As it can be shown, both sides of this conflict should reconsider their basis. Today, unbiased science has revealed new evidence for an understanding of the universe that supports neither claim as it is, but points to a more all-encompassing eternal truth to which both science and religion can be integrated.
In the past 200 years, a lot has changed about our understanding of how the world was formed and how we came to be. With the rise of modern science beginning with Newton, mechanism triumphed over teleology in our explanation of how things work (Glynn 33). Glynn explains:.
As the mechanistic explanation expanded, it left increasingly little room for God. By the eighteenth century, theism "or the belief in a personal God "had given way to deism "or the view of God as simply the first cause' and underlying principle of rationality in the universe Deism quickly deteriorated into atheism, or the belief in no God at all. (Glynn 33).
Mechanism eventually came to explain how the universe came to be, and Darwin's Theory of Evolution claimed to explain mechanistically how we got here. If everything can be explained through the mechanistic model, then there is no reason for God to have to exist. Religion was just a way that we had evolved to explain the unexplainable. Now that everything is explainable, God can be dead. But not quite yet.
In the mechanical model, things can come about in three ways: design, necessity, or chance. They can be brought about by intelligent design, they can be brought about by the necessity of laws, or they can be brought about by chance or by accident. A mechanical model of creation excluding God excludes intelligent design. Also, by no means did life have to form; in the mechanical model life as we know it and indeed the universe was all a matter of chance. Because of this, a look at the chances of this happening "of the mechanical model working "are very relevant.