- I agree with commenters on my post last week who challenged the idea that religion and science are competing theories. They are not.
For one thing, religions are not theories; they are not in the explanation and prediction business; and the value that attaches to religious ideas, cultures, texts, practices, attitudes — let's take for granted that there is value — doesn't stem from the fact that these have been tested, confirmed, verified or put to theoretical work using the methods of natural science developed over the last three centuries or so. One way to sum this up: God is not a hypothesis.
It's worth noticing that common sense is not a theory either.
That is, our conviction that the sun will rise tomorrow, that the ground beneath our feet is stable, that the world continues to exist even when we sleep, that we are not living in a Truman Show world or a Matrix world, these are not hypotheses either. Indeed, it is strange even to say that we believe them.