Free God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion by Victor J. Stenger Page A

they use on the job to their faith, and avoid letting their faith intrude on their science.
    However, as science and religion are actually practiced, they overlap considerably.Religion often intrudes on science's recognized turf in asserting that the universe was divinely created. Science intrudes on religion's self-claimed turf by subjecting human morality to observational analysis. But even if science and religion were independent, that would not make them compatible.
    DID CHRISTIANITY BEGET SCIENCE?
     
    As I have alluded to previously, a number of contemporary authors have asserted that Christianity provided a unique intellectual framework that led to the scientific revolution. 58 For example, in The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible , self-styled “beach philosopher” Robert Hutchinson writes:
It was the rational theology of both the Catholic Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation—inspired by the explicit and implicit truths revealed in the Jewish Bible—that led to the discoveries of modern science. 59
     
    In a similar vein, sociologist Alvin Schmidt wrote in his book How Christianity Changed the World :
Belief in the rationality of God not only led to the inductive method but also led to the conclusion that the universe is governed rationally by discoverable laws. 60
     
    Historian Richard Carrier has vigorously disputed these claims in an essay titled “Christianity Was Not Responsible for Modern Science.” 61 From the evidence he infers that “Christianity fully dominated the whole of the Western world from the fifth to the fifteenth century, and yet in all those thousand years there was no Scientific Revolution.” 62
    As Carrier points out, the notion that the universe is rational was already highly developed in pagan antiquity. He concludes, “Had Christianity not interrupted the intellectual advance of mankind and put the progress of science on hold for a thousand years, the Scientific Revolution might have occurred a thousand years ago, and our technology today would be a thousand years more advanced.” 63

 
If the basic claims of religion are true, the scientific worldview is so blinkered and susceptible to supernatural modification as to be rendered nearly ridiculous; if the basic claims of religion are false, most people are profoundly confused about the nature of reality, confounded by irrational hopes and fears, and tending to waste precious time and energy—often with tragic results.
    —Sam Harris 1
     
    PUTTING HEAT TO WORK
     
     
    I
n this chapter and the next two, we will spend some time developing the worldview that is presented to us by modern physics and cosmology. We will see how, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science gradually has filled in the gaps in natural knowledge that once seemed to provide a convincing scientific case for a creator. We will begin with thermodynamics.
    In the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution produced machines that took over much of the physical burdens that were previously performed by humans and animals. These machines operated according to Newton's laws of mechanics, which could be used to predict their behavior, thus greatly aiding in their design. Machines required energy to operate. Although Newton had not used the concept, his equations could be used to derive the fact that a certain quantity called energy was conserved in a closed system. If you wanted a machine to do a given amount of work, such as lift a certain mass a given height, then you needed to provide at least as much energy equal to the work you wanted done. In physics, the definition of work is useful energy.
    In practice, you need to put more energy in than the work you get out because some energy is always irretrievably lost as friction. Engineers could see that friction produces heat, and it was proposed that heat is a form of energy. A new science developed called thermodynamics to handle phenomena involving heat. Heat is also energy, but not all of