"As Science Progresses, Religion Must Decline." To What Extent Do You Agree?

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countries. Although most adults still identify themselves as Christian, few actually attend any type of religious service. Christianity has been largely abandoned in Britain and the rest of Europe, and the Archbishop has warned that with the smaller tithes collected the Church of England could become unsustainable. Elsewhere, in Canada, 20% of adults say that they attend church regularly, and only about 10% actually do.

One possible explanation for this phenomenon is the progress scientists have made in explaining our world. Conflict arises because religion originally gained much of its strength from the observation of mysterious phenomena�thunder, earthquakes, disease�that seemed to require the intervention of some divine being. But if people believe in God because no other explanation seems possible for a whole host of mysteries, and then over the years these mysteries were one by one resolved naturalistically, then a certain weakening of belief can be expected. These ...

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1100, the Sufi philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, often described as the most influential Islamic philosopher, argued against the very idea of laws of nature, on the grounds that any such law would deny God�s ability to do �miracles�. While his actual significance is uncertain, science in Muslim countries, which had led the world in the ninth and tenth centuries, went into a decline in the century or two after al-Ghazzali. As a portent of this decline, in 1194 the Ulama of C�rdoba burned all scientific and medical texts. Worse still, the impact of this retardation in science reverberates even today. In 2002 the periodical Nature carried out a survey of science in Islamic countries, and ...

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