Cris, I think the problem is that this thread is like watching a car crash - it's morbidly fascinating...

Like I told a Reverend friend of mine, I think the best way to relate science and religion is to use Venn diagrams:

O O

There's simply no point in debate as an attempt to persuade or find agreement since there is no common foundation upon which to build consensus.

Most religion sits on dogma(*) with which, *given its tenets*, you can prove anything in an otherwise self consistent manner.

However that tenet is wholly inconsistent with a purely scientific view that, by definition, challenges (and hence rejects) the dogma and this prevents any meaningful comparison.

You can apply the same logical transformations within the religious framework but the results as a whole are meaningless outside it even though vast swathes will be identical. So a "religious view" of semiconductor theory probably doesn't have a problem with dogma until you follow it down to the "so how old is a proton then" - by which time you've left semiconductor theory far enough behind that you can ignore the discontinuity and still make decent systems to broadcast your evangelistic TV on.

Science accepts this framework is fuzzy and open to challenge.

However religion cannot - dogma cannot be wrong. Evolution is the elephant in the room. Religion is *designed* to ignore inconvenient little things (not many Christians don't believe in protons or claim that nuclear energy is miraculous... ) but some things are just so clearly fudged that once you say "well actually god was only relevant several billion years ago to light the blue touch paper and *everything* else is explained by science"... things kinda start to crumble.

The predictable human mob response to a social threat: deny it by whatever means necessary and, essentially, get violent. (Not that the US is particularly prone to this kind of response at this point in their cultural evolution. Hey, we Brits had the crusades a while back!)

Anyhow, that little dig aside .... why are religion and science in such conflict again?

My opinion? In ages past religion provided a much more comprehensive and consistent view of the world. Occams razor favoured the polished and refined stories presented by the array of religions in the world.

This conflict did arise a while back until Galileo taught the church a lesson that Microsoft claim as their own : embrace and extend.

However, over the last few decades humanity has, through science, expanded it's collective comprehension of the mechanics of the universe to an astounding degree. The balance has shifted and whilst religion has learnt to manipulate our emotional responses and focus on the ethereal it simply cannot explain anything in the tangible world better than science.

I think the writing is on the wall and the religious meme doesn't like that one little bit.

(*) Amusingly, in an ironic way, the dogma appears to have been (intelligently?) designed to evolve through the gift of imperfect interpretation by mortals, without which religion would be stuck with a somewhat malaprop set of rules.