Probably the major point is that the social enterprise Science is not "complete." There are very large, very substantial portions of the universe which you cannot get to in finite time using the approach Science is taking, starting where we are now. Many of those portions we don't even know about, and some of them we can already see.
Furthermore, "Science" and "The Scientific Method" (or as I call it to make a point, the Scientific Method version 3.1) are, astoundingly, not even playing by their own rules and calibrating their equipment before using it -- a sin a junior scientist would get grief for. The resulting blind spot is huge, and in critical areas related to religion and social systems in general.
If scientists all admitted that the Scientific Method v3.1 (hereafter SM31) was a model, and, like all models, "wrong but sometimes useful", that would be OK - but when they implicitly assert that they have the universe covered and Religion can go home now, it becomes problematic.
I have no doubt that they don't "see anything" when they look for God, but I also don't see that they have ruled out "equipment failure" by demonstrating that they are capable of seeing far easier synthetic test case patterns with known answers.
Model-imposed blindness is widespread in all fields, including Science. Pulsars, the radio-frequency strobe lights in the sky, are the third brightest thing in that spectral range after the Sun. They were missed for years because they have low average energy but huge pulse energy, and all the equipment radio-astronomers used had electronics in place to average signal strength, because "everyone knew there as no signal there, just noise." They were found only because a female graduate assistant asked "What if we take these out?", didn't like the put-down she received, so she did -- for which discovery her male faculty adviser, who had discouraged her action, received an award. ( I was in that field at the time and heard all the details.)
Or, the "hole in the ozone" over Antarctica. That was missed for years because the satellite had been programmed to simply discard any low readings, because "everyone knew" that those would just be due to equipment malfunction.
Quantum mechanics was rejected as impossible in physics. Plate techtonics was rejected as impossible in Geology. Sure, now they are seen clearly, but before that point, they were invisible. As Thomas Kuhn noted, there is a huge resistance to a "paradigm shift" even among, or perhaps especially among, trained professionals.
Right now, the shift away from deterministic machine models of physics to chaos theory, non-linear math, distal causality, etc. is not widespread. The certainty and simplicity of the old theories create a huge reluctance to let go and move forward.
But to study social systems on a planetary scale will require moving forward. There is no way to "extrapolate" smaller scale or shorter-term mechanical or electronic systems to such large scales in space, time, and feedback complexity.
And, as astronomer Frank Drake pointed out to our astrophysics class one day in the late 1960's, every time a new window of the electromagnetic spectrum is opened up we see not only a new side of known phenomena, but we also see entirely unexpected and new phenomena that we never knew was there. This universe is dense with things going on that are not obvious.
Science can't even resolve fairly simple questions such as whether it is genes that evolve, and species are a byproduct -- or species that evolve, and genes are a byproduct. Are people just genes way of making other genes? Probably this evolutionary process occurs at multiple levels simultaneously, with bidirectional feedback loops. Most scientists don't like that idea because it's too complicated for them to follow or research. Right. So is a lot of life.
But understanding clearly how the hierarchical thing we call "Life on Earth" evolves, and what relationship higher level processes have to lower level processes is a rather central problem, I'd say. This is a very small scale, small-space, small-time model for a much larger scale hierarchy that extends upwards to ... well, we don't know where it goes. Religion says "God" and Scientists wince. But Science can't give us a reliable extrapolation either, because Science, today, can't even get its hands around what is going on on our own little plane and what principles govern evolution of planetary sized entities.
Science has exactly one data point, and all the data on that one are not in yet. That means, let's see, uh ... one minus one would be .. oh yes, ZERO. Science, then, is happily and confidently telling us that there is nothing going on at cosmic scales and time periods, on the basis of ZERO data points. Wow, that's powerful stuff -- or unreliable fluff, to use polite words.
Scientists are mostly involved in further extrapolatiting the fractal shaped knowledge-base deeper and deeper into secondary, tertiary, quaternary, and whatever comes next specialties. That's what they get paid to do. There is very little pressure, or reward, for spending time trying to put all the pieces back together again and see what they spell.
In fact, I can't imagine any PhD adviser recommending that his student consider looking at "the BIG PICTURE" and trying to say the first thing about it. That is not considered "Science" but something else, never very clear what. Narrow, narrower, narrower is the advice, the training, the research. I can't even think of what "scientific field" spends its time trying to figure out "what it all adds up to" if you reassemble all the pieces we have found.
