SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Are Science and Religion in Conflict?

Are Science and Religion in Conflict?

Introduction

Religion and science are also social phenomena. Its sociological aspect is therefore very important to understand the relationships between them. This aspect is less known and rarely taken into account. Science and religion are two complex social systems that bring together individual and collective experiences and have their rules and behavior patterns that result in the formation of communities with a type of structure and language of their own. Both communities interact with society in general may be key for acceptance, rejection, prestige and influence with the resulting interactions between them. The statement of positions of social influence has resulted, at times, confrontations between them. The regulations impact of religion on behavior, which leads to ethical proposals, interacts with the practice of science, which cannot be oblivious to the ethical problems it may encounter. The growing concern of society for the ethical issues related to science today opens new fields of relationship is with religious thought.

Discussion

The first question we can ask is whether science and religion are compatible with each other or not. That is, if again and can live or necessarily the one excludes the other and between them there can only be an inevitable conflict. Not uncommon, even today, the opinion, sometimes widely, that science and religion are mutually incompatible, and the relationship between them has always been a source of inevitable conflict (Cranston & Williams, 1984). They are seen as two competing visions of the world which cannot but always hitting each other. Not only that, but each denies the validity of the other. Today, moreover, maintained that only the view of science may be true, so that the religious vision has to be gradually disappearing. From this point of view, the advance of science always implies a decline of religion. In support of this position is often a biased interpretation of history and always bring the same cases of Galileo and Darwin.

Although this position is back to the origins of modern science, thus indicating that science itself cannot but be in conflict with religion, actually begins in the nineteenth century, although you can find some roots in the eighteenth. Two books published by John W. Draper and Andrew D. White in the late nineteenth century contributed in a special way to extend this position. Draper, above all, devoted their furious attacks against the ...