How Conflict Between Religion and Science Shaped The World: Submitted By-Mranal Sharma SM0117030
How Conflict Between Religion and Science Shaped The World: Submitted By-Mranal Sharma SM0117030
How Conflict Between Religion and Science Shaped The World: Submitted By-Mranal Sharma SM0117030
THE WORLD
Submitted By-
Mranal Sharma
SM0117030
Faculty in Charge
Ms. Rachel D Sangma
1. INTRODUCTION ------------------------------------------------------------------------
2. Religion ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Conclusion-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION
Generally speaking, science is the study of the empirically observable world, while religion
pertains largely to what is immaterial and cannot be detected through the senses (if that
description is even true of anything).
There was a time when philosophy, theology, and natural science coexisted peacefully as
equal partners in the quest for understanding. In the eyes of many, that harmony has turned
into the strongest rivalry of our time.
According to one very popular conception of the relationship between science and religion,
the two are enemies locked in mortal combat. In this view, religious claims rail against
science, which in turn undermines the credibility of religion. But not everyone sees the
relationship in that light.
The relation between science and religion has always been one of a controversial one. Both
of them are crucial for the society and both of the pillars of the society have been at
crossroads with each other on numerous occasions be it Copernicus who displaced the earth
from centre of universe for which he was considered to be mad by the church, or be it Darwin
who again shook the pillars of church by giving his theory of evolution.
1.1RESEARCH QUESTIONS
This book helps us understand clearly the concept of religion and the deep connection
religion has with society. It gives us a detailed account of how religion and society are
intertwined with each other. It tells us that religion is an inseparable part of a society
and has a great influence on society.
SCOPE:
This research paper aims the objective to limelight the conflict between religion and science
and how it influenced the world.
OBJECTIVES:
1. To read in detail about the various component of religion and how it affect the society.
2. Project reads the detail the influence of science and various discoveries of science like
heliocentric and gravity on society.
In this project, researcher has adopted Doctrinal research. Doctrinal research is essentially a
library-based study, which means that the materials needed by a researcher may be available
in libraries, archives and other data-bases. Various types of books were used to get the
adequate data essential for this project. Researcher also used computer laboratory to get
important data related to this topic. Researcher also found several useful websites which
were very useful to better understand this topic.
CHAPTER 2
Religion
Sociology of religion is the study of the beliefs, practices and organizational forms
of religion using the tools and methods of the discipline of sociology.
Modern academic sociology began with the analysis of religion in Emile Durkheim's
1897 study of suicide rates among Catholic and Protestant populations, a foundational work
of social research which served to distinguish sociology from other disciplines, such
as psychology. The works of Karl Marx and Max Weber emphasized the relationship between
religion and the economic or social structure of society.
Contemporary debates have centred on issues such as secularization, civil religion, and the
cohesiveness of religion in the context of globalization and multiculturalism The contemporary
sociology of religion may also encompass the sociology of irreligion (for instance, in the
analysis of secular humanist belief systems).1
Sociologists of religion study every aspect of religion from what is believed to how persons act
while in worship and while living out their stated convictions. They study the changing role of
religion both in the public arena (political, economic and media) and in intimate interpersonal
relationships. Global religious pluralism and conflict, the nature of religious cults and sects,
the influence of religion on racial, gender and sexuality issues, and the effect of the media and
modern culture has on religious practices are all topics of interest in current sociology of
religion research.2
Like marriage, family and kinship, religion is another important social institution. It is also one
of the earliest institution of human society. Since ancient days religion has been influencing
human life and human society both primitive and modern. Each and every aspect of human life
and human society bears the influence of religion. It is very difficult and almost impossible to
trace the exact origin of religion.
Different scholars put forth divergent view about its origin. Still one-thing is sure that when
the mysteries and perplexities of life plagued man’s mind at that moment he thought of some
super natural and super-sensory power which marks the origin of religion. However, as an
1
‘Sociology of religion’ , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_religion accessed on 20-04-2018
2
Sociological study of religion, ‘ http://hirr.hartsem.edu/sociology/about_the_field.html’ accessed on 20-04-
2018
institution religion plays an important role in society and imparts beliefs and patterns of
behaviour.
