion. And this is where science and religion are truly divided. It’s not about God or whether the supernatural exists. It’s about the way they approach the world around them.