This is a fantastic question, Nojus, and I hope my answer will help you see what is going on. I am a structural philosopher and my reply is specifically about fields.
A philosopher can discuss religion and science, and as such the philosophical approach is from the highest position possible, while religion and science are then the subject matters.
I hope this vantage point surprises you: philosophy in top, science and religion beneath. We truly have a choice among disciplines. I place structural philosophy above science and religion (but I don’t have to, of course).
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Let's quickly agree that science is the sturdiest discipline of them all. Science is based on facts and scientists also work with theories based on facts.
The interesting part is of course right where the facts peter out and scientists cannot obtain more facts.
Going back to the beginning of the materialization process, the scientific approach dries up. Not many scientists readily talk about this. This is where their realm finds its ending.
It is possible to look out the window, and theorize a bit further back in time because living in the result means that there was a prior. What scientists do state, for instance, is that Energy does not get lost, so we can start with the general perspective that immaterial Energy was around already. We can leave it at that, scientifically, and accept that we have a generic position in science and not a specific position. We don’t have specific facts about the prior state, other than it producing the results indeed.
All scientists declare that we live in the result and not in the original state, so there was an egg while today we live in the omelet.
Not many scientists are willing to take it any further. It is extremely difficult to discuss with scientists where their realm ends because they don't want to acknowledge that their realm does end right at the beginning of the material universe.
On close examination, somehow in most of their approaches the egg ends up becoming the omelet, and yet they do not discuss that the egg had to get broken first. They do not discuss the breaking of the egg.
That's a rather long way to say that where scientists have Energy as the essence of (seen and unseen) things and do not have the last word, religious folks may actually have a similar problem. Not all religions are structurally the same, so I am only focusing here on the ones that declare God as an actual entity next to the material creation.
They, too, do not have any data about God, while for them, too, the facts speak loud and clear.
The mistake they are making, but are fully entitled to do this, is make God one and whole. They have an egg that somehow produced an omelet without breaking the egg as it existed. The egg is whole and next to it we find the omelet.
Perhaps you noticed how in the monotheistic religions there is very little word about God godself and a lot about our relationship with God. In older religions, we often have a story about the original God and about something happening to God or with God. In the monotheistic religions there if not much more than silence, so we should know that something is awkward right away.
From a philosophical perspective, one can see both scientific and religious proponents make the exact same mistake. They start with an egg and they are not breaking it and yet they all acknowledge that we live in a result and not in the original.
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I hope this answers your question, Nojus. Philosophy need not be in top position. We all can make our own choice what we place in top position, and I am making it my work to ensure people play with these options. It is up to us to investigate how things look when we put science in top position, how things look when we put a religion in top position, or what we can view from a philosophical perspective that just looks at all these options and disciplines.
I welcome any questions you may have, but I hope you see that I am not placing one discipline above the other, except for the discipline from which I write.
