Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

The second analogy leaves out the lactose and casein-intolerant. There will still be some scientists who rise above the fray.

*notes D'Glenn's LJ's name*

Well, animism is certainly alive and well. ;)

In this view, religion is *lazy* science. "I think I've found a pattern...should I test my theory? Nah. I'm pretty sure it works this way."

Hrm. May have to expand elsewhere.

It's important to understand that science and religion are not asking the same questions. Science asks, "How?" Or "How do I know that x?" (an epistemological study). "How did the universe come into being?" for example. At its base is a particular kind of philosophical question, and for its answers one must rely exclusively on empirical data. Scientists, like everyone else, sometimes are sloppy, or rely on data that is without knowing it (A great explanation of this is found in Carol Tavris' _The Mismeasure of Woman_ in which she tears to shreds the underlying assumptions of the inexhaustible numbers of studies that keep trying to prove that men and women are *really different*) When science is bad, it's not easily differentiable from religion. When it's good, it is.

Religion (some, anyway) asks the question "why" - as a teleological question, generally, but not exclusively (that is, "Why should I behave in a certain way?" rather than "Why is the sky blue," which is just a poorly stated empirical question)

Where it gets confusing is in the territory of the mind. Science may ask a question such as "what purpose does an ethical code serve," and the answer will be very different from that answer when asked as a religious question.
Thisis the very struggle of theological positivists of the 20s and after, who simply ruled that religious questions were unanswerable by scientific means as an attempt to try to get science and religion from arguing over which territory belonged to whom. Their point was not that science was true and religion wasn't but simply that science can't answer religious questions well. They wanted to take certain questions out of the realm of science.
And well they should, as well as the reverse. Religion shouldn't be trying to answer scientific question either. In science there should be no point at which someone says, "well, that's it then, we can't ask about what happens before that." The truth is though, that's true in religion as well.
SImply positing God isn't ever the final question (at least it's not in my religion, which, I grant, is behavior focused, not belief focused). It's when you try to mush the two together that you get a holy mess with people trying to get other people to stop asking questions.