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This does not imply that Hawkins claimed or implied that there is a scientific basis for belief in God.I also did not state that Hawkin's book indicates that "scientific facts can be gleaned from superstitious beliefs",superstition being what I believe you mean by religion,a 'superstition' you acknowledge,however, a man of Hawkin's intelligence still considers it relevant to entertain.
What I state was that "Christianity and Neoplatonic philosophy were central to the Scientific Revolution through the inspiration they gave to the cosmological explorations of Johannes Kepler,Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton as well as the occult discipline of alchemy to the chemical research of Issac Newton.Stephen Hawking,one of the leading figures in modern scientific cosmology,also invokes explicitly the inspirational relationship between religious and scientific cosmology in his A Brief History of Time,where he explores,among other questions, the subject of gaining a unified grasp of the fundamental laws of nature, a level of knowledge he argues would enable human beings understand the mind of God.The point here is,religion, spirituality and the occult can and have inspired scientific discovery."
Note the words emphasized in black. I repeatedly state a relationship between religion and science as one of inspiration,which is very different from stating that scientists derive facts, from the study of religion.
Cross Fertilization between Forms of Knowledge
Inspiration in this context can be described as a motive force leading to the development of knowledge.The source of inspiration does not have to be an identical form of knowledge as the knowledge it eventually inspires.A form of knowledge can be understood as one of the distinctive categories,with its own distinctive procedures,through which human beings develop,organize and apply knowledge(Paul Hirst, "Liberal Education and the Forms of Knowledge"; "The Forms of Knowledge Revisited";Knowledge and the Curriculum).
Religion is one such form,where faith,imagination and speculative thinking are central.Science is another,where a range of approaches may be employed depending on the individuality of the scientist but where they must ultimately be related to the logical structure and existing body of knowledge constituted by science.
In the light of such a situation,Hawkin might be inspired by a conception of a creator who created the laws that constitute the character of the universe and whose mind would contain a unified understanding of those laws,to explore in scientific terms the unity of those laws,so as to understand the mind of that God.The concept of God is a philosophical and religious concept,reliant on speculation and faith to be upheld.The study of the physical laws of the universe and the unity of those laws,however,is a scientific enterprise,which,even though it might derive its inspiration from philosophy and religion,is dependent on the mutually validatable logic of science,operating in relation to known scientific knowledge,even if it tries to revise or overturn that knowledge.
Respective Relationships to the idea of Validation as Distinguishing Religion,Philosophy and Science
Differences in their respective relationships to validation distinguish science,religion.and philosophy.Validation means proving the actuality of a proposition.A proposition is an assertion about the nature of a phenomenon.Phenomena are anything,concrete or abstract that can be described.The propositions of religion are often not capable of validation by everyone,regardless of how prepared they might be to validate them.The idea of God can be described as an example of a phenomenon.The question of whether or not God exists implies propositions that assert or deny the actuality of the proposition:propositions that state that God exists;that God does not exist;that it is impossible to prove whether God exists or not.All these are possibilities,possible positions emerging from the question as to whether or not God exists.
The proposition that God exists is not one that can be validated by everybody,if it can be validated at all,beceause even if one agrees that God does exist,it can hardly be proven or proven conclusively to others.Even if it were possible to prove it for oneself as some people claim they have for themselves,it is a delicate issue whether others can also do so using the methods that anyone else might have used to prove it for themselves.On account of the difficulty or impossibility, for most,of proving the existence of God and many other religious postulates,religion often operates more in terms faith than in terms of propositions that can be mutually validated.
Philosophy might start from faith in religious ideas, from wonder at the marvels of the universe or from curiosity about its perplexities but could be described as trying to go beyond faith by reasoning about its propositions and showing how conclusions follow logically through a chain of reasoning.Even then,as evident from the history of philosophy,not everyone who follows the same chain of reasoning agrees that the conclusions reached necessarily follow from that sequence of reasoning or even that the method of reasoning is adequate to the task or even that the right question is being asked in the first place.Validation in philosophy,therefore,is more general and more widely developed than in religion but it is still not mutually binding.
Science,on the other hand,might be inspired by or even use the methods of religion and philosophy but must develop its ideas in terms that can be validated by anybody who follows the reasoning used to arrive at its conclusions.On account of the need to develop a universally acceptable style of reasoning,science uses the artificial language called mathematics,which,in its dominant form demonstrates a degree of universality developed through centuries from early civilizations to the present.Science also uses experiment,which involves testing propositions to see whether they can be upheld under precisely worked out conditions.It is held that anyone who tests those propositions under the same conditions should get the same result.Science,therefore,operates in terms of a strict concept of mutual validation.
The Intercourse of Science and Religion in Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
A superb demonstration of the inspirational relationship between the speculative but not necessarily mutually validatable logic of philosophy,the speculative logic and faith of religion and the mutually validating aspiration of scientific logic is Isaac Newton'sMathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.In this work,described by Newton scholar Richard Westfall as the most important foundational work of modern science,Newton takes the reader through a volume of closely reasoned arguments,using mathematical proofs at every step.At the conclusion of the book,however,the Cambridge scholar departs from his mutually validating logic,a logical progression which anybody who takes the time can follow,and possibly even understand fully its mathematical details,and makes statements on relationships between these logical and mathematical conclusions about the physical laws of the universe,laws that operate throughout the material cosmos,and the creator of the universe,who, as he concludes must be the originator of those laws, which he,Newton,using his mathematical and logical methods,has discovered.
