Is religion merely a primitive form of science?

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Great question! It may seem quite odd to equate religion and science because the former involves so much more than science. In religious communities and traditions one finds a whole way of life, a set of values and rites that seem to go well beyond the kind of inquiry that make up the natural and social sciences. Still, historically and today, religions do offer descriptions, explanations, and predictions about the cosmos and our place in it. Theistic traditions, for example, understand the cosmos itself to be created and conserved in being by an awesome, omnipresent, good, purposive reality. In today's terminology, however, I think it would be misleading and perhaps wrong to think of such a claim as a scientific one, but it would not be unscientific because there is (obviously) no evidence for such a worldview. The cosmological argument, for example, has some very able defenders today (see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for a good version) and that argument would seek to establish theism on the basis of the evident contingent nature of the cosmos. As a side point, some philosophers (most notably Alfred North Whitehead) have argued that modern science itself had religious (specifically theistic) roots. This is, of course, controversial but worth considering. You might find Whitehead's Religion in the Making of interest.

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