Is science coming close to the point where it can replace religion in the near future?

By definition, no, never. If Science becomes religion, it ceases being science.

I reckon science is already a religion:
The commandments by Einstein, Newton, Watt, Faraday, etc., etc.;
The chapters of numbers, physics, chemistry, etc.;
The occult of theoretical physics;
The sacred peer reviewed papers;
The old theory clutching flat earth zealots;
And any mysterious ways must be analysed and described in great detail, or at least endlessly theorised about.

Humanity needs both.
One does not nullify the other.

All science has no passion.
All religion has no reality.

Both exist within the other.
For some reason most people can't grasp this concept.
They feel a need to defend whichever they believe.
For them, it must be one or the other, never both.

Seems science is getting to be the same as any religion... When they start believing in things that aren't fact, it puts science in the same boat...

I think we need to differentiate between "Science," and "Scientists." And people who don't actually understand science, and THINK it delivers certainty, when it instead delivers PROCESS.

Individual people can go off the rails, and fail to follow the regimes of science. And plenty of people do decide to all but deify their favorite sources. That happens in lots of disciplines.

The word "discipline" kinda strengthens my hypothesis, huh?

Years ago, I was told by a doctor to take my medicine religiously.
I responded that I was not very religious and what does religion have to do with medicine?

He explained that religiously refers to a methodology that is repeated by instruction. I gave it some thought and realized that yes, that is what religion is.

At that point I realized that the scientific process is done religiously. There is an established methodology that scientific processes adhere to.

There are scientists that are religious, as in deity worship but the discoveries they find and prove are still science. Theorized and proven by a religious methodology of established requirements.

Science is like reading a book that has words that you don't understand. The words are there but some are not understood so it changes the concepts the book is written about.
As we learn the actual meaning of the words we encounter, the book starts to make more and more sense. Sometimes, understanding a word, results in a change to the entire understanding we had of the book. The words are the same as when we first started reading but the meanings have changed as we learn.

The scientific process is the act of trying to understand the words of the book to get to the actual meaning of the entire story.

If you apply these concepts to religion, it has the same effect. As we understand the words of the Book, we gain clarity to the Message in the Book.

Religions however, operate on the pretense that the Message never changes where the Scientific process operates on the pretense that the message always changes.

Religions use belief as a foundation and science uses reality as a foundation. However, where beliefs can change, reality does not.
The reality remains whether we fully understand it or not. Science is a quest for understanding.

If, at sometime in the far future, we completely understand everything about everything in the Universe, there will no longer be a need for scientific process.

For more on this...
http://kucampus.kaplan.edu/DocumentStore/Docs11/pdf/SC/HypothesisTheoryLawOrBelief.pdf

So, as I said before...

Humanity needs both.
One does not nullify the other.

Hypothesis = belief... Someone has an idea, and looks for ways to prove it

Theory has scientific evidence to support it, but not proven...man has a hypothesis that a supreme being controls them...

The "Hypothesis = Belief" is wrong.
Hypothesis does not equal belief.

Said another way,
Belief starts with an answer and attempts to 'prove' nothing. Faith maintains the answer without proof.

A hypothesis starts with a question and attempts to 'prove' the answer. The answer is not maintained by faith but by reality/evidence.

I don't think that people don't grasp that concept. It makes too much sense!!

Ditto!!!!

But you forget that 'reality' is different for everybody. It encompasses a person's physical place in the world, the perception thereof, pressures applied by it, then also a persons's physical well being. As 'reality; changes the understanding of the words in the book change as well, nuances are added and a completely different result emerges.

Just explain scientific method

Scientific method is basically:
The question
Hypothesis - if this, then that result
Null Hypothesis - if this - then not that result

Analysis of the question,
theoretical analysis - doing the numbers, math, chemistry, etc. on paper.
Show your working out.
set up an experiment if needed, run and observe the experiment, take notes and describe everything minutely, equipment, materials, times, temperatures, weights, volumes, pressures, colours, just everything. Then try to get meanings from the data taken, to answer your question scientifically.

Describing what the setup is, describing what change/input was made, and describing what the result is, in such great detail that another person with no correspondence with you, can repeat the same operations exactly, and get the same result using the same standard weights and measures, and using standard terms to describe every stage of the process.

Repeatability
After multiple repeats resulting in statistically similar outcomes are confirmed, the hypothesis is either proven or not. But. . .
Then
Peer reviewed, is when a bunch of experts in the field pull the whole effort to pieces looking for any tiny omission or mistake, to find any reason to disprove the findings.
If they say it's all cool and you did it right, THEN you have your true answer.