So, that's the gap, the role, the place where religion comes in and says "THIS is what is it all about." (or 20 different "this" versions for 15 different religions.)
Science asserts confidently "there is no purpose to all this universe" based, again, on what? On a long experience with different kinds of universes, some with purpose, some without? Hardly. Do we know how this one will turn out? No, not yet. Again, we have zero data points to work with.
And, for that matter, exactly what "purpose-ometer" is used for making this judgment, and how was it calibrated? I'd really like to see that device and the test results. -- which is impossible since there is no such device.
For instance, please look at this "cake" in this hot oven and tell me for sure whether it is "being made" or simply "evolving according to natural chemical and thermodynamic principles."
Or let's see the algorithm or device or statistic that can differentiate between "coincidence" and "enemy action" with high accuracy. Or one that can tell "criminal intent" from simple incompetence with high reliability. We have no devices that can detect "purpose" on easy test cases, so why should we trust them on much larger and more complex cases? Why do scientists trust them is the puzzle to me.
Or, try this one. Do tobacco companies' Advertising cause people to smoke and die from tobacco-related medical conditions? On a small scale, viewed person by person, there is no "causality". Some people ignore ads. Etc. On a population scale, yes, of course, the billions of dollars spent on advertising have a deterministic effect, or it wouldn't keep on being spent. We have "causality" that is scale-dependent, that is not visible at short-range scales but is visible at large-range scales. This isn't news to Science.
Which is stronger - the strong force of Electromagnetic attraction or the weak force of gravity? Well, on the scale of this room, electrostatic charge can hold a balloon up on the wall despite gravity. On the scale of the galaxy, electromagnetic interactions have vanished, and gravity dominates evolution. We have no idea what even "weaker" forces their might be, so weak that we can't detect them yet, that, on the scale of billions of galaxies, might determine evolution.
Science has been great at the large-self-energy, low-interaction energy end of the spectrum, with rocks and billiard balls interacting. It has very little power, as currently constituted at the other end, where self-energy is reduced to vanishing and interaction energy dominates the scene, or a the limit point where there are no "objects" only pure "interactions" remaining.
The only place we know of so far that is near that end is apparently the center of our galaxy, and, well, we've never been there. We didn't even know there WAS a galaxy until a hundred years ago. On the scale of the universe we've sampled zero, or, if you stretch it, one incomplete case. By normal statistics, that makes the confidence limit infinite, meaning we know nothing.
I am not sold on the argument "That couldn't possibly happen because I personally can't think of how it would happen."
If Science wants to make arguments about social issues, fine, but first let's see your demonstrated capacity to manage anything whatsoever on the societal scale.
The problem is, there is no such capacity. Science so far has been going deeper and deeper into the microscope, not further and further up society's ladder. Or, any scientists left reading this, please let the rest of us know what the cure is for corruption in organizations and politics and how to stop it. Just run the numbers or something for us and show us your strength in that area to produce spectacular social outcomes - not to be confused with analysis or writing papers.
Or, heck, take something simpler and just fix the economies of the planet and prevent World War Three. When you have that one mastered, come back and let's talk about God again. But if you can't even get one single planet to work, what arrogance to consider yourselves authorities on the whole universe and how it works.
From what I can see of calibration of your equipment, you are very good at solving very small problems that cause large-scale things to decay or explode, but very bad at solving any scale thing that makes social-scale entities heal and grow, when actually attempted in the real world, not in some simulation or power-point presentation or paper.
This could be, and should be, a legitimate question for bright people of any persuasion --
what does it take to overcome the darkness and bring forth growth, peace, stability, and a thriving ecology?What does it take to get us sufficiently organized that we can get off this little rock that's being pelted by asteroids and spread across the galaxy or farther? What does it take to roll back corruption and recover healthy growth?
Hint - the answer isn't "more technology", because technology, by itself, appears to be a centripetal force that threatens to rip our planet apart or demolish the ecosystem and biosphere. No number of cameras or high-tech walls will stop that enemy, because the enemy is already within the walls, already inside us.
We are our own worst enemy.
That's the problem we have to face, and address, and solve.
Or, frankly, we all die.
Unless you're on the verge of announcing a solution, I'd stop kicking religion in the shins and start asking what religion knows about human beings and social structures that might be helpful in this situation.
Maybe, together instead of at each other's throats, we could get somewhere.
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