Religion and Science are Compatible

by Santos Odhiambo
(Nakuru - kenya)

Many theologists have often time argued that religion and science are incompatible, they would justify their view by saying that science opposes religion. It is within these belief that the Pope executed Galileo when he suggested that the earth is a round like object, it is good that the Pope later apologised for His action.

Late last year, I attended a talk which was being given by a very prominent speaker. He said that since the beginning of time science have been viewed as opposing religion.

I agree with this framework and I want to explore why religion and science goes hand in hand.

God while creating man, He gives man opportunity to develop knowledge within a given time frame, what this means is that as humanity continue to grow and develop, so their inner and outer knowledge becomes more developed. If you asked any scientist to define for you what science as a word means, their definition will revolve around knowledge, science is knowledge.....bla bla..

Take for example a little kid, he entirely depends on the mother and nothing else can he do without constant support of the mother. But as the time goes by the little kid develops his own mechanism to understand his surrounding and his eagerness to perform some tasks by himself continues to develop.

Humanity development have followed the same channel. God created human beings and we knew little about our surroundings, we had to grow, and to grow God wanted us to develop both intellect and wisdom. As time goes and our intellect continues to improve, we were given chance to initiate artistic capability.

We invent the wheel to ease our transport problems and our knowledge grew, we developed medicine to prevent unnecessary death. Now our knowledge has developed in such wise that we can be called mature! We can do things that our forefathers could not have imagined.

All these are within the scientific framework, that we have brain and this brain is God given and God want us to use our brain to protect ourself from disease, hunger,etc.

Thus when a scientist developed a drug that cure the deadliest disease, he saved the society from catastrophe and thus through the God given Knowledge which we call science the humanity is saved.

I will admit that if he turn and make poison it will serve no good,what is important to remember is that the person who invented knife did not imagine that it will be used to stab people but that it will be used to cut apple and people will share.

That doesn't make a knife a bad object, it is important to differentiate between human intent and the object.

One reason God gave us knowledge is because He is supreme, He can not descend to earth for the reason of helping us solve some petty problem we have. And so he give us knowledge to help ourselves.

Science and religion thus have from time of creation been going hand in hand, without science we cannot know God, without religion which is entirely to believe in God we cannot feel inadequate enough to search for knowledge. The reason why we search for knowledge to explore and know more about our surroundings is because we believe there are some super being somewhere and our eagerness is to find more, the more we search the more we get to know about the earth.