"Is
there a conflict between science and religion?"
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Science and religion do not have to conflict. In fact, scientific methods can sometimes be used to study religious experiences:
Miracles are often claimed to be the most "unscientific" parts of the bible. However, given that our world is so unpredictable, perhaps miracles could actually be possible. The problem, from a scientific point of view, is that, because they are "one-off" events, they are not repeatable, and therefore not experimentally testable.
We crave miracles because God's handiwork seems much more evident in them. If my broken leg suddenly straightens out and mends itself, this looks a lot more like the work of God than submitting myself to a doctor's care. And yet even in the bible, miracles are the exception rather than the rule. Instead, we see God's greatness demonstrated by many things coming together, often separated by thousands of miles and hundreds or thousands of years, and yet all of those things individually happen so 'naturally' that you would not have considered God to be in control of them unless you saw the final big picture.
In the past, intellectuals such as Leonardo Da Vinci could be "polymaths", knowing a little bit about every subject. Nowadays, however, there is so much scientific knowledge available that it is becoming impossible for a scientist even to keep up to date in his own field of specialization, let alone knowing what is going on in other areas of science.
Science cannot even answer every scientific question! For example, no-one can know what the weather is going to be like in 10 years' time - this is due to "chaos theory", which says that, sometimes, just a small change in the initial conditions can have huge and unpredictable consequences a little while later (the "butterfly effect"). Indeed, the more they find out, the more questions there seem to be that are unanswered. It's like peeling away layers of an onion.
It's not just that things are so difficult to predict - at the sub-atomic level, there is a law of quantum physics called "Heisenberg's uncertainty principle" which means that we cannot know everything about a situation, even in principle (e.g. we cannot know both the position and the velocity of an electron to 100% accuracy). Einstein did not believe in this principle. He said "God does not play dice with the universe" Neils Bohr is said to have replied, "Who are you to tell God what to do?", and Stephen Hawking has said, "God not only plays dice; He sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen."
In the same way that scientists cannot know everything about science, Christians cannot know everything about God: Christ's riches are described as "unsearchable" (Eph. 3:8), the peace of God "passes all understanding" (Phil. 4:7), and the bible is even honest enough to admit that some parts of scripture are "hard to understand" (2 Pet. 3:16).
Science and religion may have often clashed over the course of history, yet there is not necessarily a conflict between the two. Why should there be? The God of the bible is also the God of science, as He is also the God of chance events - and God of everything else as well - but while we may not be able to prove God's existence apart from faith, the intuition that scientists use to come up with their theories is part of what constitutes faith. The idea of one thing "seeming to suggest" another is part of the activity of faith, but even faith has to have a firm basis in fact.
Getting back to the Intelligent Design idea, what really leads us to conclude that there is an intelligent designer is the issue of likelihood, but while it may be intuitively obvious, the unlikelihood of life occurring apart from intelligent intervention is very difficult to calculate in a mathematical sense. Furthermore, in chance events one can never really disprove divine intervention.
It would be good if everybody was better informed on all these subjects, for, as Paul writes, "They want to be teachers of the law, but they do not know what they are talking about." (1 Tim 1:7).
Maybe you would like to hold a discussion group on the topic of the conflict between science and religion. If so, here are a few questions that you may like to consider as you discuss:
"The argument from design says that the world looks as if it has been designed by some intelligence, and therefore it has, and that that intelligence is God. This argument is nowadays wholly implausible because modern science has shown how the world in all its complexity could have arisen through blind, mechanistic forces. Moreover, the argument is logically untenable because it begs the question of whether God was Himself designed by some higher intelligence: if He was, then we launch upon an infinite regress with no explanatory power; if His intelligence needed no designer, then we might as well assume that the universe needed no designer either."
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"Is
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