But then,
new equipment or software is developed, a new equation, a new discovery, a new way of thinking, something happens, and what was absolutely proven true, now isn't quite so cut and dried.
The scientist has to forget his new discovery, and make way for a newer hypothesis, to be tried and tested, and so it all repeats.

If you mean, does my use of the term 'discipline' support your accusation that science "is getting to be the same as any religion... When they start believing in things that aren't fact, it puts science in the same boat...," then no. 'Discipline' is another one of those words, like 'theory' that means entirely different things in one area of usage, than it does in common chat situations.

Science itself, is another of those words, which many people who don't study meanings carefully, misunderstand. Science is not an entity, and it is not a club, and it is not a particular group of people. It is a METHOD, more than anything else, at it's core.

Declaring that 'science is a religion' because it includes 'theories,' or because some individual occasionally claims to believe in science religiously, is as much of an insincere semantic game, as declaring that because individual Christians commit murder or pedophilia, that Christianity is all about those things.

But back to the ORIGINAL QUESTION, which I think we've gone off the track of...

can Science "replace" religion?" This is actually a more subtle question than we've talked about here yet, and I confess, I contributed to taking things of track a bit.

Historically, it can be seen that scientific inquiry and understanding has ALREADY replaced a lot of pieces of various religions. There is no longer a religion of consequence which claims that the Sun is a chariot of flames, driven across the sky each day by a God. No significant number of people believe that murdering farm animals in small quantities will cause the seasons to change. I think that is what leads many people, at some stage of their education, to see that as a pattern, and ask if that means that eventually ALL of religion will be replaced by scientific observation.

I think not, primarily because there are questions and concerns that Science inherently doesn't ask, and really can't ask. Questions about purpose, for example. Scientific method and study can and does gradually explain the predictable mechanics of the universe, but not whether or not there is a purpose or a reason behind those mechanics. And because of that, it is up to other things, such as philosophy and religion, to provide frameworks for how we deal with each other.

As we look back on the religions of the past and the sacrifices made to unseen Gods we scoff at the beliefs of others why we ourselves have no proof that the God we worship is real or not.Science and religion are they not both a quest in search of proof that what we believe is true.Altho one is based on faith and the other theory are they really that different..

Reality is not different for anyone.
Reality exists whether one person understands it or nobody, it just is.
What is different for everyone is how we understand the reality that is.
To some, ICE is cold, it makes things cold "Put ICE on that to cool it down".
In reality ICE is cold, it draws heat away. To put ice on that, warms the ice by drawing heat away from it.
Its the basic science of refrigeration.

People exist in a world of "Patterns of Familiarity". Reality is seen and associated then ignored and assumed. But...If the reality changes from our pattern, we recognize it again.
For instance, take the door knobs in your house.
While you were sleeping, someone moved all the door knobs in your house up 3 inches and inward two inches.
When you wake, you fumble for the door knob but it is not where you left it. Its still a door knob but it is now in a new location. Your pattern of familiarity has been broken. You see the reality. Eventually, you get used to the new location and you stop 'seeing' the reality.
People assign familiarity to reality all the time. Sometimes the familiarity distorts the actual perception of reality. When that happens, people think reality is a perception and mutable.


Reality doesn't change, the understanding of the word changes but the word always meant what it means, even when we didn't understand it. Our understanding didn't change reality, we changed to understand reality.

Reality does change. We live in a chaotic, evolving Universe that is always changing. Reality is simple but stark, cold and unemotional. Its difficult for an emotional creature like humans to accept reality.
We wrap associations, delusions and familiarity around reality so we can cope with its absolutes. This is why some people perceive different realities than others. Its a coping mechanism and is needed to keep us from going insane on the utter finality.
Some delusions are needed to maintain our sanity.

I have a passion for science fiction. Try to imagine how a robot sees the world. They are programmed to recognize objects yet form no associations or delusions to those objects. They might have the programming to understand the physics of that object but it holds no value to them except as the reality scanned. The writers give the robot personality, which gives it delusional associations towards the objects it encounters.
Science has already built robots. The real robots are not like the ones in books and movies. They are cold and precise, just like reality. Robotic programmers are working to give robots personality but it is difficult because the qualities needed to create a personality often conflict with the reality a robot must understand to function. The "AI" effect is fraught with problems because reality and perception change constantly.
Give a robot a red block and a blue block that are identical in every other way and ask it to choose the better block and it can't. But, change the reality by scratching a gouge in the red block and it 'might' read the blue block as the better of the two because it is pristine. If it doesn't read the scratch as a defect, it might still not be able to choose. It would all matter according to the perception programmed into the robots understanding.