A lot of the current attitude on this issue is a result of a few historians in the 19th century who promoted the so-called “warfare thesis” or “conflict thesis,” i.e., that science and religion have always been in conflict. The historical research on which the thesis was supposedly based has been widely debunked.
See here for more:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warfare_thesis
Also, if you can afford it, the Teaching Company offers an excellent set of lectures on science and religion.
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I do not buy the warfare thesis at all; I merely stated that the Catholic Church has not significantly contributed to
modern epistemology (notably empiricism and induction). My use of the italicized “modern” shows that I could accept the thesis that Catholicism contributed to some of the foundations of modern epistemology. The warfare thesis may apply to issues such as creationism or perhaps cosmology, but typically, the non-overlapping magisteria of science and religion are not encroached by either party, enabling them to co-exist.
(Does anyone want me to elaborate on the Catholicism/science link? It would take some time to do.)
If we do accept the negative correlation between general intelligence (as measured by IQ tests) and acceptance of revealed religion, one could hypothesize that more intelligent people are able to adeptly engage in scientific reasoning and analysis. (I do believe the
correlation is correct as I will provide an explanation why, but a high IQ simply means one is able to process information efficiently; it does not necessarily mean that one’s judgments would be correct.) Science does not necessarily preclude god, but one can examine and evaluate the world through the lens of the scientific method. As I stated before, science has provided satisfactory, consistent explanations to various (natural) phenomena and events, demonstrating that they can be understood in a materialistic framework. Some might infer, due to the success of the scientific method, that God is an extraneous, unnecessary hypothesis, vulnerable to excision by Occam’s razor for the sake of parsimony. They believe that their observations of the world show no significant deviation from the naturalistic “null hypothesis” which assumes absence of the role of an intervening deity in mundane affairs, since such affairs have naturalistic causation giving no hint of supernatural involvement. Furthermore, they might believe some of God’s purported attributes, such as omnibenevolence and omnipotence, is incompatible with their observations of the world, such as the ubiquitous, immense suffering prevalent in the human condition. The latter refers to the Epicurean paradox, a deductive argument demonstrating the impossibility of a benevolent and omnipotent deity who permits suffering, because it is assumed that suffering cannot co-exist with a benevolent, omnipotent deity, since its benevolence would compel its omnipotence to ameliorate suffering.
I used to believe in the above too.
