Religion vs. Science

I am a Darwinian evolutionist but with a really different twist, I re-interpret the writings contained within what is called the Bible.

Here's a sample of the kind of studies I do, which strangely, is being rejected by the religious right but evolution-science is more tolerant of:

(Genesis) Adam/man (Hebrew-synonyms) = ‘ruddy’, rosy, the flush of red blood

"man became a living 'soul’ " (Genesis 2:7):
soul (Hebrew & Greek) = animal principle/breathing creature

- does not suggest a ‘human’ being but rather a ‘ruddy’ creature (as coming from the ‘red’ earth-dust/ground-primordial soup)

Adam/man was not initially a human being as many believe but rather a ‘ruddy creature of earth’, an animal (which must have been a chimpanzee; somewhere along the line human beings caught the chimp as shown by recent human genome DNA mapping).

Religious tendencies are observed strictly in the ‘human’ species. If human beings are in part ‘soul (primate/mammal)’ then why aren’t such tendencies evident in primates? Could it be because we have something primates don’t have?

animal = soul
human being = soul + spirit

soul = mortal (of earth)
spirit = immortal (otherworldly, aura, transcendent, supernatural = God's image)

Prior to being put into the garden, ruddy did not have 'spiritual' ability, he only gained that after he entered the garden; '...and the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had made.' (Gen. 2:8)

It was the gaining of this other element that enabled one primate to change from animal to human,and unless he had gained this other element, he could not have changed - thus the reason we don't see other primates in various stages of change.

If Mr. Darwin merely studied God's creation (nature) and told us what he saw there, wouldn't that make him God's advocate rather than God's enemy?

Religion and the Bible are 'not' the same things, if they were then the religious right wouldn'd disagree so vehemently with evolution.

The Wisdom of Truth
There is no doubt in my mind that intelligence in microorganisms (The God of Higher Being) creating an environment that could sustain life for all its creations of Living beings that live now and the ones that lived in history.

The interpretation of its meaning that began with spiritual beliefs in all religions is the children’s story version in a general overview of how life was created for our species to understand it. It is also the voice of wisdom from experience that gives instructions on encouraging healthy Human behavior that serve to protect us from ourselves and all others that we share this planet. Our emotions and our self awareness of them are still in its infancy stage of learning that self discipline and cooperation with our environment is important for our survival.

This is centered in the subconscious mind
Our emotional being
“The Child”

Science in all fields of research is the adult’s story version in the complexity of details of how life was created. The information is enormous in data for human comprehension.

This is centered in the conscious mind

Our Self Awareness
“The Adult”

Religions since early human civilization have warned us that by not living by the behavior guidelines that we are taught to us as sin, immoral acts from our spiritual faith will have severe consequences.
These work as a destructive mechanism to the health of the planet.

Science is also telling the same story that what we are doing in destructive behavior on a global scale to the planet will also produce severe consequences.

Our spiritual belief that tells us the rules for moral human behavior and scientific facts tells us why they should have been obeyed.

Religion and Science is the Truth of Creation of Life

Why can’t we all agree and save our planet’s future?

"..won't stop the scientist from coming as close as she can." -i like how you use she defying the stereotype of a male scientist.
you start of brilliantly by showing the differences (although your definition of 'religion' seems to entail only Christianity/Judaism. There are other religions in this world that wouldn't fit any of your arguments. Hinduism, Buddhism for instance). the problem with the literal and allegoric interpretation of religious texts was a brilliant point to make. but i feel that the arguments that you make about the similarities is pretty weak. but maybe you didn't want to make a strong point and keep it open for discussion.
Some of my views:
at the end, science and religion boils down to one question: where did the first thing to ever exist (dust/ sun /star for the scientists...god for the religious people) come from.

the most convincing argument i ve ever heard an atheist give is that since every matter has an antimatter.. they can combine to form nothing..hence if the reverse is true..nothing can give matter and antimatter. thus, you didn't need anything to form the world..except for a random chain of events ( whose probability equals nil.)
well all hope is not lost for the believer (in god) yet..they've counter argued by saying that the thing that the atheists label as 'nothing' is what they call God. So, at the end it boils down to one simple difference..how do you want to name the thing that started the 'creation'.

Well written Paper Laura, and great posts everyone. A lot of different viewpoints written out by some articulate and perceptive people. It's funny how everyone's views differ slightly no matter how closely they resemble each other. In the last few hundred years religious people and their respective denominations of churches have become a bit more level headed and open minded; talk like this used to get people burned as heretics. We exist now in a time of science, where people know the world is "round" not because it's common opinion touted by the well-educated, but because there's multi-million dollar satellites in earth's orbit capable of taking HD photos of individual blades of grass. As such Religion has had to grow up and change in the face of emerging theories.

In my honest opinion, having either a strictly religious or a purely scientistic view of reality is a basically flawed position. There are unanswered and extremely important questions on both sides of the fence, and anyone who claims to have an truly informed opinion on the empirical veracity of either one is ignoring some pretty major inconsistencies. Both come down to a simple choice: can you relinquish your mind's need to substantiate facts with hard evidence, or do you believe only in what is finite, measurably and fills some volume in what's referred to as time-space. Put more simply, can you have faith or do you need proof?

In my experience religious people take much more on faith. Many are quite content to let things rest by stating (perhaps wisely) that God has a plan and that He is primarily and immeasurably Good and Just. Anything else is wasted thought, why question what you hold through faith to be true? Conversely, people basing their "faith" on science neglect the questions which science has not found(and I believe cannot find) the answers to: for example, what is rational thought and self-awareness, what is morality and why are we affected (or plagued) by it, or on a bigger scale, where did all matter in the universe originate. Of course thought and emotion are measurable phenomena and it's true that our brains carry out these instructions. But where does the feeling originate? It's true that everything we've found in the universe shares the same composite materials, but where did it all COME from?

