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It seems to be a popular trend lately to compare religion with science side by side and say that there's no reconciliation between the two, that one absolutely contradicts the other and therefore both cannot be truth, it must either be one or the other. It's a trend where I can understand how the participants arrive at that particular conclusion but at the same time don't entirely agree with.

The problem, I believe, lies in the point of view of reality being entirely objective, that any experience that can be described in words or mathematics must be 'absolute' and that there is in man's perception no inherent limitations of his experience of reality.

In regards to religious practitioners, from what I notice at least the point of view tends to blossom by the idea of placing scriptural authority as the number one means of finding literal truth, any truth indicated by a scriptural authority must be literal and absolute. God/reality is separate from you the practitioner and the only path to salvation is the path laid literally out before you by an authority that is the voice of God/reality, there can be no deviation.

On the other side of the fence are those that seem not to have gotten too far past Newtonian physics. All of reality can be expressed as mathematical absolutes and any truth must be empirically gathered. Reality follows strict laws and it's man's job through scientific method and hard research to uncover what all of those absolutes must be.

I think either of those points of views are necessarily limited. To start with, most of the ideas of absolute scriptural authority are geared towards the Abrahamic faiths, ignoring a plethora of others that exist out there. It also ignores the fact that man is necessarily limited in his perception, therefore cannot state absolutely the state of God/reality or nature of it. The scientific point of view ignores a lot of quantum mechanics in which sets of mathematics that can be experimentally proven in one situation no longer are valid on a different scale. When describing particles, one finds that they display properties of both waves and particles, that often experimental evidence will paint a paradoxical picture.

I could go on and on about either side and be both on the mark and off of it. Both are disciplines meant to lead one towards an understanding of reality, but take radically different paths to get there. As far as I'm concerned the concept of 'absolutes' should be dumped in favor of the picture that quantum mechanics and many of the eastern religions point out, that reality is dynamic, paradoxical. It appears as one thing when you look at it from one direction and as quite another when you look from a different direction. Therefore, to paint a more complete and accurate picture of reality you need both in order to constitute a full and complete worldview.

When it comes to merging the two together the first step as I see it is to completely trash the idea that you, the human, are capable of knowing all. It should be understood that you, the human, are limited in your perception as are other humans. What appears to be truth one should first question and test against experience before being accepted.

Science, at least, is good for coming up with experiments that can be repeated and observed. One needs to do as scientists this century have done and abandon the idea that there is any type of absolute in science. Often what was assumed to be two separate entities turns out to be two sides of the same coin such as space/time, particle/wave.

When it comes to religion, one should take upon themselves the idea that the Buddha put out there mistranslated along the lines of 'Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.' In this approach to religion one finds that the truths revealed by religion are more intuitively grasped. It's like reading a fable, one does not believe in the story as literally having happened but instead grasps the moral of the story and applies it to life. In much the same way one should take philosophical insights from religion.

In such cases, science would constitute our empirical knowledge, that knowledge which follows strict rational rules to arrive at a close to accurate picture of reality as it is capable of painting. It necessarily ignores sentience, conscious, experience and intuitive thought. Religion on the other hand relies on experiential knowledge, one must search for the insights of religion and experience it themselves, it cannot be repeated in a laboratory setting. As an example look at the approach to life, living things. Science can give you the rational, logical definition of life. It can paint the biological and even atomic picture of life. Religion can tell you about the purpose of life, direction, substance to life. With it, you can understand what it feels like to be alive and the experience of life.

And I've about burned myself out here and am experiencing 'stuckness' on where to go next so I'll simply add a few thoughts onto the conclusion instead of dragging it out. First, as I'm highly sure many will point out, that I've missed the mark on a lot of points but with brief generalities sometimes you just have to. I'm sure I'm going to find also that I worded a few things inappropriately and my meaning wouldn't be gathered.

I do, however, recommend reading Robert Pirsig's 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', Fritjof Capra's 'Tao of Physics', and Tenzin Gyatso's (The Dalai Lama) 'The Universe in a Single Atom' to get a better picture of the idea I'm trying to convey. All of them will draw comparisons based on eastern religions but I think it has a lot to do with Westerners abandoning the modes of thought embraced by Eastern cultures for centuries. We had many of the same points of view in the past, but with Aristotle and the Cartesian split that has differentiated our points of view for so long I think our religions may have changed and evolved to adapt to the Western way of thinking.

*(Off topic as well, but I'm finding that the most hilarious and accurate answer as far as I'm concerned to the question 'Do you believe in God?' is 'Mu.' I think a lot of discrepancies viewed as existing between science and religion would be resolved if we asked different questions instead of the ones we are asking.)

Personally I don't really see that believing in one of them necessarily has to exclude the other. As far as I am concerned, they could just be different ways of expressing the same thing.

Often science is based on "theories", which in many cases can only be "proved" on paper (or through computer models), so really it's a kind of "faith".

I also don't believe that Science and Religion are mutually exclusive. It takes just as much faith to believe in evolution (which has not been proved off of paper) as it does to believe in any religion or lack of religion. Personally, I tend to believe that we were created from the stars and when we die, we will return to them... sounds just as good as the Christian version.

The idea that science and God were separated is a relatively modern idea that really didn't have much presence until quantum physics really began to take foot. In classical physics it was assumed that scientists of the time were discovering God's divine laws that he imposed upon nature and man was discovering those laws. It wasn't until the basis of classic science was torn out from under them starting with relativity theory I think that many people really started questioning whether or not science was actually in fact disproving God.

