preview

Science And Religion Distinct Or Overlapping Domains?

Decent Essays

To what extent are science and religion distinct or overlapping domains? To be clear, find them to be both distinct and overlapping. They are distinct in that they have different methods of making—and verifying—their respective claims of truth. But they overlap (which is to say, are similar) in some of their social elements, e.g. in their day to day rituals, social structures, clashes of paradigms, political conflicts, battles with dogmas and conceptions of truth (e.g. “what defines the atom?” or “what is a God? What is our life’s ultimate purpose?”). But they also overlap in the respect that both religious and scientific paradigms attempt to explain (again by different means) the phenomena of our being in the world around us. Allow me to explain, point by point. Let’s again go back to the distinctions between science and religion.
=======================
The method by which science attempts to understand the world is different from the method by which religion follows (speaking of both very broadly, but I think aptly). The scientist must be able to “accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations (Hawking, 9)." In other words, the scientist must be able to find, of all the information available to them, the appropriate elements of information by which observe, or help make sense of, a certain phenomena. So a biochemist,

Get Access