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      In Prof. Grobstein's Thursday section, we discussed whether science and religion had a common ancestor and endured a 'speciation event.' After struggling as a class to distinguish the fundamental difference(s) between the two, most of us agreed that this was probably the case. Perhaps there is no real essence to either that allows them to be separated, and we only define the two as similar by their common ancestor. I did a little web-search and I found a sentence from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that I very much disagreed with: "Modern western empirical science has surely been the most impressive intellectual development since the 16^th century. Religion, of course, has been around for much longer..." http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religion-science/

      While I agree that religion has undoubtedly been in existence before the 16th century, I don't think that religion should be considered older than science. I think that science pre-dates humans; that is, if science is about summarizing observations, modern animals, humans, and ALL of our ancestors were 'scientists.' I think that science was a lifestyle, and that those who fulfilled this lifestyle were able to yield descendents more suited to make the necessary observations. Eventually, humans came along and were sophisticated enough to do more than just make the observations...they could question them too! Whatever they couldn't immediately explain likely made them think out of the box, and thus religion (man-made) was created.

      HOWEVER, one might also argue that none of these scientific phenomena could have occured 'randomly' at any point in time, and that some greater power existed long before the 'science lifestyle' happened. All that is new, then, is the human recognition or speculation of such powers, and NOT the 'acts' of such powers themselves.

      So temporally-speaking, science and religion seem really difficult to separate. I do think that less-obvious scientific phenomena have led to religious inquiry, and that religious ideas have led to scientific curiosity/discovery. Now though, their dependence on each other does seem to be waning...and they seem to be more self-sufficient in their ability to produce inquiry. This is beginning to sound like that 'chicken and the egg' question.