I hear people say, directly or indirectly, that academia does nothing to alleviate the suffering of the masses, while religion offers the Truth.
Let me remind you of an old, well-worn story and caution you that, just because something is a cliché, that does not mean that it is wrong.
Looking at the cave paintings of bison at Altamira and Lascaux, we can infer that early man tried to invoke sympathetic magic to increase the amount of food garnered in the hunt. Contemporary pre-literate tribes do the same thing. The invention of agriculture accomplished that end, not religious rites.
People have been praying to assorted gods for thousands of years to heal the sick. Medicine, sanitation, and nutrition accomplished that end, not prayer. Vaccination, not God, eradicated smallpox. Clean water, not prayer, eliminated cholera. Vitamin C, not tithes, cures scurvy.
The Norse, Greek, and Roman gods threw thunderbolts. Benjamin Franklin, building on the work of Maxwell, showed that thunderbolts were a natural phenomenon. No sense asking God to stop throwing them. And once electricity was understood, we could banish darkness in the night, preserve food with refrigeration, control a panoply of miracles with a push of a button.
Copernicus and Galileo showed that the stars and planets were not mere lights in the sky, but distant worlds and suns. We did not let the church's condemnation keep us from flying to the moon.
Mendel, Darwin, and Wilson provide the latest high-profile challenges to religious orthodoxy. And guess what? We, the people, are going to reap the benefits of their work, too, despite all the ranting and Bible thumping and threats bruited about by the religious fundamentalists. Their creationist/intelligent design falsehoods do not offer the benefits to mankind that true understanding will provide.
This list merely highlights a few of the most obvious times that science and religion have clashed. The true history of science and religion is a much more mundane erosion of religious "truths" a little bit at a time as science advanced in equally small increments. But the bottom line is well illustrated by these stories - religious "truths" are inevitably replaced by scientific truths.
The effect is the continual and systematic demise of religions, each replaced by a more esoteric, less practical religion. The early pagan religions that depended on magical rites were replaced by more sophisticated religions, such as that of ancient Egypt and Greece, that tried to accomplish their ends by bargaining with the gods. When that failed, those religions were replaced by Judaism and Christianity which put God at a further remove - a more spiritual God that was less moved by bargaining and more by appeasement. Islam takes appeasement even further to the point of abject servitude. It doesn't take much inferential reasoning to see the trend. The current fundamentalist fad is merely a girding of the religious loins by Jews, Christians, and Muslims as they come into violent conflict and have to re-affirm their identity. Over the long term, as science marches on and continues to reveal flaws in fundamental doctrine, modern religions will be replaced with something even less specific - maybe a general spirituality that resembles Buddhism. And our lives will be the better for the success of science and the failure of religion.
Yours,
Thom