“Has Science Refuted Religion?” - Cal Tech

For me, the two go together. Science explains how the universe works while religion is like a handbook on "how to apply science (or how to live) in this universe in order to get the best possible result."

Psychology would be the 'how to get the best results'. Understand your (and other peoples) limitations and how best to work with them .

I'm going to force myself to stop now because I could go on and on. LOL.

Yes, keep going, this is what I was hoping would come of this topic.

You can have both if you're willing to arbitrarily change certain things that don't line up.

As Sam Harris eloquently said:

Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world. If there were good reasons to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse, these beliefs would necessarily form part of our rational description of the universe. Faith is nothing more than the license that religious people give one another to believe such propositions when reasons fail. The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so. The distinction could not be more obvious, or more consequential, and yet it is everywhere elided, even in the ivory tower.

Religion is fast growing incompatible with the emergence of a global, civil society. Religious faith — faith that there is a God who cares what name he is called, that one of our books is infallible, that Jesus is coming back to earth to judge the living and the dead, that Muslim martyrs go straight to Paradise, etc. — is on the wrong side of an escalating war of ideas. The difference between science and religion is the difference between a genuine openness to fruits of human inquiry in the 21st century, and a premature closure to such inquiry as a matter of principle. I believe that the antagonism between reason and faith will only grow more pervasive and intractable in the coming years. Iron Age beliefs — about God, the soul, sin, free will, etc. — continue to impede medical research and distort public policy. The possibility that we could elect a U.S. President who takes biblical prophesy seriously is real and terrifying; the likelihood that we will one day confront Islamists armed with nuclear or biological weapons is also terrifying, and growing more probable by the day. We are doing very little, at the level of our intellectual discourse, to prevent such possibilities.

Religion brooks no argument, Science begs to be challenged.

Notice your own bolded phraseology: "Iron Age beliefs — about God, the soul, sin, free will." The fact is, many religions do not posit those ideas or do not posit them as Harris describes. Only some forms of religion do. Therefore your discussion of religion only involves narrowly-defined perspectives, not religion as a whole.

Since "science begs to be challenged," you need to challenge your own understanding of what religion is, because many examples do not fit your mental template. And ignoring those examples is bad science.

Unfortunately, it's the vast majority of the three major religions that do.

We all acknowledge that christianity and islam are only now being forced to be civil.