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'Religion' is thought of today (if not defined) as something inherently inaccessible to evidence or reason. That is, so far as Biblical religion is concerned, not the case. 'Religio' from which we get 'religion' comes from the Latin root 'ligo' which means to bind back or together. A "religio" was what bound a culture together, the beliefs, ceremonies, worship, etc. It was a very public thing, not the private thing we have made of it. It was one's worldview and all that identified it. (See The Road to Emmaus)
With the 1800's near collapse of Christian intellectual integrity in the face of the rising secular Enlightenment and the consequent distancing by Christians of themselves from reason and science, Christians gained the reputation for beng position-defenders rather than truth-seekers. The Bible is not a philosphical book, but it contains, I believe, a very defensible worldview, perhaps the only defensible worldview (see here -- and also, here, which is Earle Fox's version of the cosmological argument for God and Oxford DPhil.)
God tells Isaiah (I:18) to "Come, let us reason together..." and illustrates that in I Kings 18 (Elijah on Mount Carmel), Isaiah 43 and 45, where He calls the world to a debate over who is God. Same theme in other places as well. God is the reasonable one; we are the problem, not God. Science as we know it arose in the late Middle Ages out of the invention of Christian universities -- for the purpose of a freemarket of ideas -- not an idea common anywhere in the pagan world. Science requires 3 beliefs to function (1) that the world is rational, (2) that the world is good, and (3) that the world is improveable.
To cut to the chase, the Middle Ages definition of science (if they defined it) would be something like "You have a science when you have a set of rules for evidence-gathering which can be used in the public arena, applied equally to all participants, and which can reasonably be said to lead to the truth of the matter at issue." The "matter at issue" could be physics, theology, history, or any other area which could develop such a set of rules of evidence. Theology was called the Queen of Sciences (still is, I think).
Christians feared science because they thought that a public scientific examination of the faith or the Bible just might end up disproving them. If Christians had kept their intellectual integrity, courage, and trust in God, they would have found out early on that honest Biblical religion squares with science on every important issue. People are just beginning to realise that today, but a looong way to go yet for most Christians, clergy especially.
Secularists hijacked science by getting the public to agree to their limitation to the five senses. They succeeded because Christians almost universally were unable any more to reason about such things, having made the fatal mistake of believing that reason and revelation are opposed to each other (the 2nd worst mistake the Christian community ever made). Hence we were seen as position defenders, not truth seekers. And rightly so. And hence got kicked out of the public arena (or whimpered our way out). There were some noteable exceptions, of course, but even the brilliant minds of Chesterton, Lewis, Schaeffer, et al, could not galvanize Christians on the street to publicly defend their faith reasonably.
The ID conference at Biola some years ago was the first time I began to believe that Christians might actually be recovering their intellectual integrity, and becoming truth seekers (like Elijah) rather than position defenders. Seek the truth, and then the right position will defend itself. And if we don't have the truth, we should want to know, not hide our heads in the sand. That is God's way.
My prediction: the more we lose our Biblical foundations, the more we will also see the foundations of science eroding. We are already losing the ability to produce scientists in our secularized, socialised, and spiritually fragmented universities. Science cannot survive the loss of belief in objective truth or the loss of a moral commitment to truth. America has all but lost both -- a deliberate ploy on the part of the Gramsci-type government centralizers -- who do not want a well-educated or scientifically alert public. They want a controllable public. But with trust and obedience, we can get them back -- from Him who gave them in the first place.
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