Since the days of its arrival man has been intrigued by questions such as why and how this
world was created and what is birth and death when he fail to get an accurate answer to all his
questions he began to believe on the existence of some supernatural power which marks the
origin of religion.
Religion is a belief in God. In other words religion is the human response to the apprehension
of something of power, which is supernatural and super sensory. It is the expression of the
manner and type of adjustment effected by the people with their conception of the supernatural
Definitions:3
(1) According to Maclver, “Religion as we understand the term implies a relationship not
merely between man and man but also between man and some higher power.”
(2) According to Emile Durkheim, “Religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices
relating to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden.”
(4) According to J.M. Frazer, “Religion is a belief in powers superior to man which are
believed to direct and control the course of nature of human life.”
(5) According to A.W. Green, “Religion is a system of beliefs and symbolic practices and
objects, governed by faith rather than by knowledge which relates man to an unseen
supernatural realm beyond the known and beyond the controllable.”
(6) According to H.M. Johnson, “Religion is a more or less coherent system of beliefs and
practices concerning a super-natural order of beings, forces places or other entities.”
3
‘Religion :meaning, Definitions’ ‘ http://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/religion/religion-meaning-definitions-
and-components-of-religion/6151’ accessed on 21-04-2018
COMPONENT OF RELIGION
Belief and rituals are two main component parts of religion. Beliefs are a charter for rituals.
Rituals consist in the observance according to a prescribed manner of certain actions designed
to establish liaison between the performing individual and the supernatural power. Religion
involves a set of symbols invoking feelings of reverences or awe are linked to rituals practiced
by a community of believers.
Besides the above components religion may have some other components which are
as follows.
`
CHAPTER 3
SCIENCE
Religious condition of the Greeks in the fourth century before Christ. Their invasion of the
Persian Empire brings them in contact with new aspects of Nature, and familiarizes them with
new religious systems. The military, engineering, and scientific activity, stimulated by the
Macedonian campaigns, leads to the establishment in Alexandria of an institute, the Museum,
for the cultivation of knowledge by experiment, observation, and mathematical discussion. It
is the origin of Science.4
Science aims at understanding the behaviour of the natural world. Any propositions that are
about supernatural objects, or abstract universals, or normative ethics, should not be considered
scientific since they do not pertain to the study of natural, empirical objects.
Even so, not every scientific claim is directly about empirical objects. But those claims that are
not (for example, the claim that science ought to proceed by inductively-based generalizations,
which is itself a claim about the enterprise of science, not about any empirical objects) are
usually, at the very Least, connected to or supportive of the investigation of nature and natural
objects. That, however, is only a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. What might be
needed to complete the definition of science is still a matter of considerable debate.
Until the modern period, science was not a separate discipline from philosophy; scientists were
known as natural philosophers, or experimental philosophers. In those expressions, one sees
what it was that those men and women thought was distinctive about their investigations: their
methods, and conclusions, were, at the risk of oversimplification, directed at empirical claims
about the natural world.
Their primary mission was to gather data about observable phenomena in nature, to categorize
that data, and to generalize from specific observations to more general ones
4
John William draper, ‘history of conflict between religion & science’ , temple of earth publication
CHAPTER 4
THE CONFLICT
To understand better the conflict between science and religion we must discuss the relation in
both of them. There are a theories prevalent in this field it is
1. The Hostility Theory
The relationship between science and religion is frequently modelled as being hostile,
with each side making claims that the other side denies. According to the hostility
model, scientific claims are false if religious claims are true, and religious claims are
false if scientific claims are true
Both sides, according to the hostility model, consider the other side to be wrong even
dangerously so. We will consider three of the most historically important areas of
purported conflict between science and religion.
The conflict between the Catholic Church and empirical scientists over heliocentrism
is often treated as if the scientists, interested only in the truth of the matter, were
ruthlessly persecuted by the Church, which was blinded to the facts by its narrow-
minded dogmatism.