Personal opinion but I think it also depends on your interpretation of what a God is supposed to be whether or not you're going to find 'proof' that there is a deity. I agree with many atheists at this point in the sense that science has adequately shown that there is no deity that exists independently of the rest of existence, that has it's own reality and is able to impose on ours.

Now if you shift the idea of God so it's more like 'Brahman' or 'Tao', that is ultimately all of reality with our perceptions of it manifestations of the divine, you may or may not get a response back from science. I'm not sure if they've ever looked in that direction, but ultimately that would still fall under religion because finding that all manifestations of existence are ultimately part of the same divine figure is the type of intuitive insight that would fall under the religious category.

If a force comes into contact with our reality, changes it in some way, there's going to be evidence of that change and the original force behind it. Just about every natural phenomena (barring of course studies of psychology and sentience, there's still a lot of research to be done when it comes to researching the human brain with it's many nuances and complexities.) has been thoroughly explained. In absolutely no part of what we've discovered has there been evidence that an independent agent caused any of these phenomena, nor do any phenomena rely on an outside agent.

Instead everything is found to be based off of an extremely complex system of high energy interactions between particles which also display the paradoxical aspects of waves. Concepts we thought were concrete and their own entities turn out to be two sides of the same exact thing. Reality itself has a dynamic interconnectedness. Instead of an outside spectator organizing the universe as it would we find instead that the universe is a series of extremely high energy interactions, so high in fact that we're fooled into believing that we human beings are composed of solid mass when the actual volume of solid particles we're composed up would take up less space than on a pinhead.

If God were independent and separate from our reality and yet still able to make changes to our reality it would be like seeing footsteps appear in the sand with no body to cause them, there would be evidence that yes, indeed, some force has acted upon this structure but there's nothing within our limited knowledge that could possibly explain that force.

Quantum physics and modern astronomy to my way of thinking has done enough to show that there are no independent entities, that any manifestation of the universe changes and is changed by interactions with all other aspects of the universe, there is no agent that exists outside the system and is capable of changing without being changed itself, and even then there's been no evidence whatsoever that points at any specific deity.

It comes back once again to the idea of absolutes, of linear structures and hierarchies that have formed the basis of western thought, our language even reflecting that attitude in our grammatical structuring of sentences. We've found that there is no hierarchical structure to the universe with a deity presiding over all.

That idea should be abandoned and the question asked of ourselves once again what is God? Then, when we find a better insight into the nature of that which is divine, may we be able to formulate the proper hypothesis that can discover the nature of deity. The one that exists currently as an independent source that changes our reality doesn't have any evidence to support it. I'm reminded of the conversation between Napoleon and the mathematician Laplace.

"Monsieur Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned it's creator."

"I had no need for that hypothesis."

All I'm suggesting is changing the idea of what God is, not necessarily stating that there is no God. Perhaps then science will have more evidence to support that hypothesis if we change the particulars of it. The direction I'm instead choosing to point is at everything, the entire universe in and of itself to find out whether or not we are all manifestations of God instead of God presiding over us. It's an insight gained by many religions by the development of intuitive nodes of thought through meditation. For us it would be like returning to the Milesian idea of the 'physis' back in Greek society or even 'logos'. The idea that we even began to think of deity as separate from us was probably a consequence of the Cartesian divide between mind and matter.

Reality can be entirely objective, and in fact, must be. The problem is understanding it all. We would need to be God to do so, as we would need to fully realize every single base unit of matter, it's entire scope of possibility and energy, in every base unit of time. This goes beyond seeing, it means knowing them truly in their most pure sense.

The trouble science and religion have with each other is that they confuse what it is that they know. The questions they ask are different, so they can't really be compared. If asked about a painting, science could tell you the physical makeup- What medium it was done in, the paints used, the tools used- HOW it was created. A more spiritual or emotional approach could talk about the aesthetic and meaning of the painting- What it is about, or WHY it was created. Both can be correct, and must both be considered in order to understand the painting. The world is the same way. When one tries to claim that it's answers are the only answers is when we see problems, and for good reason, because we are only getting half of the story.

When I used to try to cope with being trans before my transition, coping with clinging to my female identity when my body, and life we're yelling at me to accept being a man, was an act of faith. I had to believe I was a woman, or at least something close. I needed it so bad it hurt. I could not see womanhood or touch it, and nobody wanted to agree with me on it, but it was there for me when I closed my eyes and felt for it. Its as easy as looking down at myself now, but I guess it made decent training for what I'm doing now.

I still fail to see how it points out the existence of a literal God (and I'll abandon the idea that we're talking about deities in general and just stick with the Abrahamic God). I still assert that there's just not enough evidence to try and rationalize the inference that a literal God as described by the Torah, Bible, etc. must exist because of the presence of more matter than anti-matter and the complex systems of life. I'm not trying to play an ad hominem here, I'm just pointing that the way of thinking associated with the idea is incorrect. You do not rationalize God. If you could, we would have had concrete evidence to support the existence of God by now because God would fall under the empirical realm.

I think you misunderstood me as well. With the idea of a pantheistic God I did state science may or may not find evidence to support it, but the idea that was supposed to be understood overall was that God belongs to the realm of intuitive insight. Ultimately, if one wishes to find God one must look within. It takes a large testament of faith to state that anything in the Bible is true, after all you were not witness to any events therein nor do you have the luxury of being able to meet the human writers to verify whether or not they truly had a connection with God, you must accept the authority of such scripts on a basis of faith. The reason to place such faith comes from the intuitive insight religion provides.