I'd say both are orthogonal to each other. The religious view of the world explain the "why do we exist?" and the scientific view the "how do we exist?".
God created the heavens and the earth, created man from the dust of the earth, and woman from man's rib. There's no room in that for the big bang, modern cosmology or evolution - one cannot accept the latter while believing the former to be anything but prose, which would make it no longer religion. Thus religion can only coexist with science as long as religion isn't taken seriously.
For example, you probably didn't have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinozism in mind when you said religion.
> Even when "natural laws" were discovered, those laws were divine in origin, and thus could conceivably be arbitrarily suspended or changed under divine will.
We still don't know the origin of natural laws. It's very probable that such knowledge is unattainable.
I have to speak up in defence of people who lived in the 9th century. In the Middle Ages, allegorical approaches to Bible interpretation were popular, and they weren't wedded to literal readings of it – e.g. Augustine of Hippo (4th/5th century) argued that the six days in Genesis 1 were not meant to be understood as six literal days – and Augustine's views on this were very influential in the centuries that followed. People sometimes seem to back-project 19th/20th/21st century American fundamentalism on to the Middle Ages, when that sort of wooden literalism was very alien to the mediaeval spirit.
Easiest example is “god made people this way” vs “people are the result of random processes that came about due to happenstance”.
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[0] - an important realization is that evolution isn't a completely random process - it has state in form of environment and path dependence, both of which concentrate the probability mass.
I don't think science can be used to find any proof of the existence of God
Can anything be used to provide any proof of the existence of God? If not, why continue to argue for the existence of God?
And you overstate "explainable" - we are only able to explain things in terms of math and fundamental (well, the most fundamental found so far) physical laws. But we cannot explain the source of either of those - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_mathematics#Fou...
The problem comes when people make decisions based on god making the desired outcome to pass, such as “don’t worry about climate change, everything happens for the better and god will take care of us”. There are religions that believe their purpose is to breed and multiply, without regard to the parameters of the system, because god will take care of the problems.
Also, culturally, in the majority of the "Western" nations, religion and belief in an omnipotent god are synonymous. There are outliers and exceptions, but they have little to no sway on the zeitgeist.
Those who define science as truth are being lazy with the definition. Science is a series of experiments to determine what doesn't seem to be true, so we can narrow down what might be true.
I'm not meaning to be oblique or argumentative, and I actually respect the right of anyone to believe anything they find to be personally gratifying to believe (otherwise science wouldn't progress). I just tend to get entrenched in these discussions because I find religion (and faith) so fascinating. I see "faith" as the birth of a hypothesis, but without experimentation, it's only a hypothesis.
There is crossover in the Venn diagrams of religion and science. History has shown that as scientific knowledge increases, the area that religion has previously laid claim to decreases.
They definitely, and historically, conflict until you're left with religion laying claim to the area that is un-provable, and therefore, un-falsifiable. This is the root of the "god-of-the-gaps" fallacy, and seems to be usually only met with the "fine-tuned-universe" theory, which is, if you think about it, a circular argument at best, and self defeating at worst.
This is, like your comment, taking strict definitions for both "why" and "how".
"why" we exist can have answers ranging from "we're the current latest bunch of mutants resulting from this whole evolution thing" all the way to "as self-realized, intelligent beings, we inevitably ask this question, and asking this question is the only predictable outcome of being intelligent and self-realized."
"how" we exist can be answered anywhere from "with a whole lot of luck" to "badly".
You need to specify what you mean by "why" and "how" for your distinction to have any debatable qualities.
To this range of answers, I'd add "because God created us (because of reasons outside the scope of this answer)"
"how we exist" is how does the universe works, which is explored and explained by the various scientific fields
Yes, but which god, and why does this explanation get any greater credence than Douglas Adams' writing "the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure. The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of The Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel."
The religions of the world disagree with each other on the "why", and none of them seem to be interested in demonstrating the veracity of their theory. This is why science generally ignores the "why". No-one has come up with a reasonable way to show, one way or another, which theory may be truer (or more aptly, falser) than any other, and therefore the question currently has no meaningful answer. If this changes, it will show that all, some, one, or none of the current religions are correct, but thousands of years of discussion haven't produced anything close to solving this problem, and this discussion has been going on since before Akhenaten.
No, it's not.
> it's hard to be patriotic when every country has so many skeletons in the closet you'd think it's perpetually Halloween
When did nations not have skeletons in their closets?