Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.
Interpretation
Science challenges religious beliefs by simply disregarding them as well as by disproving them.
Arthur C. Clarke's quote suggests that the influence of science can diminish religious adherence by either ignoring religious claims or by providing evidence that contradicts them. He points out that while certain mythological deities like Zeus or Thor have not been proven to be nonexistent, their lack of followers today reflects the power of science to shift belief systems, leading people to abandon outdated religious notions.
In practice
In a debate about science and religion, one might quote Arthur C. Clarke to illustrate the shifting nature of belief.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.
When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.
Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently - the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs 'good tricks.'
Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination
If you're going to go into space, you have to have an objective, a mission. Where do you want to go? Earth orbit? The moon? Mars? What's the technology to get there? You develop the technology for the mission.
The idea that there could be other universes out there is really one that stretches the mind in a great way.
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