Religion versus science II: Why science is wrong about life and evolution, and where religious beliefs can find objective traction

Abstract

Traditional religions posit a nonmaterial, spiritual aspect of life. Science rejects that possibility and given the contemporary intellectual hegemony enjoyed by science, that has greatly deflated support for religious perspectives. This paper introduces the countervailing position, that the extraordinary claims associated with the scientific vision have always been a stretch—beginning with a reliance on DNA for exceptional behaviors. That stretch is now unfolding in a broad failure as huge efforts to identify the DNA (or genetic) origins for disease and behavioral tendencies (in the realms of personal genomics and behavioral genetics, respectively) have been an “absolutely beyond belief” failure. This paper will discuss this unfolding heritability crisis, and then indirectly further it with consideration of challenges posed by some unusual behaviors including taboo and accepted paradoxes. A basic point herein is that objectively challenging science’s bedrock position of materialism—which has been an immense obstacle in the path of finding meaningful support for religious perspectives—is not difficult. A final point touched on here is that science’s physics-only based model of evolution never made sense as a possible vehicle for dualistic or transcendent phenomena, and thus the unfolding failure of genetics further deserves the attention of those investigating religious perspectives.