Scared, are you then saying everything in the bible must be taken literally for us to believe in religion? The Bible is full of metaphors. What is a day to an omnipotent being before the sun and earth exist? 7 days could mean 7 billion years. And you can pick and choose science, there are all sorts of unproved theories (such as string theory or big bang theory) that have evidence but aren't 100% proven. And theories are constantly being disproven, reproven, altered, etcetera. And several miracles could be done such as "purging demons from the body" meaning healing disease, just using terms they might have used then.
Back in the day when Christianity first came to be, there were no metaphors. Everyone believed that the Bible was 100% true and that everything said in there really happened. But as science became more and more popular, the supernatural stories in the Bible started to sound more and more silly. This was a big potential problem for Christianity because it's difficult to convert people when your main character is basically a wizard. But Christianity had an answer. What had been preached as the truth for centuries, suddenly became a metaphor or just a story. It's pretty clever actually, because this way it's pretty much impossible to disprove anything that happens in the Bible, because the person can always say that it isn't meant to be taken literally. It's the equivalent of having a geography book with all the country capitals screwed up, and when someone tries to correct it, you just say it's a metaphor for all people being equal.
I find it weird that as time goes by, religions just abandon many beliefs that have been the basis of those religions for so long, just so that the religion in question would better fit in the current world view. I think it's pretty insane to interpret the Bible (or any religious material) literally, but I do kind of respect these people, because even though they are wrong, they at least stand behind their beliefs. Then again by doing so, they are refusing to see all the contradicting evidence, which is really bad.
If a person believes that God created man, and we did not evolve from other species, they abandon the scientific method by ignoring all the evidence and replacing it with their own reality.
This is far from the truth. There are many respected scientists (see the Discovery Institute (http://www.discovery.org/about.php)) who do not believe that humans evolved from other species, or at least admit that the theory still has holes in it which have yet to be explained.
The way I see it, a religious scientist does not fully believe in science. As a scientist, that person knows that by adopting a religion, they partly abandon the scientific method. But the key here is that they
choose to do so, even though they know it is very unlikely or impossible in terms of science.
Yes, there are still things in the theory of evolution that we cannot explain, but that has very little relevance when we have mountains of evidence for evolution. If we have 1000 pieces of evidence that tell us evolution is happening, and 1 piece of evidence we cannot explain, that does
not mean that those 1000 pieces of evidence somehow become obsolete. All it means is that we cannot explain that one piece of evidence
yet. But science will get there eventually because every day the evidence keeps piling up.
So while they can conflict they do not necessarily conflict. Therefore one can believe in both.
It's all semantics. How do you define "believe in science"?
I define it by accepting what scientific evidence tells us. For example scientific evidence strongly suggests that evolution happened, therefore I believe it happened and is happening. I do not randomly decide that I believe in one part of science, and not believe another part, even if that another part sounds strange to me. If a religious person does not believe in evolution, then that person does not believe 100% in science. It's as simple as that.
I think that science and religion cannot really coexist because they are basically two different theories. It's like me saying it's Monday and my friend saying it's Tuesday. Those two arguments cannot coexist because one of them is wrong and we cannot just agree that it's both Monday and Tuesday at the same time. There can be a million theories but there is only one truth. If science says that evolution happened and religion said it didn't happen, those contradicting claims cannot coexist no matter how much someone says they can.
