You seem to think it’s all either science or religion. Science, esp. the modern day scientific movement, has its’ roots primarily in Christianity. See Newton [greatest scientist of all time], Galileo, Kepler, Mendel, Kelvin, etc. You claimed:
“It is this spirit of self-reliance that forms the primary difference between science and religion.”
Well one Albert Einstein had something much more poignant to say about that:
‘Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.’
Or
“As a blind man has no idea of colors, so we have no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things.” (Isaac Newton)
More Newton quotes:
Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.
Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.
I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.
What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.
Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.
A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true.
Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been due more to patient attention, than to any other talent”
No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.
Live your life as an Exclamation rather than an Explanation
This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.
Trials are medicines which our gracious and wise Physician prescribes because we need them; and he proportions the frequency and weight of them to what the case requires. Let us trust his skill and thank him for his prescription.
He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who really thinks has to believe in God.
To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age
How came the bodies of animals to be contrived with so much art, and for what ends were their several parts?
Was the eye contrived without skill in Opticks, and the ear without knowledge of sounds?...and these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from phænomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent...?
To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me
To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.
Whence arises all that order and beauty we see in the world?