Science and Religion in Conflict

The conflict between science and religion has been around for centuries, perhaps most popularly highlighted as in the house arrest of Galileo Galilei for going against the Catholic Church's teachings on the nature of the heavens.

Here's the point that is often lost in Galileo's case: he was actually a devoutly religious Catholic.

In fact, historically, most of the major scientific minds have been deeply concerned with religious and philosophical issues, save for the last century or so. Today, the schism between the two is so serious that the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould considered them nonoverlapping magisterium, meaning that the two areas should never touch each other (a solution that really didn't strike anyone as very satisfactory).

There are two problems with religion and science. The first is the case where religion attempts to stifle scientific inquiry, claiming that rationale inquiry into a certain area cannot be allowed if it conflicts with religious dogma. This is the basis for Galileo's house arrest, resistance to lightning rods (honestly - certain religious groups felt they were blasphemous, attempting to control the divine actions of God), the banning of evolution education, neuroscience, and so on.

The second problem, I would argue, came later and is now almost as severe, where science attempts to stifle religious inquiry, believing that questions which cannot be broken down into a scientific context are not only unscientific, but meaningless. This is the basis for Richard Dawkin's compelling book The God Delusion and scores of others (the "secular progressives" that Bill O'Reilly rails against, for example).

Dr. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, recently-named President of the Institute of Physics, would not agree with either of these camps. She is a practicing Quaker who says that she sees no conflict between practicing both religion and science. In the article, Burnell says "In Quakerism, your understanding of God is revised in light of your own experience, while in research science you revise your model in light of data from experiments."

Nor is Dr. Burnell alone in this view of religion and science's fundamental compatibility. Physicist John Polkinghorne is a retired physicist and current Anglican priest who wrote the book Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship, where he makes much the same case - that the study of quantum physics and the study of theology utilize much the same rational methods of analysis, often in ways that are unexpected.

Polkinghorne's effort far exceeds (in my opinion) Frank Tipler's work in The Physics of Christianity, mainly because Polkinghorne isn't making an attempt to persuade anyone that he's got the answers like Tipler does. He is not trying to use science to explain miracles! Instead, he's trying to outline the similarities in the method of inquiry. In this task, I think, he succeeds admirably.

Reading Polkinghorne's book certainly didn't change my life, but it did give me a glimpse into how a truly rational religious man views Christ's life and finds meaning in it that shapes his own life, and reasons to believe that it has literally instead of merely symbolic meaning. If every religious person were like Polkinghorne, I wish I could say that there'd be no conflict between religion and science ...

...but then, there'd still be the scientists that cause the "second problem."

Related Articles:

• Book Review: Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship by John Polkinghorne
• Einstein's God
• Book Review: The Physics of Christianity by Frank J. Tipler
• About.com Atheism
• About.com Christianity