Is there a Conflict between Science and Religion?

People are alienated from God's Truth by the apparent conflict between science and religion than by any other single cause. They argue that science is moving ahead, religion is retreating. Science is the hope of the world, religion is hypnotized by her concern with another world. Science is interested in real problems, religion is concerned about problems - many of which seem to be wholly unreal. Hence they conclude, "Why bother with religion?"

But the Truth is...there's no such thing as science!

1 Timothy 6:20, "O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called:"

Your ability to watch things fall down, and thereby formulate the Simplified Theory of Gravitation ("things fall down"), is no different, in any way, from the thoughts that let a scientist understand why a star burns. Your ability to drop a rock from your hand, and thereby squash something using the Simplified Theory of Gravitation, is no different from the thoughts that let an engineer create a nuclear submarine.

There is a tendency, in twentieth-century culture, to view science and technology as some kind of magic. People talk about nuclear weapons as if they're some sort of dark sorcery. But they aren't. The laws of physics that make nuclear weapons go off are the same laws that make the Sun burn. It's the same laws, the same equations, that keep atoms from flying apart under ordinary circumstances. If you altered the physical laws that permit atomic weapons, not only would the Sun go out, but you yourself would dissolve into a cloud of less-than-dust.

Science is the same kind of thought that lets us survive in everyday life. Not a more powerful form, or a more distilled form - the same form, just as the same laws of physics underlie nuclear weapons and your own integrity on the atomic level. I sure hope you understood that, because now I'm going to say something that I've never heard anyone - not theologians railing at science, not atheists railing at religion - dare to speak aloud.

The books of every religion record miracles of healing, and other great powers, worked by God or the prophets. The belief in that power underlies and upholds the religion. And the modern-day theologians don't have that power. And they look at science, with doctors who can heal the sick, and physicists who can destroy cities, and engineers who can supposedly put people on the Moon, and they see science as a competing religion. Hence the conflict. And yet, there's no such thing as science. Knowing how to make an atom bomb is absolutely no different from knowing how to drop a rock, and it is nothing more to marvel at.

Science does not undermine the existence of God, but rather reinforces it. When you look through a telescope at the spinning planets, you can hear God's voice in the music of the spheres. Science and religion are not enemies, but rather allies; two different languages telling the same story, a story of symmetry and balance; heaven and hell, night and day, hot and cold. Both science and religion rejoice in God's symmetry...the endless contest of light and dark.