Can science and religion mix?

I loled when I read this.

Yes try and explain why things happen the way they do and compare them to religious statements.

I belive in a higher being who just somehow made us and thats were i stop asking anymore questions. I dont how this being created us but i just belive it made us somehow and didnt do anything after that and let life drive its own way. Thats my belief for the universe existing and that belief wont change until science prove how this whole existence started. However what i see as evolution is how this exitence change and that include us so yes i belive science and religion can mix but it really depends on both parts but it will probaly never happend.

Some will say yes, others will say no. Only if everyone said no then it will be a definite no, but if someone say yes(just one person), then yes there is now a mix.

I could probably go on for several rambley pages about this, and religion in general but that sounds like a pain in the ass, that and I don't like being confrontational.

So... No. No they cannot, is my answer.

I say yes, but it's so hard to explain why. To begin with, while growing up, I think I was a devout Catholic; however somewhere along the line I stopped believing in religion and started leaning towards more to facts. Once I started thinking like this I tried to apply science into religion and sometimes it seem to go well with it. Even one of my old Catholic Bible study teachers can't really say it's not possible to use Science when it comes to religion to explain certain things.

I think the easy answer is, "No." However, I can imagine circumstances where the answer is, "Yes."

It's easy to pigeon-hole religion. If you're religious, or believe in any religion, that means that you believe in an old guy sitting on a throne in the clouds, right? But that is far from being every single religion in the world, especially if you consider the religions that aren't practiced by millions of people. It's entirely possible to say that a "God" exists that works within all scientific laws. That "God" may not do shit or mean anything to anybody, but it's possible that it may exist, nonetheless. Believing in such a "God" wouldn't go against anything said by science.

And what about the religions that don't care about God? Buddhism, for example, doesn't care about God or gods. (Some types of Buddhism do, I know, but Buddhism's incredibly complicated. Some types of Buddhism don't have a God to be worshiped.) How would being a Buddhist go against anything taught by science? "But Buddhism's more of a philosophy!" you may cry. Who the fuck cares? One possible definition of religion is, "a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith." Using that definition, you could say that science is a religion, in a way. Do you not believe that the sun is so many miles from Earth, even if you haven't measured it yourself? Technically, most of what you learn in any science class is based on faith, at least a little bit, because you have faith that the people who studied the stuff and came to the conclusions regarded as truth were right. Of course, that's how we move forward, using what was learned in the past generation as a stepping stone, but the fact remains that when we learn that the earth's gravity is so strong, we're trusting that the guy who figured that out was right. We don't do the actual work to prove it ourselves.

Getting back to the point, a religion can be a set of beliefs. If I have a code of ethics based on psychology (which can be considered a type of science), am I not successfully mixing science and religion? I am using what I have learned about the world to construct a belief structure that allows me to view the world in a certain way.

Not every religion can blend with science, but really, not every science can mix. We're still learning, even now, and people have differing opinions about all sorts of things. Some scientists view some scientific schools as complete bullshit, and the scientists in those schools view other schools as ridiculous. Just like what happens with religions. It's kind of funny, isn't it? Everybody hates those they disagree with, whether they're talking about God or science.

ITT: People who don't understand what faith is and/or just decide to misapply it to science.

Edit: People who misunderstand what science is and does and casually claim there's faith involved/ call it a religion.

It might be nothing but a battle of semantics, but you can argue about the definition of "faith" and "religion." I've already put a possible definition of religon, so let's cover "faith":

Faith:
"something that is believed especially with strong conviction"
"Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing."
"A set of principles or beliefs"

Sounds like science fits that. Yes, there is truth involved in science, but we accept a lot of that truth in good faith. As I said, we don't learn everything by ourselves. I took a Physics class a few years back, and in it, we learned how people did all sorts of crazy math that I don't understand a bit and came up with the distance between Pluto and Earth, the strength of the gravity of Jupiter, how hot the sun is, etc. I accepted that those were facts, but I didn't do any real research. I trusted that everyone else was right; isn't that faith? I felt no need whatsoever to learn how they came up with those facts or how we knew, 100% , that they were correct. And, again, as I said, that is necessary, because we have to spend our time moving forward, not checking people's work for ourselves. But still, we trust that other people checked the work. We have faith that the institution of science would not allow false statements to be presented as fact.

Conspicuously missing is the definition of faith that gives me problems: Belief without evidence.

Let's start with the first bullshit claim: Science is like a religion.

That is impossible. Science is not a set of beliefs, it is a method. Absolutely no faith is involved in science. Maybe you can have faith that the scientific method will discover something, but the faith is not in the science.

Then,

That doesn't matter. The reason it's not faith is because the products of the scientific method rely on valid logic, evidence, etc. Scientists can back their shit up. When something can be supported with evidence, yet you're ignorant of how it all really works, then you're trusting the products of science to be true (as opposed to having faith in them as if there is no evidence to bolster their veracity). I distinguish trust from faith. Trust is what happened in your physics class. What you learned was the findings of science, which were discovered by people with expertise in the subject, and their conclusions were supported by evidence. When people "trust" the claims of religion, that is simply faith because religion can't provide the kind of support that the findings of science have for their own claims.