The Outside World
Science and Religion—Old Enemies
 Come to a Better Understanding


Sometimes its hard to believe the above headline, so long has the antipathy between the two existed.  We think of Galileo, the Renaissance astronomer driven by the threat of the Church to recant on his knees for the heresy of saying that the earth moved around the sun.  He did recant—but at the same time whispered, “nevertheless, it moves,” thus maintaining his scientific integrity.  Today, we think of the ongoing scrap—it is about 150 years old now— that pits the champions of Charles Darwin against generation after generation of religionists who deny the mechanisms of evolution he detailed, and today insist that creationism is a discipline that deserves an equal place with the findings of Darwin and his successors.  Finally, threaded throughout much of modern history we have the scorn of the scientists, who deal in hard data, for theology, which they have accused of being no discipline at all.
    All too often this picture of continual warfare is the only picture the public gets.  TV and newspapers play up conflict because conflict is drama, and they are in the drama business.  But beneath the superficial squabbling something important has been happening almost unnoticed by most of us.  Science and religion have been approaching each other with new respect for their differing roles, and talking with each other in meaningful ways.
    Science, once so arrogant, has been humbled by its own discoveriesOnce it thought it could unravel all the mysteries of the universe, given enough time— but those it has been able to solve often reveal beneath the solution even greater, more baffling mysteries.  The universe of Newton was a simple one compared to the universe of Einstein, who said that space and time are an interwoven fabric.  Now we face a microworld, the world of quantum mechanics, that is profoundly different still, and full of new mysteries.  Armed with all the vast advances of research into the human brain, neuroscientists still can’t even define what consciousness is.  The list goes on and on. 
    For its part, religion no longer clings so blindly to doctrine and dogma, and tortured logic chopping to justify them.  It is more open-minded, inclined to bow to science when the findings of the scientists seem incontrovertible.  Relatively few people today, for example, faced with the findings of modern geology and paleontology, still believe the earth was created less than 7,000 years ago, as an early bishop inferred from Biblical ‘evidence.’  The fact that this timeline was once a widely accepted credo only shows how far we have come.
    Today, among scientists it is no longer disreputable to believe in God and practice a religious faith; once it was.  Among religionists, the old fearfulness of science and blind denial of its findings has been waning, the noisy current battle over creationism v. Darwinism notwithstanding.  Both are engaged with each other well out of sight of the media, through numerous symposia, papers, meetings.  Both have come to a better and humbler understanding of their roles.  Science knows that it cannot find the meaning of life no matter how hard it tries.  Religion knows it cannot be in blind denial of the findings of science if it is to have any success in investigating meaning.  Their partnership in this great enterprise benefits us all.
        ~Bill Blundell