It is obvious from the four statements in the November 17 issue of The Scientist (pp. 11-12) that definitions for science and religion are critical for defusing the evolution/creation wars. As an evolutionist who is religious, I would like to evaluate the problem a little further. By definition, science limits itself to those phenomena that can be explained by the invariant laws of nature. Creation science is indeed an oxymoron because it brings unprovable assumptions as explanations into the process of scientific reasoning. It denies science's methodological assumptions. The result is pseudoscience.
However, the concept that no reality exists outside of or behind the invariant laws of nature is not part of science, nor is it a restatement of its method. If that materialistic assumption is said to be the scientific view of reality, we have created another oxymoron, "scientific religion." Science has violated its own method by making statements...
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