Religoin Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Religoin - Essay Example Mysticism is key to the methodology of any religion (Underhill 43). The creation theory states that, the universe and all life form in it originated from God -who created everything in six days with man being created on the last day. This is found in the book of Genesis; used as the basis of creationists fundamentalist Christians against evolutionists Charles Darwin then came up with the Darwinism theory of biological evolution. According to evolutionists, human beings evolved from apes to the present Homo Sapiens Sapiens through natural selection. They argue that in order to cope with the change in the environment, human beings adapted to the changing environment by weeding out the weak and only leaving the strongest to survive. The continental drift theory theorizes that the earth was initially a large land mass that split into seven continents due to tectonic plates shifting in the core of the earth’s crust. The two theories greatly differ with the creation theory (Ruse 24). The methodologies used by both factions are quite different. The creationists rely on sacred texts like the Bible to pursue an understanding of the universe while the evolutionists use scientific correlation of cause and effect to investigate the phenomena. The conflict thesis proposed by William Draper in 1875 aims to highlight the differing perspectives between religion and science. Draper came up with the conflict thesis to highlight how the two ‘conflicted’ in terms of methodology, intellectual framework, and politics. Others such as Richard Dawkins provide an in depth view of the epistemological differences between science and religion. He argues that science and religion differ in the way they formulate and hold beliefs. Religion uses faith-based methods while science uses reason-based methods. Dawkins in his theory suggests that science uses inductive statements that can be verified through statistical analysis on objective