Friendly Atheist poses this question:
There are plenty of examples of science proving a religious claim wrong.
There are no examples of religion proving a scientific claim wrong.
Are there any responses a theist can give to it? Are there any examples of religion proving science wrong?
A Religious Liberal Blog notes that this is not a good opposition and I tend to agree, but perhaps for different reasons. I think that this is not a very scientific way to proceed.
First, the question is an absurdity. In order for religion to prove science wrong, a scientific means of proof would have to be employed to substantiate said proof in order to answer the question affirmatively with any degree of satisfaction to the interrogator. By proving science wrong, science would have to be used and so, it is an absurd recursion that cannot be answered.
Second, the problem with the quote is that it forces religious claims to be scientifically justified which they are not. Granted, the problem with many religious people is that they want their claims of faith to be scientific which gives this kind of atheist argument the fodder it needs to exist. The problem here is the assumption which has its starting point in a poorly constructed hypothesis.
Think of it this way. A room of 300 people all claim to have seen an apparition of some sort floating in air and then disappear. All have different ideas about it, and all would have seen it from a different perspective, but all claim to have seen something strange and unusual floating in the air that disappeared from view. The atheist argument quoted here might say, well rather than accept that anyone saw an object that apparently defied basic laws of physics like gravity and the conservation of matter, it must have been something else like a mass hallucination. This is not all that scientific. The goal is that after this experience has been recorded, you have to disprove that said object has much of a probability of being "real" and thus prove that all 300 people were wrong and did not see anything real at all. The null hypothesis is that no one in the room had an experience with anything authentic. The hypothesis is to assume that everyone did have an authentic experience. The argument quoted above has got it the wrong way around.
Something like the end of a Scooby-Doo episode where the mask is pulled off the warehouse clerk who "Would have gotten away with it too" would be acceptable. After all, Scooby-Doo is the show that basically tells us that what ever seems to be magic or ghosts is really just a ruse. However, "those meddling kids" prove this at the end of every show by pulling the mask off, finding the hidden projection unit, tape of chain sounds, etc. Would that atheists who make these claims could do the same thing even with the same indubitable rigor as Velma and Fred.
The fact is that atheists in general fail to produce proof that all experiences of God in the history of humankind have been false. They make that claim as an assumption and go from there. Doesn't it seem more reasonable that all of the people in history who have claimed some kind of phenomenal religious experience may have actually experienced something that current scientific knowledge cannot substantiate?
In the final analysis, atheists demand evidence from religions folk who have experienced what they call God that this God is "real". Said religious folk claim they have the evidence that satisfies them to the degree that this God was real and the experience authentic. However, this kind of evidence will never be satisfying to the whims of the atheist.
If the experience of "God" is an anomaly in human history, then the atheist desire and demand for scientifically substantiated evidence would be very sensible. The fact is that such experience of God is not a mere anomaly or blip, but a fairly predictable and consistent variable of the human condition. To say that every single instance of this is a delusion seems to be as absurd as arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin – especially when the claim that God does not exist is not a falsifiable claim. It is more reasonable, therefore, to reject the null hypothesis stated above for now.
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