Religion has developed a haughty attitude throughout the ages making it unwilling and unable to spot its flaws and correct its understanding of our natural world. I think the reason why this is, because it has not developed a mechanism to critically check its beliefs, biases, and rush & dirty conclusions against reality. By its very nature it has become an enemy of reason and science, hindering human progress throughout the late centuries.
Victor J. Stenger says:
Faith is belief in the absence of supportive evidence and even in the light of contrary evidence. No one disputes that religion is based on faith. Some theologians, Christian apologists, and even a few secular scholars claim that science is also based on faith. They argue that science takes it on faith that the world is rational and that Nature can be ordered in an intelligible way.
However, science makes no such assumption on faith. It analyzes observations by applying certain methodological rules and formulates models to describe those observations. It justifies that process by its practical success, not by any logical deduction derived from dubious metaphysical assumptions. WE MUST DISTINGUISH FAITH FROM TRUST. Science has earned our trust by its proven success. Religion has destroyed our trust by its repeated failure.
Using the empirical method, science has eliminated smallpox, flown men to the moon, and discovered DNA. If science did not work, we wouldn't do it. Relying on faith, religion has brought us inquisitions, holy wars, and intolerance. Religion does not work, but we still do it.
Science and religion are fundamentally incompatible because of their unequivocally opposed epistemologies—the separate assumptions they make concerning what we can know about the world. Every human alive is aware of a world that seems to exist outside the body, the world of sensory experience we call the natural. Science is the systematic study of the observations made of the natural world with our senses and scientific instruments, and the application to human needs of the knowledge obtained.
By contrast, all major religions teach that humans possess an additional “inner” sense that allows us to access a realm lying beyond the visible world—a divine, transcendent reality we call the supernatural. If it does not involve the transcendent, it is not religion. Religion is a set of practices intended to communicate with that invisible world so that we can either cause forces from it to affect things here or at least apply insights gained from it to human needs.
