@Karl Stone: I have no idea what you've been on about this last three pages. What is this "very deep theory that's concerned with the nature of reality ... life ... the nature of mind"?

I'm going to lay my cards on the table as an agnostic with no particular belief system, but ... -

@Christoffer - This being a philosophy forum, members are going to ask 'what does it mean' - when it comes to science - or indeed anything. Regardless of certain members' claims, the results of scientific experiments have meaning only within a narrow context - in relation to potential technological applications, for example, or in relation to concepts whose definition is circular (e.g. 'energy' = "the capacity to do work" / 'the capacity to do work' = "energy") and therefore lacking in wider or deeper truth claims. For example, humans may have evolved (well yeah, they did), but does that *alone* that mean we should each devote all our mental activity to out-surviving and out-reproducing everyone unrelated to us? {There's a scientific morality for you...} - Science makes predictions about the three-dimensional world; brain science delves into how this links into the human world, but cannot explain it much beyond the point that it can give a physical location for the number three.

As for religion, do you really understand enough about it to call it (even if non-abrahamic faiths are excluded) an attempt to understand the physical universe and nothing more? In this case, science would be on an equal footing with religion in any case. Since spirituality goes straight for the mind, how do you know it hasn't improved our quality of life intangibly, for example by helping create social/moral and psychological/spiritual conditions in which scientists and others felt free and still feel free, inspired, and encouraged to do their work?

The scientific method is not what 'smells a lot like religion'. What does, as Jake implied, are the claims made mainly by non-scientists and popular science writers on the back of rushed and stretched conclusions, that science alone provides ultimate understanding. It does not - As you yourself say, it deals in 'facts', and so its only conclusions relate one physical phenomenon to other similarly-bounded phenomena. Needless to say, phrases like "delusions that corrupt mankind" smell 'religious' - in as much as each religion (at least monotheistic ones) tends to paint the others in similar terms, as well as clarifying that they are *nothing* like they are themselves...