How can one believe in Science and Religion at the same time ?

What is Reality is a question that we often ask ourselves and both Science and Religion tries to give an explanation to it. While both are different from one another both tries to answer the same questions of universe but in different manner.

John F. Haught has offered the following metaphor as a way of conceiving of their relationship. If you were to walk into a room to find a pot of water boiling on a stove top and were to ask someone why the water was boiling, they might answer that an electric current is passing through the iron coil beneath the pot, exciting the atoms in the coil, causing them to radiate heat. This heat is being transferred to the pot, and from the pot to the water, where water molecules are becoming super-heated, turning into gas and then bubbling up to the surface of the water. From all the knowledge we have gathered over time in Science this explanation stands completely accurate.

But someone else might answer that the water is boiling because some person say Ashish wanted to drink some tea. This too is perfectly good answer to the question.

The first explanation corresponds to the work of scientists and the second to the work of theologians. No matter how closely you study the pot of water and run empirical tests to support it, there is no property of boiling or water itself that could tell you that its boiling is connected to the intentions and (unobserved) actions of thirsty Ashish. So you see there is no empirical investigation that could prove or disapprove theological answers about the motive or objective of God in the universe.

(Of course, certain types of "theological" claims can be disapproved by science. But I don't believe that those claims are theological in the best of its intention. An instance of this would be young earth creationists who claim the earth is only six thousand years old - this type of claim is easily and quickly falsifiable. What is not empirically falsifiable OR provable is that God exists, and that creation exists because he intends it to and has purposes for it that are currently being worked out.)

Just because something is not observable or empirically verifiable does not mean it is not true. To adopt a purely empirical epistemology is to deny the reality not only of God but of your own existence as a conscious subject. Consciousness, as such, is not observable. From a purely empirical point of view, your conscious self is the "byproduct" of the chemical and electrical transactions occurring in your brain and is not ontologically "real" - that is there is no "I" (again, from a purely empirical standpoint) that exists - your experience of being an autonomous and undifferentiated, thinking subject is a kind of illusion – for Empirical Examination can never explain an individual as a whole. Another way of saying it is that, empirically speaking, you do not HAVE thoughts (what, after all, is the "you" which would have them), rather your sense of being a subject which "has" thoughts is just a feature of your mind's physical processes.

It is absurd, however, to doubt that you exist as an autonomous thinking subject - to have that thought is to disprove it. This gives us warrant to attribute ontological significance to things that cannot be empirically observed.

Objection is ordinary, though, and people may say that to believe in something that cannot be empirically observed is, unjustified. But I would simply ask another question to them. On what empirical basis do they propose that only empirically observable realities exist? That proposition does not have an empirical foundation - it is an assumption. There's nothing wrong with that - we all have them - they are, in fact, unavoidable. But empirically speaking, there is nothing better about the proposition that only empirically observable things are real than the proposition that there are realities that cannot be empirically verified.

Actually there is no conflict between religion and science, except for when religion tries to deny what science has been proven empirically or when science unempirically claims that only empirical things exist. If scientists and theologians can refrain from these bad and self-refuting behaviors, they can coexist much as those two explanations for the boiling water coexist.