Does science undermine religious faith? Obviously it has done so and often still does, particularly when dogmatic religion over-reaches itself and makes empirically false claims. But such activity on the part of religionists should be condemned as an aspect of perennial temptation which man has to create his own religion in his own image. The question I would like to consider is whether science means that a religious attitude to the world and a patient search for divine revelation is in itself misguided. Playing down the probative force of natural theology, as I have shown, means that scientific investigation can per se have nothing to say either for or against a fundamental religious attitude or insight. What we have in science and in religion are at bottom two separate and non-conflicting modes of discourse. Science is the attempt to classify, describe and explain natural phenomena in mathematico-reductive terms: that is, it sees the great diversity of natural phenomena in terms of the quantifiably describable operations of smaller numbers of objects or processes, which are seen as causally responsible for the phenomena. In so doing, it abstracts from what it sees as causally irrelevant properties of the phenomena, secondary qualities and much else besides. From the point of view of human experience, the scientific picture omits much that is significant and important; this is no criticism of science as such, but only of the attitude of mind which would see scientific discourse as the only valid approach to the world.
(Anthony O'Hear, "Science and Religion," The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44 [September 1993]: 505-16, at 512)
Note from KBJ: This is a good statement of the distinction between science and scientism. Most of today's atheists are proponents of scientism, which they, in their eagerness to "refute" religion, mistake for science.
