Science vs Religion and Context

There are lots of groups dialoguing about science in religion. A lot these conversations seem to me to miss some rather basic contextual points:

• who is the one practicing science or religion?
• what is their belief binding strength, i..e., they consider their belief system an absolute truth or a relative truth ?

With this view, there are scientists who are fundamentalists. So wedded to their models that they can not see past them. Kuhn points this out in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Similarly, there are religious people who see their beliefs as their preference rather than as an absolute truth.

Given this contextual frame, the battle lines drawn between science and religion can be rather meaningless.

Perhaps the real issue is that as primates we have different needs for certainty in our world view. And the arguments are about a characteristic that we have that may not be under our conscious control. The programming of belief systems that we go through in our families, cultures, various institutions bind us to belief systems with varying strengths depending on our make up. Then we try and convince each other that our perspective is the right one. In this process we often confuse the familiar or the comfortable with an absolute truth.

Seems to me that part of our development is the realization that all we have is stories, both in science and religion. And perhaps the real issue is what stories have 

• what qualities
• what contextual bindings
• what value in our lives
• what values for our societies and our civilizations

This leaves aside the whole issue of how we interpret and use those stories.