Whenever organized religion has attempted to dictate scientific ideas, from Copernicus and Galileo to Darwin, it has risked being proved wrong, and thus has diminished its intellectual standing. Similarly, the ultimate arbiters of the origin and evolution of life will be biology and perhaps astrophysics, not theology. By the same token, the moment that scientists attempt to prove or disprove the existence of God, or divine purpose, they have stopped being scientists. Perhaps most important, science has discovered absolutely nothing in the past century of remarkable activity that has any spiritual implications. As far as we can tell, simple laws of nature explain every event that has happened since the big bang.
Some people find that a bitter pill to swallow.
Indeed, one of the most significant legacies of science in the 20th century has been the recognition that the universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not. The onus is on us to adjust our theories to conform to the results of the experiment, rather than vice versa. The tension between science and organized religion may have reached an all-time high in 1633, when the Roman Catholic Church accused Galileo of heresy and sentenced him to house arrest for promoting the Copernican view of our solar system. Today, the church has accepted the physical realities illuminated by nearly four centuries of science, including the big bang and even evolution. Many scientists and theologians now are able to have polite discussions, and emphasize that they are simply taking different routes on the same human quest for understanding.