God vs Science Controversy Might Be Hard Wired

God and science are inherently at odds, or so goes the story with roots that reach back nearly 400 years to the Inquisition's trial of Galileo on suspicion of heresy.

The ongoing effort of U.S. creationists to inject doubt about evolution into science classrooms in public schools is an example of that conflict, not to mention the polarizing arguments over the decades offered by numerous members of the clergy, politicians, and some atheist scientists and scholars including Richard Dawkins.

Now a new study suggests our minds are conflicted, making it so we have trouble reconciling science and God because we unconsciously see these concepts as fundamentally opposed, at least when both are used to explain the beginning of life and the universe.

But what is the source of this seeming "irreconcilable difference" — are we hard-wired for it, or is it tenacious cultural baggage?

Experiments headed up by psychologist Jesse Preston of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her colleague Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago provide some data to support the argument that the conflict is inherent, or hard-wired. They found that subjects apparently cannot easily give positive evaluations to both God and science as explanations for big questions, such as the origin of life and the universe, at the same time.

In one experiment, 129 volunteers, mostly undergrads, read short summaries of the Big Bang theory and the Primordial Soup Hypothesis, a scientific theory of the origin of life.

Half of the group then read a statement explaining that the theories were strong and supported by the data. The other half read that the theories "raised more questions than they answered." All of the subjects then completed a computer task where they were required to categorize various words as positive or negative.

Read about the results here...
http://www.livescience.com/culture/090115-god-science.html

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