There's No Such Thing As Science

The science vs religion debate is certainly an interesting one: there's people who say that science and religion go hand in hand and there's people that say they are completely separate. And then there's people who can't really grasp either concept. I get particularly frustrated when I hear people talk about "science" and indeed "religion" as if they are very special and very specific things. Science is simply the attempt to discover things (or truths) about the world and the universe around us. Nothing more and nothing less. There are good ways to do science, whereby you can be confident that your results are accurate, your conclusions are logically derived from your results and your claims are tested and verified further. You should then be able to make predictions based on your claims or theories. Religion, on the other hand, is basically science done wrong. Rather than attempt to discover truths, religion is happy to answer anything which is currently unknown or un-testable with the phrase "god did it", which doesn't explain anything. Further more, religion and the religious have a strong tendency to disregard evidence which does not support or in many cases disproves the religious view, whereas the correct scientific approach would be to either modify the theory or devise a new theory, and recommence testing.

Many claims of religion can be tested and have been proven false. This is why we see religion become less and less relevant, as a source of information both scientifically and morally. As scientific knowledge and technology improves, we are slowly discovering the actual causes of all the "god did it" bits and more often than not they are somewhat incompatible with the majority of explanations found in religious texts. Obviously one has to make a rather general statement there, as the Islamic explanation of our origins will differ from the Buddhist or Catholic explanation. We no longer have to rely on the Garden of Eden or the Noah stories, for example, because we now know that we are an evolved species belonging to a wonderfully giant web of family trees all linked to a common ancestor some many millions of years ago. This not only makes the claims of the aforementioned stories redundant but actually falsifies them and the same can be said for things like the Islamic explanation of foetal development.

Likewise, as we learn more and understand more about human consciousness, brain function and throw in an understanding of evolution, we can disregard the need to use god and the devil to explain people committing atrocities or what morality is. We now know the reasons for altruistic behaviour. We understand that there are complex emotions and instincts within our brain, that have been calved out by evolutionary principles and that these instincts compete with each other to define our behaviour. We understand how our species would not have survived if had we not had a Darwinian impulse towards altruism. We know that there is a specific area of the brain that deals with empathy and if it doesn't develop correctly, a person will not be able act in an empathetic way and can lead them to become what is known as psychotic and that it isn't just a chap with red horns and pointy stick. The gaps left to fill with the "god did it" explanation are becoming fewer and fewer, and father and father apart every day.

One of the few gaps we still have is everyone's favourite question "how did we get here?" If we assume this means not just us as a species or all living things but the universe as a whole, then to say that "science hasn't explained how we got here" is fine to an extent. But religion hasn't either. Science says "something" did it. Religion says "god did it”, usually with a feeble, drastically short sighted explanation which can usually be refuted straight away. Indeed, the how element of the question is almost always flawed and has already been disproved. But even if we let the 6,000 year old earth bits slide, along with the fact that god tends to mention us as the centre of the universe and never mentions any other planets, nor even begins to address even the most basic elements of astronomy, such as the moon and sun and the prospect of other solar systems, and we disregard everything that each religion has gotten completely wrong, then the religious still have a lot of work ahead of them. Even if we decide to accept that "god did it", the question is still there - how did god do it? What did he do? No religion says "well god started with energy at zero mass and then due to xyz, mass was produced and this caused...". This is a point that I find is overlooked in these debates. "God created the heavens and the earth" is certainly not an explanation, by any stretch of the imagination. It tells us nothing.

To say that "science can't explain how we got here" is a completely nonsensical statement. Science CAN explain how we got here, but science HASN'T explained how we got here. Or more importantly, science hasn't yet obtained enough information to explain how we got here. When and if we ever know how we got here, that can only have been due to science. Even if we were to discover a book that happened to conclusively show how the universe began and what existed prior to it, then that would be science. We would read the book, test its claims and upon discovering the claims were true, confirm an answer. That's called scientific investigation.