Does Modern Science Owe Its Existence to Religion?

[Statler Waldorf]

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If Christians all hate one another so much, how are inter-denominational schools possible? Please answer that.

Well it might be all rosey where you are but there are many areas of the world where christians are segregated.

Northern ireland is the obvious example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation...rn_Ireland.

Scotland is another where the violence takes place at football matches.

Scotland suffers from a spill-over of Northern Irish sectarianism due to the many people with links to both communities living in the country, particularly in the West. The Old Firm of Celtic and Rangers football clubs have provided a focus for this, with Rangers being the Protestant and Celtic the Catholic icon.

Both teams subscribe to government initiatives, and charities like the Nil by Mouth campaign are working in this area, but there are still some fans on both sides who sing sectarian songs and display slogans and images related to the conflict in Northern Ireland. Celtic recently wrote to every season ticket holder banning sectarian behaviour at Celtic Park.[citation needed] Rangers' equivalent anti-sectarian policy is called Follow With Pride.[21]

Even in recent years, deaths and serious injuries have taken place after Old Firm matches

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Those places hold such an insignificant representation of Christians that it can hardly be used as an example to make a blanket statement about all of Christianity, and Catholicism and Protestantism are actually different branches of Christianity, not denominations. Your point is taken though.

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Statler, seriously? Modern science owes its existence to religion? Prove that point. You're making an audacious claim here. Personally, I won't give it any credence unless you give me an outline from religion to modern science that shows precisely how religion led to modern science.

It's called Whitehead's hypothesis, it's a point well accepted, even by Richard Dawkins.

“Here is a final paradox. Recent work on early modern science has demonstrated a direct (and positive) relationship between the resurgence of the Hebraic, literal exegesis of the Bible in the Protestant Reformation, and the rise of the empirical method in modern science. I’m not referring to wooden literalism, but the sophisticated literal-historical hermeneutics that Martin Luther and others (including Newton) championed. It was, in part, when this method was transferred to science, when students of nature moved on from studying nature as symbols, allegories and metaphors to observing nature directly in an inductive and empirical way, that modern science was born. In this, Newton also played a pivotal role. As strange as it may sound, science will forever be in the debt of millenarians and biblical literalists. “

- Stephen Snobelen, Assistant Professor of History of Science and Technology,
University of King’s College

“The philosophy of experimental science began its discoveries and made use of its methods in the faith, not the knowledge, that it was dealing with a rational universe controlled by a creator who did not act upon whim nor interfere with the forces He had set in operation… It is surely one of the curious paradoxes of history that science, which professionally has little to do with faith, owes its origins to an act of faith that the universe can be rationally interpreted, and that science today is sustained by that assumption.”

- Evolutionary anthropologist and science writer Loren Eiseley in Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men who Discovered It