[kspacewalk2]

I have a somewhat less charitable take on the whole "context incorporation"/exegesis process. It's simply a process of reconciling an ancient, mostly irrelevant religious text to the modern-day economic, social and political realities. What do you need the Bible to do for you, dear leader/dear society? A la carte options available with a little exegesis.

- Need the Bible to justify slavery? With a little judicious exegesis, here you go! Oh, society realized slavery is an abhorrent crime? Time to dust off your trusty exegesis experts.

- Is homosexuality a horrible sin punishable by death, or is that now an anachronistic view which is making us bleed subscribers... scratch, the faithful? Religion Has A Method to correct this!

- etc., etc.

[thereddaikon]

Science has also been used to justify some pretty terrible things.

And that is their point, humans are the corrupting force here. Taking a framework and then using it to justify whatever they want. The scientific method is not uniquely immune to people cherry picking quotes from studies to justify their agendas. And in many ways it is very much the same thing as someone cherry picking scripture to justify the same.

[kspacewalk2]

Sure, humanity is flawed and all that good stuff. But the central point is that of course there's a huge difference between religion (corruptable by humans) and science (corruptable by humans) - the scientific method is not in itself based on evidence-free magical thinking, and is rooted in verifiable/falsifiable reality. So while the two can be compared at this superficial oh-but-what-about-flawed-humanity level, at their root/essence they are fundamentally, categorically different.

[nvahalik]

> the scientific method is not in itself based on evidence-free magical thinking

However, the scientific method is, in many ways, based on faith. In science, you can only measure what you can observe. We cannot "observe" what occurred in the past. We can guess but it is a lie that we know without a doubt what happened before recorded history began: Nobody actually observed it.

Each religion makes its own claim about its epistemological systems. It different for each, but each system ought to be internal consistent for it to make sense. Some systems are far more consistent than others. Based on the internal consistency, one can make an objective assessment as to the validity of said belief system. You can test it based on what it produces and how it judges itself.

At the end of the day, science and religion do not stand on equal footing—but religion has to make sense first because our scientific method was built upon Bacon's own religious beliefs:

"Bacon's entire understanding of what we call "science," and what he called "natural philosophy," was fashioned around the basic tenets of his belief system."

This belief system was Christianity—the idea that a creator created a system that can be known and studied and has order rather than chaos.