What Challenges Does Science Pose for Religion, and How Do Religious People Respond?

While empirical observations of the world has been ubiquitous since Aristotle’s ‘Physica’, which is not the most accurate book but certainly opened the door for empirical sciences, it was not until the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th century when scientists started to propose serious questions, and eventually threats, to religious communities. I have called them ‘threats’ rather than ‘challenges’ because an increasing number of scientists are getting fed up with how falsely and unjustly the religions are going about their thesis on scientific matters. Admittedly, several researches have been published on the statistical relationship between religiosity and scientific knowledge, which all came out to be that most modern scientists of the last couple of centuries are nihilistic about religions. For example, out of several hundreds of scientific Nobelists, only six turned out to be religious. The statistical results do not formidably suggest that science is completely against religion. However, undeniably there are succinct and sufficient reasons to denote that science does pose some serious threats to the future and stability of today’s religions.

At the heart of this argument stands a man called Charles Darwin. Darwin was an English naturalist who first came up with the theory ‘natural selection’. Undoubtedly, Darwin’s theory is considered to be the most influential in the modern world, quite plainly because it seems to destroy so-called the ‘design argument’ put forward by religions. According to Darwin, the genetic structure of any life form produces changes (mutations) and any of these changes that are better suited to living in the environment will survive and reproduce. Hence, over millions of years, new life forms were produced, finally leading to the evolution of humans about 2.5 million years ago. This argument is very close to the absolutism that God could not have created humans, however, there is a possible fight back from a concept of...