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When we hear the words “science” and “religion” we immediately think of the stormy history of their relationship. But the chronicle of religion’s encounter with science is by no means only one of warfare. Here we shall examine four distinct ways in which science and religion may stand in relation to each other:

1. Conflict—the conviction that science and religion are fundamentally irreconcilable;

2. Contrast—the claim that there can be no possibility of genuine conflict since religion and science are each responding to radically different questions;

3. Contact—an approach that goes beyond the standoff, in which science and religion simply agree not to be enemies, seeking a positive and fruitful correspondence between them;

4. Confirmation—a seldom articulated position that shows the ways in which, at a very deep level, religion supports and nourishes the entire scientific enterprise.

A grasp of these four approaches should help us make our way through the thicket of issues that make up the subject matter of this book. Let us now examine each of them more closely.

I. Conflict

Many scientific thinkers are quite certain that religion can never be reconciled with science. If you are a scientist, they say, it is hard to imagine how you could honestly also be religious, at least in the sense of believing in God. Their main reason for drawing this conclusion is that religion apparently cannot demonstrate the truth of its ideas in a straightforward way, whereas science can. Religion tries to sneak by without providing any concrete evidence of God’s existence. Science, on the other hand, is willing to test all of its hypotheses and theories against “experience.” Religion cannot do this in a way that is satisfying to an impartial witness. Thus, there is a “conflict” between the scientific and the religious ways of understanding.

Both historical and philosophical factors seem to substantiate such a grim verdict. Historically, we need only to recall the obvious examples: the Church’s persecution of Galileo in the seventeenth century and the widespread religious aversion to Darwin’s evolutionary theory in the nineteenth and twentieth. The slow pace by which religious thought comes to terms with science, and the fact that many theists still have a distaste for it, suggest that religion will never get along with science. Since so many believers in God have resisted the findings of astronomy, physics, and biology, is it any wonder that religion comes across as inherently hostile to science?

More important than these historical considerations, however, are the imposing philosophical (specifically epistemological) obstacles that religion and theology present to scientific skeptics. The main problem here is that religious ideas seem to be experientially untestable. That is, they exempt themselves from the rigors of public examination, whereas science always submits its ideas to open experimentation. If empirical scrutiny shows a scientific hypothesis to be mistaken, then science willingly discards it and tries out alternatives, subjecting these also to the same rigorous process of inspection.

But can you do the same with religious teachings? Don’t they dodge all attempts to demonstrate their truth observationally? Don’t theists, for example, go on believing in God no matter what they observe in the world, including enormous suffering and evil? Doesn’t Judaism, for example, say of its Lord: “Even though He slay me, yet shall I trust in Him”? Isn’t the “religious hypothesis,” if we may use this expression, completely impervious to, and fundamentally unaffected by, the things we actually experience?

Putting this another way, it seems to skeptics that religious teachings are “unfalsifiable.” After all, the renowned philosopher Karl Popper argued that genuine science strives to come up with evidence that will show its ideas to be wrong. That is, science has the fortitude to risk the “falsification” of its own claims.71 For example, since relativity theory predicts that light waves will always bend in the presence of gravitational fields, then scientists should look for possible instances in which this prediction might not be true. Then, if they cannot find any evidence to the contrary, this means that relativity is a pretty strong theory for weathering all attempts at falsification. Falsifiability is the mark of a theory’s scientific status. A willingness to allow its ideas to be falsified purifies science and shows it to be a truly open and honest way of learning about the nature of things.

But can religion display a comparable openness? Scientific skeptics (i.e. those who reject religion in the name of science) think that religion lacks the robust probity of science. The God-hypothesis, for example, seems to be completely beyond falsification, so it cannot pass muster before the courts of science. Religion is based, skeptics claim, on a priori assumptions, or “faith,” whereas science takes nothing for granted. In addition, religion relies too heavily on the imagination, whereas science sticks to observable facts. Religion is highly emotional, passionate, and subjective, whereas science strives to remain disinterested, dispassionate, and objective. These antitheses seem to add up to nothing less than an insuperable mutual hostility between science and religion.

