This was an essay title for an examination essay writing class I took last semester. Voila here is my piece, slightly corrected, yet fragmentary due to the time constraints (90′ is not enough to come up with a thorough philosophical argument - maybe a life is…)

Scientific Progress Dispenses with the Need for Religion?

Ever since scientific methods of analysing the world were on the rise in the late sixteenth century, religion has been on the decline. The church, or rather the churches, bit by bit lost their influence on politics, and on culture as a whole, at least in western Europe. Especially in the 19th and 20th centuries the sciences developed at such a pace that they were able to deliver a worldview without gaps by the middle of the 20th century (or even before). “God” was no longer needed to explain the world. And yet, scientific progress does not dispense with the need for religion, or rather the need for transcendence, as I will argue below.

Scientific progress only dispenses with a limited view of God, namely a “God of the Gaps”. This view assigns God all phenomena that cannot be esplained by science. In other words: If scientists cannot account for the genesis of the world it must have been created by God. (And some people seem to put forward this view, indeed). The dilemma of this view becomes obvious when one considers Big Bang Theory and the Theory of Evolution: Suddenly God is no longer needed because he/she only served as a “wild-card”. Such a view of God, however, is wrong in the first place. A God that deserves to be called “God” must encompass the whole universe, life and everything else. (Only to make things clear: Such a God is not the universe.) Furthermore, this God cannot be prove or be argued against; he/she is an axiom. Thus outside of scientific analysis, as the sciences more or less obviously do not work with the axiom “God”; their working hypothesis is to explain the world without this particular axiom.

Having dispensed with a limited conception of God, it is worth to consider a second field: the human disposition towards religion, which serves - IMHO - as an indicator, not a proof, for the existence of a “higher being”, God.  Religion and religious rituals have existed ever since human beings descended from the trees, as it were, and they still exist all around the wold, although to a lesser estent in the westernised parts of the worl. This may serve as an indicator for the fact that all humans are born with a longing to transcend themselves, i.e. to get into conctact with something beyond human nature. This religious slot, to put it flippantly, has to be filled with something. Traditionally it used to be the Christian religion in the western world but it has, in recent decades, become sheer materialism, for great parts of these societies.

Putting it all together, the dispensability of (a limited view of) God, on the one hand, and the inate ability to “believe” and act religiously (that a word?) on the other, one can argue that with scientific progress, the sciences now fill the ‘religious slot’, which used to be occupied by religion beforehand. This can only be stated so far, as from a neutral point of view an individual choice of religion can not be judged.

One might, however, point out the fact that science as-is does not provide moral values, like basic human rights, for example. Where do these come from?