Today’s popular media often portray science and religion as two opposing forces which are often in conflict. In the European cultural traditions, religion (meaning Christianity) and science have been historically intertwined. Many of the natural philosophers (the term used before “science” was introduced) of the fifteenth through twentieth centuries were also theologians. Isaac Newton, one of the founders of modern physics and the “discoverer” of gravity, wrote more about religion than about the laws of physics.
In looking at the history of science and religion, Christopher Hitchens, in his book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, writes:
“Before Charles Darwin revolutionized our entire concept of our origins, and Albert Einstein did the same for the beginnings of our cosmos, many scientists and philosophers and mathematicians took what might be called the default position and professed one or another version of ‘deism,’ which held that the order and predictability of the universe seemed indeed to imply a designer, if not necessarily a designer who took any active part in human affairs.”
Thomas Dixon, in his book Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction writes:
“There has certainly not been a single and unchanging relationship between two entities called ‘science’ and ‘religion.’”
Dixon also writes:
“Science and religion have a shared concern with the relationship between the observable and the unobservable.”
Markos Moulitsas, in his book American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right, writes:
“Certainly, the advancement of science has long presented a challenge to religious authority by providing explanations for many of the phenomena religion once sought to answer.”
Science is both a body of knowledge and a practice. As a practice it is a set of methods for gaining, assessing, and augmenting the sum total of knowledge claims that science holds. Joel Achenbach, in an article in National Geographic, writes:
“The scientific method leads us to truths that are less than self-evident, often mind-blowing, and sometimes hard to swallow.”
Achenbach goes on to say:
“Even for scientists, the scientific method is a hard discipline. Like the rest of us, they’re vulnerable to what they call confirmation bias—the tendency to look for and see only evidence that confirms what they already believe. But unlike the rest of us, they submit their ideas to formal peer review before publishing them.”
Religion (meaning Christianity), on the other hand, is based on faith: a method of arriving at knowledge claims—by simple belief, by assumption, or suspended disbelief. Faith is based on assumptions—faith statements (creed). Reason takes us from premises to conclusions by the means of argument and logic. Science operates by reason, religion by faith. While science is concerned about confirmation bias, religion often embraces it as a primary research method.
In his comparison of religion and science, Stephen Jay Gould in his book Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life writes:
“Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, real world of human purposes, meanings, and values—subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve.”
In a similar vein, Markos Moulitsas writes:
“Science demystifies the world, and well, religion becomes less central to people’s lives. But science still can’t answer questions about death and spirituality, and many still look to their church or mosque or holy book for guidance in these areas.”
In general, there are several basic views of the interrelationships between science and religion. First, and most prevalent in today’s news media, is the conflict or warfare model which states that science and religion or scientists and religionists form two separate and warring camps. The findings of science are seen as opposing and threatening religious beliefs.
Historians tend to view conflict model as a fabrication of the late nineteenth century. Its origins lie with two men, John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. These men had specific political and social purposes when arguing their case. They used the imagery and rhetoric of war to describe the conflicts between science and religion. In his 1896 book A History of Warfare of Science and Thought in Christendom, White emphasized the incompatibility between science and Christianity. Christine Garwood, in her book Flat Earth, reports:
“Their books turned into bestsellers, and as readers were seduced by a colourful interpretation of a dry, complex topic, historians, polemicists and popular writers likewise became inspired by this compelling idea.”
Looking at the situation today, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, in a chapter in Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?, writes
“Publishers have come to learn that there is a lot of money in God, especially when the author is a scientist and when the book title includes a direct juxtaposition of scientific and religious themes.”
The historical foundations for their work are almost totally unreliable. For example, Draper and White popularized the misconception that prior to Columbus most people thought the world was flat. They helped perpetuate the myth that until Columbus the world thought the earth was flat: it is a simple, appealing, one-dimensional narrative that is totally false. Christine Garwood writes:
“The myth is all too convenient: the flat-earth idea has become shorthand for ‘Dark Age’ stupidity, a handy one-liner to capture the days of yore before the Enlightenment era of progress and science.”
In a chapter in Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?, anthropologist Eugenie Scott summarizes the warfare model:
“Depending on which side of the issue one is on, one concludes either that religion trumps science, or that science trumps religion.”
