From George Dawson:

Re: God and science not an easy mix for many (Dec. 15): it is Religion and THEORY Preston and others are considering, and not Religion and Science.

‘Preston said she examined the question because if science and religion “are both ultimate explanations, at some point they have to conflict with each another because they can’t possibly both explain everything. ”‘ Religion requires faith in an unknowable answer, whereas science requires universally observable facts. Preston is correlating science with theory, which is a logical error.

Sensationalist reporting often takes on the garb of science in an effort to substantiate itself, and so often jumps to the conclusion of causality when there is in fact none. Uadulterated science does not jump to conclusions. It relies on peer review and experimentation to keep separate theory from established fact, no matter how tempting it might be to jump to a conclusion of causality. Evolution is a theory. Big bang is a theory. Neither is science. Both attempt to explain scientific findings. And, generally, biologists “believe” in Evolution, not as a cause, but as a possible explanation for the evidence which everybody can objectively observe. True evolutionists never imply intention to evolution. It is presumed random, and what works, survives.

Is that to say that anything not (currently) explained by science is supported only by ‘magical thinking’? All peoples throughout known time have engaged in magical thinking. It is natural to attribute a cause to an event. And social acceptance generally seals the deal, protecting an initial conjecture from any and all subsequent debate or even questioning. Science holds all conjecture as questionable - even so called scientific conjecture. So I can still be within the realm of empirical thinking and argue against the big bang - because the evidence used to support this theory is based solely on conjecture. We presume that red shifts mean this, or that comparative color shifts at different distances mean that, when in fact, we do not know these things to be true. No one has ever followed a photon to see if a phase shift might occur naturally over a vast period of time, like 10 billion years. So, much of what passes as science in the popular media is in fact nothing more than sensationalistic reporting, and not actual comparative stark observation, which tends to be boring.

Lots of people have suffered emotional “imbalance” and yet not suffered the calamities of the usual suspects of disease. And conversely, lots of people have suffered calamities generally attributed to spiritual imbalance, but they have not had the spiritual imbalance. There! Now if you can prove these two statements false, then you have science.