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Page 1 of 3 I came across an article online (hosted on a scientific journal website) that comments upon the similarity of religion and science. While it isn't the most eloquent paper I've read on the matter, it appears to be neutral (lack of political agend) and well thought out. He does what all scientists (should) do, scrutinize all assumptions and offer full transparency to the layman when the answer is unknown. Many scientists and (almost?) all politicians fail to offer such scrutiny and transparency of their work. Even Einstein, Dawkins and Obama are fallible... they are often wrong too. ;-)
I'll paraphrase/summarize the article before offering my own analysis on the article. My comments appear in square brackets: eg [comment]. Don Page, Theoretical Physics Institute, Department of Physics, University of Alberta, http://arxiv.org/pdf/0811.0630v1 Both religion and science start with basic assumptions that cannot be proved but are taken on faith. One basic assumption that is common to both enterprises (science and religion) is the assumption that simpler hypotheses are more probable (Occam’s razor / the law of parsimony). [Both are reductionist] In particular, here I wish to emphasize how both religion and science share an unproven assumption in their common element of faith in simplicity, that simpler explanations for our observations are generally better. There is also the related tacit assumption that the world is at least partially intelligible. Human beings, and indeed their biological ancestors, have long noticed that there are apparent regularities in the world: eg Sex often leads to reproduction. (And by reducing venereal disease and its effects on the unborn, high fidelity leads to sound reproduction.) Some regularities in the world seem so simple, such as the fact that unsupported objects fall, that God is probably not the first thing that comes into mind in trying to explain them. They are usually just taken to be facts about the world that need not be attributed to God. Other regularities, such as being given something by another human when asked, are sufficiently complex that they are often ascribed to God. But there are also intermediate cases, such as thunderstorms and ?oods, that are not so obviously simple as falling objects and yet are neither so obviously the result of God. [The crux of his argument; the main point of the paper: ] My claim is that in doing this, humans were not taking a perversely complex view of reality, ascribing different causes for everything, but rather they were attempting to simplify their understanding of the world by ascribing all complex behavior to one single class, God. So I would think that the move toward a religious viewpoint, that thunderstorms, ?oods, etc., were caused by unseen gods, was not a move away from a search for simplicity in explanations, but rather a move toward simplicity. Now of course there is a strong movement [mostly blockheads that don't know what ontological means in the first place], promoted by people such as Richard Dawkins, to reduce the number of gods even further, from one to zero. Indeed, much of The God Delusion sounds like a Hebrew Old Testament prophet railing against false gods, except that Dawkins does not believe in any true God. It is certainly a matter of debate whether the simplest explanation of all that we observe is one God or zero. [After this is a lot of waffle to back up his claims then a somewhat interesting conclusion. On the next page is my analysis.]
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I 'm refering to the fact that all scientific eviden ce must be empirical or empirically based and a hy pothesis must be testable using observation or exp eriment. If you meant something else then I apolog ise. 
. Thus you don't need have a full knowledge of th e universe to be an Atheist (ie believe in the non -existence of God). Small digression: science cann ot say anything about the existence of God. Howeve r, science can say if certain phenomena or mechani sm can be explained without invoking God.
