I get the sense you're starting to catch on to the argument, but there may be a language barrier here, and you're drifting away from the original question of whether scientific and religious thought are compatible.
Funny, I have the exact opposite feeling, that you are drifting to nonsensical blatter.
Science has absolutely nothing to say about the existence of an omnipotent, supreme being. Any given scientist or empirical thinker is therefore free to believe whatever they please about said omnipotent, supreme being, so long as the beliefs they hold do not interfere with the scientific method or their investigation of what they view as the wonder of creation.
Anyone is free to have his own hypothesis of the unseen, without being called upon inconsistency to what
we see. You're just sprouting tautologies here. Religion is not about the unseen, it is about the whole cosmos. You keep pounding in a red herring.
Religion is a living thing. It is not challenged by the expansion of scientific knowledge because a true believer, one who takes religion seriously, seeks to know the mind of God, and the mind of God created the universe.
You don't get to define a "true believer". Go see the definition of the "true scotsman fallacy". Come back when you are able to write non-fallatious sentences.
Ironically, this is also a confirmation of what I said previously about people believing the fictions they themselves created as "true".
If that would be "your" religion, and you'd get by just perfectly fine, I'm not against it.
If the scientific method is the best way to understand the universe, then it is the best way to know the mind of God, and any valid product of the scientific method is compatible with religion.
That pressuposes that the religion is about searching for god, when it is not. Religion is the
revelation of god to man about the truth of the cosmos, and this is universally true, even in Buddhism. So if you find about the cosmos scientifically, you are not doing religion any service. You may even, gasp, find inconsistencies with religion. And then you proudly proclaim that they *aren't* inconsistencies, if only we see religious thinking as *metaphorical*.
But even metaphorically, they can be false. What then?
Science is the search of the truth. Religion is the faith upon its revelation.
And you can't get that simple point.
There's nothing antiscientific there.
There aren't any tanks in bagdad.
f we grant that religious stories are "metaphors", then nothing in the religious tradition survives.
There's no reason to believe this. Holy texts are not the direct word of God. They were given to people a very long time ago and passed down by human hands. The core of religious belief does not lie in a text; it lies in a relationship with God. Very few faiths in the world have core beliefs which could be threatened by any sort of scientific discovery.
Evolution flies in the face of almost every religion in the world. The Vatican is inherently creationist, and proudly so.
And even if that wasn't true, the lack of inconsistencies between religious truths and scientific findings would only prove that they were lucky, not that they are compatible processes. Which they aren't.
Consider, for instance, the Islamic view of science.
From an Islamic standpoint, science, the study of nature, is considered to be linked to the concept of Tawhid (the Oneness of God), as are all other branches of knowledge.[28] In Islam, nature is not seen as a separate entity, but rather as an integral part of Islam’s holistic outlook on God, humanity, and the world. Unlike the other Abrahamic monotheistic religions, Judaism and Christianity, the Islamic view of science and nature is continuous with that of religion and God. This link implies a sacred aspect to the pursuit of scientific knowledge by Muslims, as nature itself is viewed in the Qur'an as a compilation of signs pointing to the Divine.[29] It was with this understanding that science was studied and understood in Islamic civilizations, specifically during the eighth to sixteenth centuries, prior to the colonization of the Muslim world.[30]
According to most historians, the modern scientific method was first developed by Islamic scientists, pioneered by Ibn Al-Haytham, known to the west as "Alhazen".[31] Robert Briffault, in The Making of Humanity, asserts that the very existence of science, as it is understood in the modern sense, is rooted in the scientific thought and knowledge that emerged in Islamic civilizations during this time.[32]
Do you feel that this discussion would be productive for you? What chance do you think there is of your opinion changing, or of you taking away new information?
If you happened to provide information that was so novel to me that I had my mind blown away, I'd consider it. But alas, you provide trivialities. I've read many books about the history of science and religion, you aren't stating anything new here. The fact that some particular theologians in some particular times regarded the empirical search of the world as something valuable spiritually has little to do with its inherent incompatibility with science.
I'll give you an analogy. Imagine that in the middle ages, an astrologist would consider the careful observation of the stars as something that should be the inspiration of any astrologist and all astrology would only gain with it. But then subsequent people find that the astrological assumption that the stars influence human events is silly. To state that astronomy was only possible because astrology made it so, isn't a refutation to the basic claim that these two human activities are totally incompatible with each other.
