Rainbows... and religion.

Rainbows - nothing screams God more than a beautiful rainbow on a warm spring day - or does it? You would be hard pressed to find someone that argued that rainbows weren't beautiful. But do they show the existence of God or a god? Many a religious person has told me about the miracle that is a rainbow and how they are here to show us God's presence in the world.

I would like to use them to show the usefulness of science over religion. It's a great thing to say that God created a rainbow - and perhaps I'm wrong and he did. But what does that get us? It says that some being that we can't see painted something across the sky at a whim - just for the heck of it. That's fine and dandy - but again how does thinking that help us? Science can explain in explicit details the entire phenomenon of the rainbow. Using that we can create our own or also predict when another will occur. It does not in any way limit the amazement that I still see every time I look up at the sky and see a rainbow. Yes, I know it's light reflecting off droplets of water in the sky. Thanks to a little phrase (roygbiv) I learned in school I can tell you exactly the order of the colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet) you will see.

This is what science can give us. Students can create a rainbow at their desk in class using a prism. If we ignore science and follow religion exclusively we'd never know this. The two can exist side by side - but it does no good to teach religion in a science class. Science can be tested - and proven wrong. That is a failure of faith by definition. I'm not against religion by itself. It just needs to be kept out of the science classroom. This entire argument can be carried over to many religion/science arguments. Science isn't a religion - it doesn't involve faith to believe it. It involved testing and proving your ideas. Science can change it's ideas - religion doesn't allow for this.

Science can predict what's going to happen next. We might not be explaining everything exactly as it is but at least we have an idea for what should be happening next - or why it happened that way in the first place. Religion doesn't give that information. We just hear that God wanted it that way and so it happened. That may help you deal with a bad situation but it doesn't tell you why a rainbow forms. It doesn't explain why you should have your brakes checked on your car so you can stop. Science explains how the brakes work and can also explain why they fail. Telling the person you just rear ended that God wanted you to hit them doesn't really help you, does it?