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“It is my experience that the “conflict between religion and science” is not generated by the scientists. The history of that conflict is invariably one of reaction by religionists to scientific knowledge they object to… not any active effort by scientists to prove religion false. Of course there are exceptions to every rule, but they prove the rule rather than call it into question”

It appears that your knowledge of the subject is conventional and not very informed. Rather than open such a large subject I’ll just recommend the works of Stanley Jaki. The question is of course epistemological, and not one of science versus religion. It’s metaknowledge. Science doesn’t and can’t define itself, a point Jaki develops in his writing on Goedel. Moreover if non-repeatable events happened in Christ’s life then science would record them as data, it wouldn’t simply discard them because they don’t fit an imposed paradigm of naturalism. In fact at that point naturalism would reveal itself as rigid and non-scientific, choosing repeatability over data it can’t explain within the limitations imposed by naturalism.

Moreover if non-repeatable events happened in Christ’s life then science would record them as data, it wouldn’t simply discard them because they don’t fit an imposed paradigm of naturalism.

Good point.

But its kind of a continuum. Seems scientific method needs to get less rigid the closer it gets to studying the actions of intelligent beings. Sociology and psychology are softer sciences than biology which is softer than chemistry and physics. For understanding people, having relationships and using intuition and empathy work better.

Theology is most at the extreme. We can not understand God through science any more than an microscopic organism can understand us through science. However we can have a relationship with Him.

The problem many have with this is that God is more sophisticated than us and out of our control. He refuses to be what we imagine he ought. And He stubbornly persists at being what we can't comprehend. And yet we can "get" Him when we love Him.

"It appears that your knowledge of the subject is conventional and not very informed."

That's one option. Another is that the conventional view is correct. I'm certain that there are others.

But let me be clear on my position (and this is supported by the writing of Jaki regarding Godel's incompleteness theory and the "theory of everything").

The only genuine tools we have for incrementally approaching truth are evidence and reason. Hume pointed out that inductive reasoning rested on an unprovable assumption and therefore could not itself be "proven." Godel extended that inability to ever attain proof to deductive reasoning as well. The net result is fascinating if you are a philosopher, but of exactly zero pragmatic use to living human beings.

We operate inductively because it works. There is no other reason, and no other reason is necessary. It's all we got.

"Moreover if non-repeatable events happened in Christ’s life then science would record them as data, it wouldn’t simply discard them because they don’t fit an imposed paradigm of naturalism"

Completely consistent with my previous response to Andy. Science does not reject any such phenomena out of hand... but it does expect them to be actually demonstrated to exist before they can be seriously considered.

Any "non-repeatable events" that happened in Christi's life are not discarded because they fail to fit a naturalistic paradigm. They are discarded because they are not data at all, they are anecdote.

So along with Andy you are arguing with a convenient caricature of naturalistic science, not with science as it actually operates. What was it you were saying about someone's "knowledge of the subject [being] conventional and not very informed?"

Let no irony go unsmelted.