Science and Religion cannot overlap.

[Dystopia]

Certainly not yours, your perfect little world.

Perfect only in this one regard: the chains of superstition have no place.

---

Just back on the OP, I'm interested that, rather than discussing the relationship between science and faith, it is mostly a critique of philosophical arguments for God. I think that's quite a different topic, though I do wonder how many people's faith is derived from philosophical argument. I don't think I've yet met a person who came to faith from any philosophical argument (that doesn't, of course, mean it can't and doesn't happen, but I think it must be pretty rare). Those arguments to me seem to be more about just showing that it is not unreasonable to believe in God (they start with reasonable premises and proceed logically to a conclusion; but they are far from certain proofs), and perhaps appeal more to people who already have faith and want some assurance that they have not gone completely bonkers. Even Aquinas, who is frequently quoted, devoted very little time and space to them; he seems to deal with them just in passing.

You bring up Aquinas, a finer example of a person whose philosophy went bonkers I reckon I could hardly conceive. You either have the invisible house of deism or the crooked and ill-designed architecture of religion; a re-examination of the foundation, which is what science does, reveals why the old architects have lost their ability to perform the task. Reason and science work together by starting with sense experience and making small steps of induction and deduction from there, using methods of reduction in the process. At any point in which this becomes divorced from reality, you go back to work on what you already know. Religion makes specific claims that are divorced from our experience and hence, knowledge of cause and effect, long before some vague idea of an ineffable higher power, I'll grant you that, but both must be viewed from a perspective that is tried and tested to be reliable: science. In science, one should know better than to commit to propositions on ground as flimsy and undefined as the God hypothesis; to do so would be unscientific, contrary to the spirit of curiosity and investigation. When the hypothesis doesn't work, we give precedence to new ones. That is, I believe, why we have finally entered, since perhaps the 19th-20th centuries, what can be called the Age of Atheism.

I'd replace the age of atheism by the age of 'Secularism, reason and irreligion'. And let's not forget Islam is growing too