J. Anderson Thomson claims it “is no longer a question of whether religion shall wither away, just when”:
There is a massive, irreconcilable conflict between science and religion. Religion was humanity’s original cosmology, biology and anthropology. It provided explanations for the origin of the world, life and humans. Science now gives us increasingly complete explanations for those big three. We know the origins of the universe, the physics of the big bang and how the basic chemical elements formed in supernovas. We know that life on this planet originated about 4 billion years ago, and we are all descendants of that original replicating molecule. Thanks to Darwin we know that natural selection is the only workable explanation for the design and variety of all life on this planet. Paleoanthropologists and geneticists have reconstructed much of the human tree of life. We are risen apes, not fallen angels.
But in what sense are we risen? Merely by intelligence? And isn’t it worth exploring why we first experienced our alienation as having fallen rather than risen? Maybe we have risen intellectually, but feel fallen spiritually – because we have a semblance of a sense of the transcendent?
And couldn’t religion, having been abused for so long and put to so many inappropriate purposes over the centuries, actually free itself from this trap and relate to truths beyond science and experiences of the whole? That is the real work ahead. And it will come within the churches or outside of them. The hierarchy will be the last to know.
The Dish 