But, seriously, yes, they can and do combine.
I would hypothesize that the finding of the connection is going to take some give from both sides.
Religion can't fall back on, "It's unknowable," each time a question comes up.
Science can't fall back on, "It can't be reproduced in a lab," just because they haven't figured out how to test for it yet.
If we accept that there is actually very little that is actually mysterious, and that we can only detect the thin sliver of "reality" in the same way that we can only detect a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, we're half way there.
The same rules that govern the movement of fluids, exist in the movement of rocks (mountains, techtonic plates) and water vapor and air. The only difference being the density.
Meanwhile, those same principles apply to consciousness from the air of subconscious to the vapor of thought to the water of story to the rock of mythology.
What if we find that, just like we found that epigenetics shrunk the world of DNA down particles that attach to the DNA chain and become hereditary we find that there is an even smaller particle that produces species memory. We find that this memory is in essence the entity that we refer to as the "SOUL."
I can't prove it. But 20 years ago I couldn't even decode your DNA, and here we are. Would it have been reasonable (in retrospect) to think that there was no such thing as epigenetics (which I just use as the example)?
Yes, it would have been entirely reasonable.
So how can we reasonably be so sure that we know what is unreasonable from today?
Meanwhile, how reasonable is it to think that the Earth has been in the business of transforming matter from not living to living and back and back to living from 3.7Ga (billion years ago) using the same mechanisms since the very beginning, and yet we are not a part of a larger community? That is (IMHO) not reasonable at all.
Can Science and Religion co-exist? Not in either's current format. But I'm working on changing that. Are you?
