[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous

dude, do you even know me?

no, but i read what you write.

science is not about proving or disproving the supernatural.

science is and has been from its origins a natural philosophy-- it deals with nature.

the development of the scientific method reduced the speculative side of this philosophia naturalis and emphasized experimentation. so, more than ever, questions of religion may be parallel to science, but not directly related to it.

for example, the big bang theory has been used by some religious people to say "aha! that's the moment when god created the universe!", but the theory neither proves nor disproves this. the theory is concerned with physics, that is all, and is proven or disproven within physics.

now, the reason why there is an opposition of science vs. religion in the minds of the masses, is because they misunderstand both science and religion.

it is true that science has demonstrated the natural causes of what once were deemed "miracles", and removed the mystic veil from many natural phenomena, but again, science deals with the physical realm, not the spirit realm where the deities supposedly exist. in other words, science is not concerned with spiritual phenomena, only with physical ones.

so science has provided us with an alternative explanation to the world other than "kukumatz made the people from corn", but it does not concern itself with kukumatz.

that's why freeman says that what he knows of the universe is consistent with his theology, but it neither proves nor disproves it. even if the mind of the universe were to be a natural phenomenon, we can only speculate, but we cannot conduct experiments nor make measurements nor make mathematical extrapolations of it.

when you artificially oppose science vs. religion, then you are thinking like an ayatollah or a medieval pope who says that this or that scientific theory must not be true because it is inconsistent with the scriptures.

and when you value mathematicians not for their mathematical work but for their religious tendencies, you're missing the point of mathematics by a million metaphorical light-years.