After Copernicus passed from the stage, Galileo made his great entrance. Aided by a
newly invented means of magnification, the telescope, Galileo chronicled several
observable features of our solar system that were in conflict with the claims of church.
The church believed that the older view, inherited from Ptolemy, was that the sun and
all other heavenly bodies were in orbit around the earth, the fixed centre of the universe.
Certainly the Church found justification for geocentrism in Christian scripture.
Faced with two equally able models, then, the Churchmen tried to settle the dispute by
saying that one model (geocentrism) more naturally fit the claims of the Bible and was
better suited to Aristotle’s highly successful broader scientific framework. Thus, both
astronomical models fit the data equally accurately (or equally inaccurately); but one
seemed to fit holy writ much more naturally, and required a less radical retooling of the
entire body of scientific knowledge.5
Church rejected Copernicus’s theory just because it was against the bible.
In the seventeenth century, the brilliant work of Sir Isaac Newton gave rise to another
issue that would strain the relationship between science and religion. Newton was able
to model the behaviour of celestial bodies (including the earth, moon, and sun) through
mechanical means by positing that one force, the force of gravity, was responsible for
terrestrial phenomena, such as the falling of heavy bodies to earth, as well as celestial
phenomena, such as the earth’s orbit around the sun. Through his clever combination
of observation and mathematical modelling, he also formulated his three famous laws
of motion:
(1) That a body at rest will stay at rest, and a body at motion will continue in uniform
motion, unless acted on by an external force;
(2) That a force of strength F applied to a body of mass m results in an acceleration of
a
(3) That every action is paired with an equal and opposite reaction.
The result of this comprehensive and powerful work was the ability to account for
nearly all natural phenomena from a few carefully stated physical principles. Even
though Newton frequently referred to the activity of God in nature (for example, that
God might be directly responsible for gravitational attraction in the absence of a
materially mediated force, or that the smallest particles of matter were made to be
5
Bradley Sickler , Conflicts Between Science and Religion, Internet Encyclopaedia of philosophy,
http://archive.is/pzC4R
indestructible by God so that nature would have a constant character through time),
there was nothing in his system of nature that required God, or any intelligent agent at
all. The properties of matter in motion seemed sufficient to explain the behaviour of
natural objects. His was an apparently complete system and thoroughly naturalistic
system.
Interestingly, this led to two diametrically opposed inferences. On the one hand, many
people saw the success of Newton (and many people see the continued success of
physics to the present day) as an argument for atheism. If God is not needed to explain
the behaviour of the world, and if the cosmos, like a giant clock, operates on mechanical
principles alone, then one has no reason to suppose that God even exists. There are no
explanatory gaps left for God to fill. Newton himself would have rejected this. He
considered God to have a vital role in setting up the initial conditions for the universe.
Conclusion
The relationship between science and religion is frequently commented on, but rarely
understood with clarity. Though very few people would deny the importance of religion
or of science, it is difficult to see what their importance is to each other. On the hostility
theory, they make incompatible claims, and they pose grave risks to each other, and to
society.
After studying this project we can conclude a few things, which are humans since their
origin have looked for a superstitious being who control and governs the life in order to
satisfy this urge to find something superstitious religion was formed .
Religion has many component which were discussed in the project among the
components one of the main component is that it unites people and brings them under
common faith.
The common argument given by the people who are against science (extremist) is that
science is a tool used by atheist to destroy the common faith.
The conflict of science any religion has been going on from a long time and it is going
to continue as long as human civilisation is there because both science and religion are
important for society.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Articles
John William draper, ‘history of conflict between religion & science’ , temple of earth
publication
Bradley Sickler , Conflicts Between Science and Religion, Internet Encyclopaedia of
philosophy,
http://archive.is/pzC4R
Miracles, internet encyclopaedia of philosophy
http://www.iep.utm.edu/miracles/
‘Religion :meaning, Definitions’ ‘
http://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/religion/religion-meaning-definitions-and-
components-of-religion/6151’
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