The Conflict Between Religion, Science And Science

Religion is an important part of life for many people. Even people who are not all that religious by nature consider it to be important. The rise of science during the renaissance in Europe created a confrontation between religion, science and philosophy which still persists today. Is religion still useful to civilization? In this paper an evaluation of the conflict between religion and science will be discussed.
Dictionary.com defines religion as, “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs” . Oxforddictionaries.com
Marx likened religion to opium for the masses. Whether used medicinally or illegitimately, this drug has been used to try to alleviate physical or emotional pain; opium has been used in an attempt to escape the symptoms of that from which individuals ailed. As with most palliatives, only the symptoms of the ills were treated – the underlying causes of the sickness or injury remained. Marx’s real criticism of religion comes in the understanding of his attitude that religion had developed in a way that provided humanity with an escape from the realities of this world by offering a better future in the next life. The conditions of this life – poverty, oppression and alienation – could then be simply accepted and tolerated. In this way, Marx viewed contemporary religion as maintaining the status quo by stripping individuals of the initiative to change their circumstances. He saw that the harsh conditions within which people lived during the early to mid-nineteenth century, if not radically changed, required some source of illusion that provided hope. Religion filled this function. Marx’s argument was that, in order to remove the conditions of oppression that made this illusion necessary, the source of the comforting illusion, or painkiller, had to be first removed. Marx considered the abolition of religion necessary in order that people find real
Marx railed against the concepts of caste and division of labour, but seems to have written almost reverently of the conditions that preceded the Industrial Revolution. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, and the resultant drastic increase in capitalism, a different class system developed containing two primary strata – the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. “The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West” . Cycles of oppression and revolution, rather than resulting from class struggle, may be better interpreted as consequences of self-interest on a large scale, with profit and power as the motives, in which class domination and oppression are symptoms of unrestrained greed. The basic causality has been economics, but economics on a large scale with a history of a powerful, limited, moneyed elite dominating the much larger populations of powerless, impoverished peasants in order to satiate