[inspired by Phil's very cool, but very obvious post on religion]Religion and science have often come into conflict. Too often in the United States, where people are stupid and bad logic convinces them that things are mutually exclusive. At least in the Middle East, most people can at least reinterpret their Divine Word, where as people in the Far East get it right: Buddhism, for example, doesn't go against quantum physics or evolution. So here's my theory: religion was the first science. The Ancient Greeks or Egyptians or Chinese started to wonder why things happen, such as why the wind blows or why it rains. Simple natural phenomena. They couldn't explain things such as the chemical structure of water (thus the water cycle), so they had to invent a supernatural explanation for rain: there's a god that controls it and he has a reason for dropping rain upon us. In essence, the guys who invented religion (and it was invented, and I'll delete any comments that deny that point) were finding explanations for phenomena which they couldn't understand - they were the first scientists.Over time, we began to understand things - that boiling water resembles the clouds in the sky and eventually that steam turns back into water elsewhere - so we got to reduce all the stuff we didn't understand into one god. So now there was just one god to explain what's beyond the sky and what's underneath the earth, and why the moon and the stars moved like they did through the night. Eventually that came into question and we got the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and for the first time science was truly based entirely on natural forms and not upon any essential acts of God. So really, somewhere around 200 years ago, religion should have been outdated and cancelled out, but somewhere along the line someone caught a hold of this "science" and warped it to fit their agenda. And no, I'm not talking about the Bush administration, but more accurately the guys who started the Judeo-Christian tradition. Christianity and politics have been interwoven for the life of the religion - hence the Catholic church and why its history has to be studied, rather than known intuitively - and it was the initial corruption of the good work of the first scientists. So honestly, "intelligent design" and the "debate over life" aren't really that big of a deal - they're just the latest flavor of a misinterpretation that's lasted 2,006 years.