At one time, religion and science were one in the same. Both developed simultaneously a way to understand and make sense of a chaotic world. What could be readily explained without invoking the supernatural, was. What could not be readily explained was attributed to a god or gods. Gradually, the two began to emerge as separate entities, with a divorce taking place at the end of the Middle Ages when Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus and a host of others formally divorced science from religious dogma. After this divorce, science emerged as the more reliable method for learning about the world and the universe.
What led to the divorce has to do with the incompatible methodologies of the two.
Religion seeks to understand the world through the divine revelation of a god or gods. The pursuit of knowledge becomes an exercise in understanding the character, nature, and will of the god or gods in question. Knowledge comes about either through direct, personal divine revelation, or by accepting on faith the claims of those who have received this revelation. Here is where religion's first dilemma develops.
How do you tell correct revelations from false ones? The faithful will point to a sacred text. But what is a sacred text? It is someone's else's record of their own divine revelation, only older. An older claim of divine revelation is just older, not necessarily any more valid. The only solution is to have an authority dictate which is which. But from what is that authority derived? Yet another "divine revelation."
Bear in mind, we have only examined conflicting claims within ONE religion. When we expand our focus to conflicting religions, the waters get even murkier.
Now let's shift our focus to science. Science seeks to understand the world through observation, logical reasoning,and experimentation. Nothing is taken on faith. There is no "revealed knowledge." When conflicting claims arise, both claims are tested through a controlled, repeatable testing method (experimentation) and the false claim is exposed (and discarded) through this process. No authorities are needed to dictate what is a false claim and what is correct. The evidence IS the authority. "If you can't show it, you don't know it." The pursuit of knowledge in this light is a pursuit of evidence and the construction of a logical apparatus to account for the evidence.
