You're not wrong, per se, but you are parroting the fundamentalist party line. Maybe I've just got a unique perspective on the issue (I'm a Unitarian Universalist; everyone at my church respects my atheism as a sincere and personally fulfilling spiritual journey and a valuable perspective within the community at large), but I don't think science and religion are as opposed as the cultural narrative would suggest.
Religion, broadly speaking, aims to answer a variety of questions; most foundationally but least importantly "how does the world work?". And science indisputably provides better answers, which is why many theological schools of thought are more than happy to cede their authority in the topic. It free them up to focus on the more important question: "given the world, how best should we live in it?".
It turns out that narrativizing and anthropomorphizing the world around us provides an immensely powerful framing device for thinking critically about community values and for approaching consensus on what those values should be, both across cultural lines and between generations.
In other words it doesn't really matter whether the Torah was divinely inspired or not. It's the grain of sand that the Talmudic pearl accreted around, no more, no less.
> but I don't think science and religion are as opposed as the cultural narrative would suggest.
I agree. I take a fundamental interpretation approach to the Bible. I firmly believe that science must jive with my belief-set. If it doesn't, there are serious questions that I need to answer.
Personally, this calls into question things like evolutionary theory, or creation theories that don't match what I can extract from the Bible.
I don't purport to know everything, nor do I think I'll ever manage to answer all the outstanding questions. I also don't claim correctness on either side of the question. What is important for me is cognitive resonance.
> Religion, broadly speaking, aims to answer a variety of questions; most foundationally [...]
No. I would counter that religion (in general) seeks to answer the "why" of it all.
> It's the grain of sand that the Talmudic pearl accreted around, no more, no less.
"Seek and you will find..." in this case, we go looking for answers and eventually, (sometimes) in matters that can't be handled scientifically, we settle on suitable answers.
And thus more questions. One of the axioms I struggle with in these sorts of discussions is the idea of Truth, or ground truth, or absolute truth: this idea that there is some complete representation of reality that possesses is-ness (it exists and we perceive only a small piece of it).
If we assume there is a ground truth (as an axiom, inductively suggested by persistent results from physical experimentation), then we still can say nothing of the God that created it (this, all of this expansive and perplexing existence). In fact, science as it stands cannot answer questions that we cannot test.
How do you test for the existence of a being that is not a part of what we live in? Even if the God overlaps with our existence (a core tradition of Christianity being omnipresence) what test can we leverage to show He is here?
All of this leads to the dispersed opinions of many, many people. We have supposed two things so far: there is a God, and there is some absolute representation of our universe (above I called it existence).
Given ground truth, how might we approach the texts that are said to explain God? As a society (my guess is many people do this) we tend to overlay what we "know" onto things we don't understand.
For example, in Genesis we have words like erev and boker which are translated consistently as "morning" and "evening". But its ancient Hebrew, we don't actually have the meaning as it was intended. We have lost the societal context that informed the deeper meanings of those words. So we guess. We think they mean morning and evening. But that's at best ambiguous.
They could mean "order" and "disorder", as they are used in other contexts to mean that.
I'm sure I could meander about and come up with a logically sound chain of interpretations, but I only left this here to illustrate just how difficult the interpretation of simple things can be.
Religion, broadly speaking, aims to answer a variety of questions; most foundationally but least importantly "how does the world work?". And science indisputably provides better answers, which is why many theological schools of thought are more than happy to cede their authority in the topic. It free them up to focus on the more important question: "given the world, how best should we live in it?".
It turns out that narrativizing and anthropomorphizing the world around us provides an immensely powerful framing device for thinking critically about community values and for approaching consensus on what those values should be, both across cultural lines and between generations.
In other words it doesn't really matter whether the Torah was divinely inspired or not. It's the grain of sand that the Talmudic pearl accreted around, no more, no less.