The coexistence of religion and science

Are they incompatible? Alan Lightman explores the question:

As a scientist, I find Dawkins’ efforts to rebut these two arguments for the existence of God — intelligent design and morality — as completely convincing. However, as I think he would acknowledge, falsifying the arguments put forward to support a proposition does not falsify the proposition. Science can never know what created our universe. Even if tomorrow we observed another universe spawned from our universe, as could hypothetically happen in certain theories of cosmology, we could not know what created our universe. And as long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not. The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.

One thing which ought to be noted, and is often forgotten, is we cannot actually disprove the existence of anything – let alone a supernatural, celestial deity that we can purportedly neither hear nor see. Richard Dawkins has a greater chance of disproving the existence of Harry Potter or the Hobbit than he does of the Almighty. However, because I have no evidentiary reason for a belief in the divine (be it God, Allah, Yahweh, the Gods of non-Abrahamic religions, or Harry Potter) I can only reasonably conclude that there is no such deity in existence.

Some also need to be reminded that as science has continued to develop, the role of religion and its influence has reassuringly receded or diminished. On this and staggering statistics of belief, it is clear that religion and science may have to coexist for quite some time yet. In the long term, though? I'd say that the two are clearly incompatible.