Why science “or” religion?

The first in a possible series of posts on dichotomy

There’s a lot of debate these days about science and religion, especially as promoted by the New Athiests, but much of this debate is so polarized into one camp or the other as to be pretty much pointless. You’ve got the atheists and their scientific materialism on the one hand and the traditionalist (mostly) Christians on the other, and far too few are making much of an attempt to reconcile the two extremes.

I’m certainly not enough of an expert on either side of the debate to make any concrete recommendations, but from my layman’s point of view, it seems to me that much of the problem lies in how exactly “religion” is being defined. Most taking the “side” of science seem to equate religion with belief in an anthropomorphic god and a literal interpretation of everything written in the Bible. The vast majority of which, of course, can’t be proven in any scientific sense. Fair enough.

And certainly many religious people do interpret the Bible literally and believe in an anthropomorphic (and paradoxically omnipotent) God. Again, fair enough. That’s how they’ve been raised and taught by their parents and by their church leaders, and they have every right to believe as they choose. But so long as the science vs. religion debate is between scientific materialism on…