Science and religion: friend or foe?

It seems to come as a shock to people when I say I believe in God. 'But Roshi you're a scientist! How can you believe in God?!' they decry, sometimes quite loudly.
I understand their reasoning. The church and science have had a complex and rather unpleasant past together. This has mostly arisen from power hungry people being scared of new ideas undermining their authority. Too frequently the reaction has been to demonise and ostracise rather than embrace new theories.

I personally believe in the fact that God made us in his/her own image. This doesn't mean (s)he actually physically molded us, I'll cover my theories on that in a later post, but (s)he chose humanity as the closest to him/her out of all the species evolution led to and granted us souls and the ability to reason and explore.

Like any parent I believe God wants us to grow up to understand the processes (s)he created. We're not going to be told how they all work, that wouldn't be learning, we have to discover it for ourselves. That's where science comes in. Unravelling the complex patterns that the universe works by, that personally I believe God put in place.

So fundamentally science and religion work together perfectly as we are trying to understand our Lord the creator. Science let's us do so physically, gaining knowledge of the processes in the universe and religion allows us to do so mentally, gaining knowledge of how to be good, just people.

It may all sound daft, but it makes a sort of sense to me. What do you guys think?

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