Until about 1832, when it first seems to have become established as a concept, the term « science » or "scientist" had no really independent meaning. "Science" meant "knowledge" in much the same way as "physic" meant medicine, and those who conducted experiments or organised field expeditions or managed laboratories were known as "natural philosophers." To these gentlemen the belief in a divine presence or inspiration was often assumed to be a part of the natural order, in rather the same way as it was assumed—or actually insisted upon—that a teacher at Cambridge University swear an oath to be an ordained Christian minister. For Sir Isaac Newton—an enthusiastic alchemist (an early form of the investigation of nature and an early philosophical and spiritual discipline, both combining elements of chemistry, metallurgy, physics, medicine, astrology, semiotics, mysticism, spiritualism, and art all as parts of one greater force), a despiser of the doctrine of the Trinity, and a fanatical anti-Papist, who believed that the main clues to the cosmos were to be found in the Bible. Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen, was a devout Unitarian Christian as well as a believer in the phlogiston theory (1667: an obsolete scientific theory that posited the existence of additional fire-like element called "phlogiston", in addition to the classical four elements of the Greeks: Earth, Water, Air and Fire. Alfred Russel Wallace, to whom, along-with Darwin, we owe much of what we know about evolution and natural selection, delighted in nothing more than a session of the so-called spiritual communion with the departed. However, there were others like the rational and atheist John Stuart Mills who refused to study at Oxford University or Cambridge University, because he refused to take Anglican orders from the "white devil"; the deist and atheist David Hume (1711 –1776)- the famous 18th-century Scottish philosopher, considered among the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment; Jean-Baptiste de Mirabaud (1743) (pseudonym du baron d'Olbach) the leader of French atheists and rationalists, who wrote the Bible of atheists-« The system of Nature », and many other less-sung heroes of atheism and rationalism.
And thus it could be argued that a commitment to science may or may not contradict a belief in the supernatural, particular in the pre-modern and pre-Enlightenment period. The best known statement of such ignorance in our own time comes from the late Stephen Jay Gould, who tactfully proposed that the worlds of science and religion commanded "non-overlapping magisteria." How true is this on a second look, or even on a first glance? Would we have adopted monotheism in the first place if we had known that:
*That our species is at most 200,000 years old.
*That the universe, as discovered by Edwin Hubble is expanding away from itself in a flash of red light.
*That these are very recent examples, post-Darwinian and post-Einsteinian, and they make pathetic nonsense of any idea that human presence on this planet, let alone in this one of billion galaxies of which our planet earth is a minutely small member, is part of a plan ! Which design, or designer? What plan, or planner determined that millions of humans would die without even a grave marker, for our first 200,000 years of struggling and desperate existence, and that there would only then be a "revelation" to save us humans, only about 3,000 years ago, disclosed only to few ignorant peasants in a remote, violent and illiterate area of the Middle East? Or to one of ignorant and illiterate Bedouins of the remote and thinly populated, socially and culturally backward desert of Arabia only 1500 years ago ? What nonsense ! What make-belief !
Such wild claims were, once, the prerogative of the Popes, Archbishops, Ayatullahs and the witch doctors, but now it's all but gone. This is as much as to say that reason and logic reject any Allah or God, which would be a fairly close approach to a historical and scientific claim that Ethics and Morality shudders at the very idea of an Allah or God !
Religion or Faith cannot rest itself on the argument that there might or might not be a prime mover. Religious faith must, of necessity, believe in answered prayers, divinely ordained morality, heavenly warrant for circumcision, stoning to death, cutting of hands and feet, Female Genital Mutilation and the occurrence of miracles etc. Physics and chemistry, biology and paleontology (the study of prehistoric life forms on Earth through the examination of plant and animal fossils). and archaeology have, given us explanations for what used to be mysterious, and furnished us with hypotheses that are much better than, the ones offered by ignorant believers in inexplicable dimensions.
Does this mean that the inexplicable or superstitious has become "obsolete"? in a way and to some extent, yes, it has ; if only because we today believe that the human capacity for wonder neither will nor should be destroyed or superseded. But the original problem with religion is that it is our first, and our worst, attempt at explaining ourselves and our universe. It is how we came up with answers before we had any knowledge, any tools for investigation or analytic minds looking for evidence. It belongs to the terrified childhood of our species, before we knew about germs or could account for earthquakes. It belongs to our intellectual childhood, too, in the less charming sense of demanding a tyrannical authority: a protective Allah/God-parent who demands compulsory love even as he exacts a tithe of fear for his colossal destruction. This unalterable and eternal religious despot, Allah / God is the origin of totalitarianism, and represents the first cringing human attempt to refer all difficult questions to the smoking and forbidding religious altars. This of course is why one desires that science and humanism would make faith obsolete, even as one sadly realises that as long as we feel like insecure primates we shall remain very fearful of breaking the chain.
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Article 1: Does science make belief in Allah/God obsolete ? Necessarily, it does - speaks a physicist
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