Recently, Sam Harris asked the question "Can Science determine Ethics?"  and he has a book coming soon on the subject called "The Mortal Landscape".  No doubt to promote the book, he spoke at TED with the topic "Science can answer Moral Questions".  But there is another related question  "Are Religion and Science totally separate?"  Do they deal with different things?  Dan Dennett tackled this subject - especially the starting point "Can Science study religion?" in his book "Breaking the Spell".

So what things might be in the domain of religion? Dan says that "the religious experiences, beliefs, practices, texts, artifacts, institutions, conflicts, and history of H. sapiens, (are) unquestionably natural phenomena" and clearly could be studied by scientists.  Likewise "religious ecstasy (is) amenable to study by neuroscientists and psychologists".  And "the logistics of holy wars do not differ from the logistics of entirely secular conflicts. 'Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!' as the World War II song said." It is clear that many human experiences that we might label religious, can be studied by scientists.

But maybe science and religions can be separated out?  Maybe scientists should focus on factual things leaving religious experts (theologians, priests, imams etc) to focus on morality, the meaning of life and as Stephen Hawking puts it "why the universe exists" (more here).  But then you are telling fundamentalists that the story of creation is un-scientific and wrong and that religion does not deal in facts.  You are also saying that science can have no say on what is morally wrong.  Not many theists or atheists would agree with such a clean division.

Why should science even concern itself with religion? Apart from the demonstrated harm that religion causes,  surely we just want to know more about something that is important to so many people in this world?  Most of the progress in the human race has come from knowing about things - or getting factual knowledge instead of guessing.   Other than philosophical things like religion, there are other things that we think we know but we are wrong.  Dan Dennett gives an example:  You are normally oblivious of your own blind spot, and people are typically amazed to discover that we don't see colors in our peripheral vision. It seems as if we do, but we don't, as you can prove to yourself by wiggling colored cards at the edge of your vision - you'll see motion just fine but not be able to identify the color of the moving thing.

But hasn't this subject been done to death?  There have been innumerable books and studies on religion and related matters.  But again, as Dan Dennett points out: The research to date has hardly been neutral, however. We don't just walk up to religious phenomena and study them point-blank, as if they were fossils or soybeans in a field. Researchers tend to be either respectful, deferential. diplomatic, tentative - or hostile, invasive, and contemptuous. It is just about impossible to be neutral in your approach to religion, because many people view neutrality in itself as hostile. If you're not for us, you're against us. And so, since religion so clearly matters so much to so many people, researchers have almost never even attempted to be neutral; they have tended to err on the side of deference, putting on the kid gloves. It is either that or open hostility. For this reason, there has been an unfortunate pattern in the work that has been done. People who want to study religion usually have an ax to grind. They either want to defend their favorite religion from its critics or want to demonstrate the irrationality and futility of religion, and this tends to infect their methods with bias.

Once it's recognized that religion can and should be studied, then such research will be done.  In fact there are now organizations that publish research on the psychology of religion and in particular, why we think as we do. Some are under the heading "The Evolution of Religion" (list of articles) but every month there are new studies published that are the product of research on religion by scientists - primarily psychologists.

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