Science is fairly definite about what it points to, religion is rather less so. And most people accept that both of these traditions represent at least some form of reality, and that the realities thus represented cannot be entirely independent.
Thus there are many people just as intelligent and rational as you or I, who believe that the institutional segregation of reality as represented by science and religion is an historically generated distortion of a what is actually a more unified world.
If human understanding of the world is going to continue to advance, then at some point we will have to confront and overcome these institutional limitations.
The greatest minds in the world have spent millennia grappling with the problem of how to integrate the material and spiritual aspects of reality. Most philosophers would now agree that there is only one rational answer to that question. The answer is simply that reality is ultimately spiritual. The many modern and post-modern philosophers who defend other beliefs, will readily admit that they do so only because they believe that reality and rationality are radically divergent, no matter how much all of us might wish otherwise.
In other words, scientific modernism is the view that although the world may be partially intelligible, this does not imply that it is the construct of a larger intelligence. But I do not see this as sufficient reason to reject the idea that our minds are an essential part of a larger intelligence of which our world is one of the products.
But if I am right, then science is wrong about the world, particularly in reference to its beginnings and possible endings. I can do nothing other than uphold the traditional spiritual imperative to concern ourselves actively with these beginnings and especially the endings.
Thus, in as much as science claims to know about the end of the world, I should do everything in my power to make sure that its claim is seen by the public to be rationally refutable. This ought to be a fairly straightforward task, albeit one with spiritual, intellectual and political ramifications.
Dan T. Smith, Baltimore, MD