It occurs to me there are people who focus on reason, and those who focus on faith. Reasoners look to scientific endeavors to explain the universe, believers look to religion. And while a person may subscribe to both in varying degrees, if pressed they will eventually forsake one for the other; the forsaken philosophy presenting more as an intellectual exercise than something that meaningfully shapes their reality. I find this at once profound and disheartening. The two approaches are diametrically opposed, and neither can be embraced fully while the other is entertained. The result is constant tension between the believers and the reasoners, neither of which can understand the attraction of the opposing philosophy, so only the best of either side can refrain from assuming their counterparts “just don’t get it.”
Carl Sagan was firmly entrenched on the side of reason. Shockingly so—in his Cosmos series he is seen walking through a ruined temple (Aphrodite I believe it was). As he strolls through the ruins, lilting out his gentle but firmly condescending interpretation of the roles gods have played in the human quest to make sense of things, some of the wall crumbles beneath his feet as he nonchalantly contributes to the erosion of the ruined monument. My inner archaeologist gasped at the act. Not because he was desecrating the house of a deity, but because he was adding damage to an already badly damaged but ancient structure. His carelessness makes sense, however. The building, the goddess, and the people who built it all belong to The Other camp: the one that prefers to look to divinity for answers, and not to intellectual efforts. I can’t provide a comparable antithesis to Sagan because I myself don’t care enough for religion to pick one. Pope Francis seems pretty cool in much the same way—kind, and willing to convince his way is correct. To me, the institutions are too tainted to be of value to me spiritually so I have to learn to embrace a truth that space is big, vastly bigger than our own galaxy which is by itself incomprehensibly huge and but an atom with respect to the rest of the suspected universe. Like God, The Universe is unknowable to us—we can maybe learn the mechanics of how it works, but we can never take it all in. Odd, then, and somewhat arbitrary, that I should believe so strongly in one unknowable and reject another. It seems the choice comes down to whether your mind or your heart is more open to being comforted. Is there anything that can do both?
The OP is making a false dichotomy. Reason and Faith are not mutually exclusive, they are orthogonal. It’s like stating Plumbing is incompatible with Religion since a plumber doesn’t pray over a clog, etc.
The problem is that too many extremists on both sides claim they are polar opposites. These people need to shut up.
Help me out there, I can be fairly dense sometimes. As I see it:
Science = how stuff works is evaluated through testing and observation. Faith, to the extent it enters the equation at all, might be useful for forming a hypothesis, but ultimately it gets held up to scrutiny.
Religion = faith/belief, not necessarily subjected to inquiry of any sort, knowledge arising from gut feelings & emotion. Details can be scrutinized with objectivity, but conflicts are blamed on the observer’s imperfection and not the premise.
It only makes sense to someone who believes that religion is as absolute as scientific method. Religion at the time of that temple was an attempt to explain how things work. In my opinion it was in the same camp as Sagan though it was a much more primitive camp. Both religion and science were attempts to reason out the mysteries of existence. But it wasn’t necessarily opposed to scientific discovery.
Religion fails (and does so quite often) only when it refuses to yield to scientific discovery. But it doesn’t have to. One can take the position that their deity created existence and explained it to primitives in ways they might understand. Those primitives recorded their beliefs for future generations. But those future generations should possess the intelligence to discover scientifically what their ancestors failed to explain.
‘The universe is a single entity and our individual egos are illusory. We are, in fact, organs that the universe has grown (through the process of evolution) in order to know itself. The more science one learns, therefore, the better - the proper study of concience is its own existence and its place within the universe. Awe and worship is the inevitable response to this divine universal unity, which typically can be ‘known’ intellectually but only truly felt through intuitive or mystical means.’
There’s a religious statement (akin to some types of pantheism); it is not really subject to disproof; it is totally orthogonal to science - in that there is no conflict between believing in it, and science. Indeed, they are complementary.
I’ve always seen them as answers to different questions. Of course, fundamentalists on both sides will confuse the issue by insisting that their favoured answer settles both.
Any true adherent to any of these schools of thought should claim ignorance of the naked truth about things. In religion such knowledge exist in God only, in science it exists, yet we can only know to a certain extent - absolute certainty about most things does not exist; i.e. scientific theories are not scientific laws.