Science and Religion (Yet again)

 I want to start by saying, without equivocation, that I have the greatest respect for scientists and the scientific method. I have a great respect for all people who try to do the almost unspeakably difficult task of putting aside their prejudices, their hopes, desires, emotional investments to discover knowledge. Disinterested knowledge is a treasure worth more per ounce than any other treasure. At the same time I have a distrust that is usually indistinguishable from contempt tinged with revulsion for most of the most prominent advocates of religion--whether Christian, Muslim, Jew, or Hindu. I do NOT have contempt for any of these faiths or for Buddhism (which are the only bona fide religious traditions I know anything about). But I do loathe the power-hungry, hypocrites who paint their souls with religious language in the service of what, in religious language, can only be called "evil." Almost everything that pissed off George Carlin and that the popular imagination thinks of as "religion" is perfectly deserving of the tone of contempt in the most vitriolic Carlin bit, though the logic of those bits is rarely worth the name of logic. 

That said, I must maintain that science can only find what it is looking for. It can only proceed on its materialist premises. And the smugness of scientism that holds all religion under the paper thumb of "superstition" is as insupportable as creationism itself. Science can prove that Noah is a story, that Adam and Eve were not actual people, that the world did not come into existence in seven days, that the universe is more than 6000 years old. It can therefore be of very great use to faith. It helps faith clarify and focus. But the scope of science is self-limiting, as it should be. And it is as silly when it tries to apply itself outside its scope as religion is when it does the same.