In fact,the concluding section of this book is most instructive in suggesting how a scientist may develop scientific ideas in relation to a non-scientific cosmology,as exemplified by religion and philosophy,beceause Newton goes one to postulate further relationships,beyond gravitational theory, which the book develops, between material bodies and the cosmic force he attributes to God, but states that he is not able to proceed further to prove the unity of these effects of that cosmic force using the logical and experimental tools of his scientific discipline: "We are not furnished with with a sufficiency of experiments to prove these things..."
Newton does not claim to prove that God is the creator of those laws.He merely asserts his faith.In that regard,he shares a similarity with the German philosopher Immanuel Kant,whom I understand postulates the value of the idea of God while stating that he cannot prove the existence of God and that efforts to do so so far are faulty.His religious consciousness,however, seems to suffuse his work becaeuse he develops a kind of a kind of religiosity within the logical and speculative structures of his philosophy.
Relationships between Theory and Fact in the History of Science and Scientific Methodology
You focused on Hawkin but went so far as to deride the notion of religious ideas inspiring the development of scientific facts.Your conception is mistaken on two grounds.It is mistaken on the grounds of historical accuracy. It is also problematic because it seems to be based on limited conception of science as different from its actual practice.
To take the second one first.Science is not only about fact.It is to a large degree about theory,which itself demonstrates a complex relationship to fact.Theories are general statements about phenomena, their intrinsic or internal characteristics and the conditions that hold between them.Theories are useful in science because they facilitate the understanding of relationships among broad groups of phenomena,and indicate how such relationships enable us to describe and predict particular instances.The relationship between particular examples that demonstrate a theory can be arrived at through induction or deduction.To deduce is to "infer (something) about a particular case from a general principle that holds of all such cases".Inductive reasoning is reasoning "from a part to the whole,from particulars to generals,or from the individual to the universal".Specific example- "a process of mathematical demonstration in which the validity of a law is inferred from its observed validity in particular cases by proving that if the law holds in a certain case it must hold in the next and therefore in successive cases" (Both definitions from Webster's Third New International Dictionary)
An example of a theory is Newton's theory of gravitation.Another is Darwin's theory of evolution.Both these conceptions represent lofty levels of abstract generalization.In the case of Newton he developed an idea that deals with the relationships of bodies to each other throughout space and developed an understanding of the laws that are demonstrated in such relationships,central to which is the inverse square law which describes in quantitative,measurable terms,the relationship between gravity,mass and distance.From this theory it is possible to work out gravitational relationships between the celestial bodies and between artifical forms such as human made satellites and those natural celestial bodies.
Darwin worked out an idea in relation to biological developments of animate species,his theory of evolution.From that theory scientists are able to work out ideas about particular examples of evolution in specific species.
A fine work on relationships between theory and fact in science is P.B.Medwar,The Art of the Soluble. I also understand that Karl Popper,as in The Logic of Scientific Discovery addresses the subject. Also striking, I am informed, is the more modern James Gleick,Chaos.
Scientific theory, being abstract and general,has drawn inspiration from bodies of generalisation about the nature of the universe which are not scientific,specifically religion and the occult.This is because religious cosmology,a description within a religion of the general character of the universe, represents the earliest and longest existing form of large scale generalization in many societies.Kepler sums up the relationship between the religious philosophies of Plato and Pythagoras which understood numbers as the structural foundations of the universe,in its combination with the theistic Christian characterization of the creator of the universe, in stating that "In the beginning,God geometrised".Johannes Kepler,whose work is a turning point in scientific cosmology,was inspired by an effort to understand the motions of the celestial bodies in terms of the geometric postulates of Platonism,Platonism being a central inspiration to Western philosophy,religion and science(Frances Yates,Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition; Alexander Koyre,In Praise of Measurement).Newton was not only inspired by the occult practice of alchemy,described by historians of science as the mother of chemistry,his gravitational theory is described by Westfall as being essentially a scientific transposition of an occult concept-the idea of action at a distance without visible means of conduction,a basic concept in magic and possibly new in science at that time( "Newton,Isaac",Encylopedia Britannica 1992; Isaac Newton and Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton)
All in all,Kepler sums up the difference between a completely religious or philosophical approach to the universe and an approach which, though inspired by occult,philosophical or religious ideas,develops its conceptions in terms of mutually validatable scientific logic often represented by mathematics, in stating that he approached his scientific work in a spirit "more gemetrico" (more geometrical) (Yates,Giordano Bruno).
The fact that religion and the occult have inspired Western science has been a mainstay of modern Western philosophy of science since the work of Frances Yates.The relationship between philosophy and science has always been acknowledged.These philosophies have often demonstrated a relationship with religion.
A beautiful modern summation of these relationships between domains of knowledge in the history and philosophy of science is the work of Tian Yu Cao,as his Conceptual Developments in Twentieth Century Field Theories.
I would have liked to further develop these points by addressing the following topics emerging from the critique of Benin Olokun belief and practice [on Nigerian internet groups] but I don’t seem have the energy for that now:
Basic Cognitive Implications of Benin Olokun Graphic Symbols
Spatial and Temporal Division and Unity through Geometric Abstraction
Relating Space, Time, Ultimate and Contingent Reality, Ultimate and Derived Spirit through Geometric Abstraction