Science versus Religion: The Age Long Conflict.
In the middle of our course we were shown a video on science and religion, which tried to prove that religion and science always got along in the past and always will in the future. I strongly disagree with the video's perspective. Religious worldview makes the assumption that the universe and its inhabitants have been designed and created by a supreme "force" or being, which transcend the material world. Science, on the other hand, assumes that there are no transcendent, immaterial forces and that all forces, which do exist within the universe, behave in an objective or random fashion that can be explained an understood. As a result religion and science conflicts with each other at many levels. Evidence of such conflicts beckons us throughout the history. No matter how well one sugarcoats the controversies, these events prove that science and religion have always been at odds.
First let us go back to the sixth century B.C. up until then, the public believed earth was flat because major religions like Christianity taught so. Passages such as Ps. 104:2-3 in the Bible apparently supports that the earth is flat. It was then that Pythagoras followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and Aristarchus, among others who introduced the idea in observing that the earth is a sphere. Because the Bible had specific text implying that the earth is flat, these great thinkers and their ideas were condemned.
In the early 1600s, when Copernicus and Galileo defied the Catholic geocentric belief of earth being stationary and the center of the universe they were also condemned. The idea of a heliocentric system in which earth and other planets revolve around the sun falsified the sacred text and threatened the Church's authority over the people. As a result these scientists were again put down. Even though the video shown in class sugarcoated this event and proclaimed that Galileo was treated with much luxury and respect, the documents reproduced in Fable and by every other fully informed writer show that the Inquisition harshly replied that Galileo's "deception" would not be tolerated.
