Duke Divinity School says it answers what science cannot

I stumbled on an article in the Duke Chronicle with the title above.  I assumed it was probably a young journalist getting a little carried away with the headline, but read it anyway.  In fact, the headline was pretty factual.  Here are some interesting nuggets:

Duke Chapel

Students in the Divinity graduate programs come from a wide variety of backgrounds, but all of them come to seek further study in the field of faith. Each come having accepted the fundamentals of their Christian faith—just as a mathematics graduate student accepts the concept of numbers, or a medical student accepts chemistry, Hays said.
[Hays is the Dean of the Div. School.]

“There is no field at Duke that doesn’t take on presuppositions,” Myers said. “I don’t think the argument should be about the crazy claims that the Christian Church makes because we all have crazy presuppositions."
[Myers is as grad student at the Div. School]

“Science seeks to describe empirical phenomena in a material world,” Hays said. “It describes how things work. Science cannot answer questions about why it exists or for what purposes or how it came to be. Those are the questions that theology tries to address.”
[Hays again]

The study of what it means to be human is at the heart of humanities studies, and that is where religion plays a role, said Carnes, who wants to become a theology professor. 

“Humanities in general have something to do with what it means to be a human in a way that math and science can’t fully address,” she said.
[Carnes is another grad student at the Div. School]

I am a practicing scientist.  I do not have a very sophisticated understanding in philosophy, and I'll take it as given that there is some lack of "proof" for the theory of numbers or atoms, as Hays claims. However, I absolutely reject the reasoning that somehow a belief in 2+2=4 is essentially the same as a belief in the Christian god (or any other god). That's nuts! Chemistry and Christianity are just not on equal footing in terms of supporting evidence, no matter how intractable the ultimate proof of atom theory may be. 

These little philosophical slights-of-hand, like the one used by Hays, create a superficial notion of an equivalence of the factuality and veracity of science and religious belief. This kind of thinking just blows my mind. I also find this very disheartening because I have a hunch that these tricks are one of the more pernicious roots of the rejection of science. It's much easier to cast science aside if you pose it as a belief system or as equivalent to a religious belief system.  

Second, what does it mean to study why things exist or for what purpose [Why do carrots exists, and for what purpose are supernovae?], or what it means to be human?  I suppose in some sense I've been studying what it means to be human every day for the last 34 years. I'm sad to report I've had no breakthroughs :). Honestly, I'm not even sure I'd recognize a breakthrough if it occurred.