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Yes - it is an adversarial relationship - it simply has to be, they're in the same business... they're both in the business of PATTERN RECOGNITION.
Modern Science - the Scientific Method - is about 300 years old; it is the brainchild of the pre-Industrial Revolution - and it is gaining momentum as we move into the Space Age... it is the reason we HAVE the space age and the reason you're reading this from me (a stranger communicating to you at light speed from the other side of the globe).
Religion is ten-times older, and perhaps it is with the benefit of seeing it juxtaposed alongside its sleek and virile alternative that it now looks so senile in its attempts at pattern recognition; it is eye surgery with a pitchfork and shovel - it is Bronze and Iron Age man's attempts at pattern recognition, but worryingly conveyed to us from a different set of languages in an ongoing game of broken-telephone via a cast of grizzled ancestral tribesmen. As historic literature, it is part of our culture and deserves that respect at least; the reality that it informs too many of our citizen's daily decisions - but as a compass to navigate by in this potentially lethal climate of global tensions, exploitations and wars; we'd do as well looking at tea leaves.
On that note - Skinner Box experiments... When you put a pigeon (or any animal) in a skinner box that provides some lights or levers... then randomize rewards to the critter; pretty quickly you get 'superstitions' arising in the inmate. Bopping and dancing and twirling in some imagined expectation that these actions will lead to a bounty of feeds.
Well.... rain dances are the human equivalent - and boy don't we have a good laugh at the exponents of that reed-skired time-waster; but then we pray and sing choruses every Sunday in the hope of pretty much the same sort of unrelated reward. We imagine that stars light years away - in some random arrangement from our perspective across the cosmos - have some significance in our character when plotted against the day of our birth.
All these superstitions are the result of normal mammalian pattern recognition gone wrong; and that's okay - we're fixing that... you're reading this, and the seed it is planting is a good start.
And this is all that is wrong with religion - it has skinner-box rituals set up that are rooted in the antiquity of people who could not know better; their observational skills and the body of work that it has taken to tease fact and reality out of the clutter of a complex cosmos, simply did not and could not exist.
Science is systematic pattern recognition - recognition through observation and data - predictions made and measurement of performance against the predictions put out for peer and public review. Like an expert unlocking a complex lock, science is not the hopeful spinning of the dial in random fashion and hoping for a random unlatching - no... it is the locking in of the data points every time a number in that combination is found to seat in place. Slowly we see the mechanism beginning to click - the levers lining up - the bounty of electronics through quantum theory and wifi through mathematics, and Satellite Communications through Relativity beginning to delivery tangible luxuries and comforts the wisest of our distant past could not imagine.
From their perspective, we might as well be gods.
That is all it is... we're just becoming better and better at pattern recognition - and weening ourselves off of the mistaken patterns we once thought were valid - there's nothing to get upset about.
Can we please now be left to progress with less hysteria?
Modern Science - the Scientific Method - is about 300 years old; it is the brainchild of the pre-Industrial Revolution - and it is gaining momentum as we move into the Space Age... it is the reason we HAVE the space age and the reason you're reading this from me (a stranger communicating to you at light speed from the other side of the globe).
Religion is ten-times older, and perhaps it is with the benefit of seeing it juxtaposed alongside its sleek and virile alternative that it now looks so senile in its attempts at pattern recognition; it is eye surgery with a pitchfork and shovel - it is Bronze and Iron Age man's attempts at pattern recognition, but worryingly conveyed to us from a different set of languages in an ongoing game of broken-telephone via a cast of grizzled ancestral tribesmen. As historic literature, it is part of our culture and deserves that respect at least; the reality that it informs too many of our citizen's daily decisions - but as a compass to navigate by in this potentially lethal climate of global tensions, exploitations and wars; we'd do as well looking at tea leaves.
On that note - Skinner Box experiments... When you put a pigeon (or any animal) in a skinner box that provides some lights or levers... then randomize rewards to the critter; pretty quickly you get 'superstitions' arising in the inmate. Bopping and dancing and twirling in some imagined expectation that these actions will lead to a bounty of feeds.
Well.... rain dances are the human equivalent - and boy don't we have a good laugh at the exponents of that reed-skired time-waster; but then we pray and sing choruses every Sunday in the hope of pretty much the same sort of unrelated reward. We imagine that stars light years away - in some random arrangement from our perspective across the cosmos - have some significance in our character when plotted against the day of our birth.
All these superstitions are the result of normal mammalian pattern recognition gone wrong; and that's okay - we're fixing that... you're reading this, and the seed it is planting is a good start.
And this is all that is wrong with religion - it has skinner-box rituals set up that are rooted in the antiquity of people who could not know better; their observational skills and the body of work that it has taken to tease fact and reality out of the clutter of a complex cosmos, simply did not and could not exist.
Science is systematic pattern recognition - recognition through observation and data - predictions made and measurement of performance against the predictions put out for peer and public review. Like an expert unlocking a complex lock, science is not the hopeful spinning of the dial in random fashion and hoping for a random unlatching - no... it is the locking in of the data points every time a number in that combination is found to seat in place. Slowly we see the mechanism beginning to click - the levers lining up - the bounty of electronics through quantum theory and wifi through mathematics, and Satellite Communications through Relativity beginning to delivery tangible luxuries and comforts the wisest of our distant past could not imagine.
From their perspective, we might as well be gods.
That is all it is... we're just becoming better and better at pattern recognition - and weening ourselves off of the mistaken patterns we once thought were valid - there's nothing to get upset about.
Can we please now be left to progress with less hysteria?
