hope this is within the ROC. Apologies upfront if it is not. Delete at will if not!
Because they are forever snd inexorably linked by the concept of faith. If you accept that faith is the belief something exists or is true without direct evidence, both religion and science have elements. No one has ever seen a Boson-Higgs particle, but there is evidence. No one can see a gravitational wave, but there is evidence.. Lot's of medicines work, but with no clear explanation of why.
Depending on how deep into the realm of theoretical physics, theology, and philosophy we want to get then some will contend that you can never really have "direct evidence" of anything.. all the "direct evidence" that one perceives is just that, a perception that you experience through your senses.. whether seen, understand, etc. Bishop Berkeley did some work on this, arguing that everything was just perception anyway. Yes I see that 2+2=4, yes I can count, but ultimately that's just how my brain perceives the world through my eyes, senses, etc., and understands these perceptions.. but does that make them true?
^I'm not sure I necessarily buy that personally.. but at least to me the scientific "leaps of faith" are at least based on some more directly "known" premises.. with regards to the Higgs Boson mentioned, that's based on other "known" elements: "Well if 2+X=4 and 3+X=5 then we can deduce that X=2.. even if we can never really observe X directly"
*I guess you could say there is some faith in "trusting" that X is in fact 2 without seeing it, but it's a different kind of faith, to me it's like the faith I have that the runway will be there when I follow the ILS down.. I can't directly see it but I have faith that my instruments work. Having faith in gravity or the Higgs Boson (or my ILS) is different than wondering about what my purpose in the world is and where my soul (if there is such a thing) goes when I perish. Religion and science need not be mutually exclusive, they can be very intimately connected. And if there is a God, surely he (or she, or it) knew that it is in our nature to explore and learn about our world, and seek order and understanding
Sadly some folks are just too damn sensitive
Give me my coloring book and safe space please. Where's my blanky. Someone thinks differently than me and my frail sense of reality can't accept that!
Disclaimer: I do not think all athiests treat science like a religion, nor do I have anything against atheists in general. It’s only the hypocrites that I like to annoy.
Totally agree. There's maybe a range of agnosticism out there upon which most people fall. Claiming something that you cannot prove definitively one way or the other is scary.. hard core atheists freak me out just as much as hard core fundamentalists..