I realize this thread is a bit old, but I was finishing
this book at work Saturday (rather dull in the beginning, but gets far more interesting later on. It’s one of those books like
Emperor’s New Mind that no one agrees with completely, but everyone think you should read anyway), and one paragraph near the end caught my eye:
Julian Jaynes wrote:
We sometimes think, and even like to think, that the two greatest exertions that have influenced mankind, religion and science, have always been historical enemies, intriguing us in opposite directions. But this effort at special identity is loudly false. It is not religion but the church and science that were hostile to each other. And it was rivalry, not contravention. Both were religious. They were two giants fuming at each other over the same ground. Both proclaimed to be the only way to divine revelation.
In other words, they are really after the same thing- making sense of the universe- although they go about it in different ways. So whether or not you consider science and religion different aspects of the same thing depends on whether you place more emphasis on the goal, or the method. Like Icy said before, it's a matter of semantics :)
Personally, I’ve always considered religion, along with many artistic endeavors, to be subsets of science, in the broad sense. Mostly because I think the term "science" admits of a more flexible interpretation than "religion". I group in art because much of it is an attempt to find new ways to communicate ideas, feelings, etc., or to express oneself, and hence to understand oneself better, which comes under the banner of "understanding the universe". Of course, then there is the usual definition of Science, which is limited to analyzing and predicting repeatable phenomena. (Although at the more speculative theoretical levels, it practically becomes an art itself. Really, what else can one call most higher mathematics but an unusually structured art form? Just because its systems occasionally turn out to be unexpectedly useful in manipulating the physical world, that doesn't mean that possibility is what motivates most of its theorists).
Yevaud333 wrote:
And if our Facts are subject to change upon occasion, it is merely a reflection upon our poor inadequacies as finite beings, and in no way impugns the grandeur or glory of that Universe Which Gave Us Life.
:D