Can Religion and Science Coexist?

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In May 1988, a 13-year-old girl named Ashley King was admitted to Phoenix Children’s Hospital by court order. She had a tumor on her leg—an osteogenic sarcoma—that, writes Jerry Coyne in his book Faith Versus Fact, was “larger than a basketball,” and was causing her leg to decay while her body started to shut down. Ashley’s Christian Scientist parents, however, refused to allow doctors permission to amputate, and instead moved their daughter to a Christian Science sanatorium, where, in accordance with the tenets of their faith, “there was no medical care, not even pain medication.” Ashley’s mother and father arranged a collective pray-in to help her recover—to no avail. Three weeks later, she died.

This tragic story backs up the chief argument Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, makes in Faith Versus Fact, namely that “it is time for us to stop seeing faith as a virtue, and to stop using the term ‘person of faith’ as a compliment.” In the book’s 262 pages, Coyne tackles arguments stating that belief in God is a laudable quality, and reasons instead that faith is detrimental, even dangerous, and fundamentally incompatible with science, even while peacemakers try to find common ground between the two. Coyne, it should be noted, has spent much of his career objecting to religious rejection of Darwinism—he published a bestseller, Why Evolution Is True"

*One of the most significant examples of conflict between religion and science is the global-warming debate, and Coyne takes care to stress the religious roots of the arguments against climate change. He refers to Rick Santorum’s claims about it all being a “hoax” and the Illinois Representative John Shimkus’s 2009 Genesis-based testimony before a House subcommittee. Religion and climate-change denialism are inextricably linked, Coyne writes, because people of faith have a vested belief in “God’s stewardship of the planet, and his promise to preserve it until his return.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/religion-science-coexist-faith-versus-fact-coyne/396362/