Originally Posted By: samwik

Can't the two be seen as different perspectives on ways to understand reality--each based on different definitions,


Religion is a way to obscure reality. But it does provide a tool for understanding human psychology. I don't mean by believers, but by psychologists studying religious behavior.

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And sometimes science is too specialized to see the big, humane picture--and sometimes religion is too generalized to see the reality on the ground--so they each seem to have value in complementing each other. There isn't a problem with contradictions, is there?


The humane picture is small. There's only a few billion humans in the universe, and all crammed into one planet. That's the narrow domain of religion. Science covers a much wider scope and has produced some big pictures encompassing humans as well as plants, rocks, stars, dark matter, space, etc.