A Christian might say that it was all created by God. But what is God? Is it a being? Does it reside somewhere in the depths of space? Or is there some alternate reality that exists alongside our own, one in which time doesn't exist and the governing laws of the universe don't apply? And if so, what is the meaning of our reality, of our very existence? Add to this the search for life in the rest of the universe. Am I to believe that in a universe that's quite possibly infinite there is nothing else but floating rocks? No life exists anywhere else? And if it does, why doesn't the Bible make any mention of it? And then there's the historical angle. If the world was created with human beings already fully "evolved", then were they alive during the time of the dinosaurs? Why do we dig up fossils of giant reptilian beasts from the Cretaceous Period but no humans? And more to the point why, if carnivorous instincts weren't originally built into the animals in the Garden of Eden (as evidenced in the Bible a few times) did a Tyrannosaurus have jaw musculature perfectly suited for ripping flesh from bone, and why were its teeth naturally serrated to more efficiently cut through meat?

An atheistic scientist on the other hand would have to concede, I imagine, that the universe (by which I mean all the matter in the universe) has always been and will always be. To cope with the immediate feeling of helplessness and infinitesimal worth in the scheme of fourteen billion years of continued existence he/she would adopt perhaps and existentialist outlook, or an agnostic/realist one. To cope with the inconsistencies of the evolutionary theory and the meager evidence of the big bang theory (of which I am a believer) he/she would have to make allowances in the area that science is as yet imperfect and the answers to these questions are logically answerable in some way or another. And in the face of the essential meaninglessness of life as a whole, it becomes the responsibility of each person to craft a meaning for their own place in the world.

I believe that the entire root of existence is the perception of time, and that the universe by humanity's very existence is subject to its laws. The "Garden of Eden" was a verbal rendering of the state of the earth, before self-realization was introduced and with it time and guilt, which is a byproduct of retrospect. Before original sin, there was no sin in my own estimation. The fruit eaten by "Eve" and then "Adam" was an "apple" picked from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. "We" (I don't think I was there) rebelled against God by giving ourselves the ability to differentiate between right and wrong, thereby creating Good and Evil. And this is my biggest gripe with religion at the moment; that if we had no concept of right and wrong before the fall, how are we guilty of original sin? My other main gripe is that the God that I read about in the Old Testament doesn't seem like an all-knowing benevolent and loving savior, but more like an overzealous, overbearing, tyrannical and brutal egocentrist.

The answers to the overriding questions of existence are as plentiful as they are subjective, and holding to one and ignoring all others is the very definition of narrow-minded. If it turns out that my unwillingness to subscribe fully to a world view that I don't completely understand condemns me in God's eyes, then I guess I'm just a fool to the core. But in my opinion no view can ever be fully understood by a single person, and as Mr. Mcauliff quoted Darwin to have said, "...the whole subject of God is beyond the scope of man's intellect." It's my view that no matter if someone believes basically in Science or in Religion as the sole explanation of creation, many things will have to be taken on faith. Science is no closer to discovering the meaning of existence than the Bible is to painting a suitably concise picture of human history and the advancement and evolution of its various cultures. No physical evidence exists to prove Heaven or Hell exist in the same way that no irrefutable evidence exists to prove man evolved from microbacteria in the still-forming earth's new-formed oceans. At some level, everything must be taken on faith.

Sorry for the long-winded post, it's 4am and I'm wide awake... cheers.

The agreed-upon age of the universe and the earth itself has changed within the scientific community within the last twenty years (fact); nobody who wants to make sense within the religious world is claiming that we are built of anything other than the same elements that the stars are made of (fact); theories about the evolution of man are based largely off of tenuous evidence that is often taken for granted once its put onto a chart that shows a hairy man becoming more and more upright (fact); the Bible does not give a comprehensive timeline of human events and does not claim to (fact); and we are taking on "faith" most of the facts stated in the prior post (fact).

The thing most interesting to me to find out is how many people are going to assume that I'm a religious nut taking everything that fundamentalist Christian preachers thump out to be true. It may be important to note that I think that much of what has been said here is absolutely true. But while science is wonderful, the sort of thinking that it can lead to is just as dangerous and based on exclusiveness as religion; it's the same condition of humanity manifesting itself in two divergent places. After reading both Silvius' essay and the posts here, I think that both sides of this endless debate have forgotten that the central tenets of their beliefs has nothing to do with disregarding reason in favor of noise. Both science and religion are filled with breakdowns in thinking -- can anyone here think of an error that was ever made in their own field? For the Christians here, show some of that famous tolerance for all men; for the scientists, at least have a passing understanding of the thing you are assaulting.

well, im a 15 year old girl who has no idea what life is or what i'm here for, but obviously im here for a reason. I do believe in god,(why else would i have life and be here) I mean think about it, what makes science work? yeah its there but what gives object mass and gravity and size? how were things ever created at all? i believe this answer is god, but there are some things that i don't believe.... i think religion is a form of selfishness, it's for teh betterment of ourselves isnt it? to make us get to heaven by being good to others? I think thats being good for the wrong reasons. My religion is a little bit hypocritical, i believe. Well look at how religions were created and seperated and all teh wars, its all to believe in the same basic thing, common morals, but different reasons for thesse morals. Maybe im disillusioned about everything, but im still young and inexperienced, i have a life to live cause do i really know what comes next?