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their lack of followers today reflects the power of science to shift belief systems, leading people to abandon outdated religious notions.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'.
It is the weight, not numbers of experiments that is to be regarded.
Mitt Romney's energy policy is a relic of the 19th century. We need a 21st century plan. The fate of the planet is at stake.
There is no energy crisis, only a crisis of ignorance.
The more one chases the quanta, the better they hide themselves.
The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt... ," but "If ... then ... else.
Cosmologists have attempted to account for the day-to-day laws you find in textbooks in terms of fundamental 'superlaws,' but the superlaws themselves must still be accepted as brute facts. So maybe the ultimate laws of nature will always be off-limits to science.
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