The world ‘scientific’ and ‘science’ have been misused too often, mainly to strengthen arguments or claims. However, quite often the ‘science’ presented is all but scientific. Sometimes it’s not easy to know if a claim is scientific or not.
A good guideline can be to think whether you can imagine new facts being discovered that have the potential to support or reject a claim. That is, science is potentially provable and refutable. Every proof is temporary while refutation is for ever. For example, a new discovery in the nuclear processes field may confirm or force us to throw away everything we know about the age of the universe. So although our understanding of the age of the universe may not be true, it is scientific: it is the best explanation we have come up with to fit the facts we know.
On the other hand, the fact that we have not been able to refute something does not make it scientific. So while there is no conceivable way to prove heaven and hell, our inability to prove it does not make it scientific (nor true).
This is the crux of most scientific-religious arguments. While religion tries to show any ‘not yet known’ in a scientific theory as a proof that the scientific theory is invalid, it presents irrefutable claims (often tautologies) as proofs.
And to think how many people have been killed, and are still being killed over our inability to accept that we just need to live with this gap, as it can never be bridged.
