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"Religion is the belief in an absence of evidence." Quoi? May be you have some particular religion in mind, but many beliefs coexist happily with science. There is a domain where atheists and many religious people agree on. Which is the domain that is not covered by the particular religion and that is covered by the scientific method (do an experiment, analyse data, get conclusions, rinse, repeat). Choice of medicine is one such area. True, some religions believe in voodoo or other "alternative medicine" but that is not part of the definition of religion. The critical question is what to do with things we have no physical evidence of, things which we have no data of, are uncertain of. Things that science has not reached a verdict on. Religions typically have loads of these. The existence of god/gods for example. Having such a belief does not contradict the available science at the time, so we can have a scientist who believes in gods carrying on his research cheerfully. Atheists don't believe in gods unless there is physical proof. That also does not contradict doing some scientific research.
The issue comes when you mistake "SCIENCE", the tool we use daily, with "science", the set of propositions, heuristics, conjectures and half-baked theories that will always exist at the frontiers of research. That effectively means you choose to place your trust in the set of current researchers and if they get it wrong, you get it wrong. In short, science is not and has never been the whole of objective reality. This assigns mythical powers to scientists, which some would certainly call a "religion". |
Totally! Perfectly faithful Christians can be Evolutionary Biologists without falling victim to fundamentalist anti-science idiocy.
"The critical question is what to do with things we have no physical evidence of, things which we have no data of, are uncertain of. Things that science has not reached a verdict on. Religions typically have loads of these. The existence of god/gods for example."
That's the realm of social science, not hard science, seeing as there is always going to be zero physical evidence of "God"/gods.
"In short, science is not and has never been the whole of objective reality. This assigns mythical powers to scientists, which some would certainly call a "religion"."
Again, "Science" is reality. Scientists do not have mythical powers. They are human. They are however the best we have to understand objective reality, through our feeble and failing minds. We do quite a good job, and conflating priests with scientists shows how little persons understand what facts and objective evidence versus subjectivity, belief, and perspective. Priests are "infallible". Science is not. And that is a very good thing.