Hi Aaron,

I agree as long as you maintain the distinction between individually held religious beliefs and the tenets of religious organizations. Now, you might say that the beliefs of evolutionists have become organized and institutionalized and so "evolutionary science" has become a religious organization. If that happened, to any scientific discipline, it would be harmful, and I think it has happened from time to time. But the way science should work, and the way it does work most of the time, is that individual scientists hold varying levels of opinions on specific issues which are not necessarily in sync with those of other scientists. This is healthy and it is not a reason to label their body of shared opinions to be mere guesswork. Science has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that their model of the world is more accurate and provides us with more useful information than any other model, bar none.

As Luis indicated, scientists would probably oppose using the term 'religion' to describe their system of beliefs about the world, but that is only a problem of semantics and is not really important. I think that if everyone observed the distinction between 'religion' and 'religious organization', that the opposition to that classification might diminish.

Warm regards,

Paul

• Yeah, but just look at the scientific community now... - emperor__alikar - August 5, 2002 - 03:33 UTC
  • What I see looks pretty good - pmartin - August 5, 2002 - 15:36 UTC