The Conflict between Science and Religion

The Black death was a devastating global plague that stroke Asia and Europe in the mid 1300s. It is said that the black plague arrived in Europe when ships from the Black sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina.Most sailors aboard were dead, and those still alive were gravely ill. ‘’The plague hit hard and fast. People lay ill little more than two or three days and died suddenly….He who was well one day was dead the next and being carried to his grave’’ (Carmelite friar Jean de Venette,14th century).Over the next few years the black plague killed more than 20 million people in Europe.Today, scientists understand that the Black Death, now known as the plague, is spread by a bacillus called Yersinia pestis. (The French scientist Yersin discovered this germ at the top of the nineteenth century.).

At the time of the renaissance no one knew how to treat this disease, how it was transmitted, or how to prevent it.The disease affected goats,chickens,cows,pigs,and sheeps as well as people. Since the origin of the disease was a mysterious phenomena, many people believed that the black death was a kind of divine punishment for the sins against God.By this logic people back then thought that the only way to overcome this was to win God’s forgiveness.People at the time lost faith in God for they prayed with all their heart but those prayers were not heard,“God is deaf nowadays and will not hear us.

And for our guilt he grinds smart men to dirt,” wrote the late fourteenth century English ecclesiastic, William Langland, in his epic “Piers farmhand. There has always been a constant battle that we constantly create with Science and Religion since one is based on common sense and ‘’probable facts’’ and the other one is based upon faith and beliefs that a miracle is going to happen but like Russell M. Nelson once stated ‘’There is no conflict between science and religion.Conflict only arises from an incomplete knowledge of either science or religion, or both.

People back at the renaissance era saw the black plague as a punishment of God since they didn’t have something or anyone to blame that on, but what happened is that they started to lose faith which allowed them to look for another alternative way to find a solution or the cause of the plague and that is how science has been constantly evolving and improving and faith is becoming lost since we think that we know everything there is to know and like Ishmael stated in chapter 10 Men believe they have the power/knowledge to control the world and everything in it, therefore not need anything from the Gods. 

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