Vern Bullough, in Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?, writes:
“To sum up, it is a war not of religion itself but a minority of true believers who are interested in imposing their theological views not only on science and scientists but on the world at large. They believe they have the answers and they want the rest of us to accept them.”
The separate realms model, proposed by Steven Jay Gould, states that science and religion operate in fundamentally different realms of knowledge and activity. In other words, there should be no conflict as science and religion are involved with different realms of knowledge. Eugenie Scott summarizes the separate realms model:
“Here, science and religion don’t conflict, because they have little to say to one another.”
In a similar vein, Neil DeGrasse Tyson writes:
“Let there be no doubt that as they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion.”
Neil DeGrasse Tyson goes on to explain:
“The claims of science rely on experimental verification, while the claims of religion rely on faith. These approaches are irreconcilable approaches to knowing which ensures an eternity of debate wherever and whenever the two camps meet.”
With regard to the separate realms model of science and religion, philosopher Sidney Hook, in his 1961 essay reprinted in Critiques of God: Making the Case Against Belief in God, writes:
“If it really is the case that the domains of scientific inquiry and religious beliefs do not touch at any point, and therefore cannot conflict, then it becomes hard to explain why the advance of science should in fact have weakened religious belief and produced periodic crises of faith.”
Philosopher A.C. Grayling, in his book The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, takes issue with the separate realms model. A.C. Grayling writes:
“Religions make claims that certain entities exist in or attached to the universe, and further claim that this fact has a significant impact on the universe or at least on humans on this planet. If these claims have content, they should be testable. Yet they are untestable, and at sharp odds with everything that science and common sense shows us about the nature of reality.”
Seeing conflict between science and religion, A.C. Grayling writes:
“In fact religion and science are competitors for the truth about quite a number of things, including the origins of the universe, the nature of human beings, and the belief that the laws of nature can be locally and temporarily suspended—thus allowing for miracles.”
About 1912, the embryologist Félix le Dantec began to popularize the concept of scientism. Scientism refers to an approach to all cognitive problems that uses a scientific approach, also called the scientific method. There are many people who feel that scientism brings about the truest, deepest, and most realistic knowledge about nature and society. Mario Bunge, writing in Free Inquiry, notes:
“While most contemporary philosophers reject scientism, arguably all scientists practice it, even if they have never encountered the word.”
To counter scientism, there are some religionists who attempt to appear scientific through the use of pseudo-science. One current example of this can be seen in Intelligent Design and Creation Science which pretend to advance a scientific alternative to evolution. Mario Bunge writes:
“Pseudoscientism is the practice of parading pseudoscience as genuine sciences just because they wear some of the accoutrements of science—in particular the conspicuous use of mathematical symbols—while lacking its peculiarities, in particular compatibility with antecedent knowledge and concern for empirical testing.”
From the perspective of Intelligent Design, where naturalistic causes have not been uncovered by science, the belief in the supernatural must be the default explanation. This type of reasoning is somewhat alien to science.
In pseudo-science, definitions are often manipulated. Those who are upset with the scientific findings regarding climate change, for example, will claim that disciplines such as geology and climatology are not “hard” sciences and therefore should not be believed. In reporting on the debate over evolution and creationism in an article in Skeptic, psychologist Ralph Barnes writes:
“If the conflict is going to be resolved by considering empirical evidence, creationists have lost the battle before it has even begun. However, if creationists can reconfigure the definition of science to suit their needs, they can make it seem that lack of empirical evidence isn’t that much of a handicap.”
There is also an accommodation model in which both science and religion directly engage with each other with the goal of deepening understanding. Eugenie Scott writes:
“The accommodation seems to be largely a one-way street, with science acting as a source for theological reinterpretation rather than the reverse.”
Finally, there is the complexity thesis: there’s no one simple description to the science-religion issue. There are many different dimensions to it. In some instances, science and religion have overlapping concerns, in other areas they do not.
Philosopher A.C. Grayling attempts to summarize the conflicts between science and religion this way:
“…there are broadly speaking three schools of thought: that science and religion are compatible because they address wholly different spheres; or they are compatible because the principles, practices and world-views of science and religion (more accurately, some religions, or some sects of some religions) are consistent with each other; or, thirdly, that one of them is right about the world, and the other one wrong.”