Whenever scientific ideas do not correspond with the letter of the Bible (which is quite often), biblical literalists argue that science must be wrong and religion right. This is especially the case regarding evolution, but also with miracles, the creation of the universe, the origin of life, and other issues. Many Christians in the USA and elsewhere maintain that the Bible teaches the “true” science and that secular science should be rejected if it does not correspond with the letter of Scripture.

In addition to biblical literalists, there are other critics who think that science is the enemy of religion. They argue that it was the coming of science that produced the emptiness and meaninglessness of modern experience. When science separated the experience of “facts” from our human need for eternal “values,” they argue, it emptied the cosmos of any real meaning. And since the main business of religion is to teach us the meaning of things, it cannot be reconciled with science. We would have been better off if the scientific revolution had never occurred.

In a controversial new book, for example, the British journalist Bryan Appleyard passionately argues that science is “spiritually corrosive, burning away ancient authorities and traditions.”72 Science, he insists, is inherently incapable of coexisting with religion. It is not a neutral way of knowing at all, but a subversive and demonic force that has evacuated our culture of its spiritual substance. It is impossible, he goes on to say, for anyone to be both religious and scientific in any honest, straightforward way.

Appleyard’s contention that science is “absolutely not compatible with religion” is confirmed from the other side by scientific skeptics, although, for them, science brings about the liberation rather than the emptying of culture. While they are certainly aware that many religious believers see no conflict between religion and science today, and that many theists are admittedly good scientists, skeptics claim that both the logic and the spirit of science are nevertheless fundamentally incompatible with any form of theistic religion. As the Cornell historian of science William Provine puts it, we have to “check our brains at the church house door” if we are to be both scientist and believer.73 More specific reasons for this judgment will be offered in each succeeding chapter.

II. Contrast

Many other scientists and theologians, on the other hand, find no such opposition between religion and science. Each is valid, they argue, though only in its own, clearly defined sphere of inquiry. Religion cannot be judged by the standards of science, nor vice-versa, because the questions each asks are so completely disparate and the content of their answers so distinct that it makes no sense to compare them with each other. If religion and science were both trying to do the same job, then they might be incompatible. But as they have radically dissimilar tasks, if we just keep them in their separate jurisdictions, preventing them from invading each other’s territory, there can never be any real “problem” of science and religion.

According to this “contrast” approach, the impression that religion conflicts with science is almost always rooted in a previous confusion or “conflation” of science with religion or some other belief system. To avoid conflict, then, we must first avoid any mindless melding of science and belief into an undifferentiated smudge. It was, after all, the inability of medieval theology to distinguish religion’s role clearly from that of science that made Galileo’s ideas seem so hostile to believers in the sixteenth century.

In fact, it is nearly always a prior conflation of science with religion that leads eventually to the sense that there is a conflict between them. The uncritical mixing of science with religion before the scientific era is what led to the lamentable condemnation of Galileo by the Church and to the hostility that many scientists still feel toward religion. Now, however, we should know better: religion and science have no business meddling in each other’s affairs in the first place. To avoid conflict, therefore, our second approach claims that we should carefully contrast science with religion. They are such completely independent ways of understanding reality that it is meaningless to place them in opposition to each other.

Conflation, in this view, is an unsatisfactory attempt to avoid conflict by carelessly commingling science with belief. Instead of respecting the sharp differences between science and religion, conflation weaves them into a single fabric where they fade into each other, becoming indistinguishable. Today, for instance, some conservative Christians argue that the biblical stories of creation give us the best scientific information about the beginnings of the universe and life. They call their fusion of science and belief “creation science,” an amalgamation that renounces the Darwinian theory of evolution in favor of a literalist interpretation of the biblical accounts of the world’s creation. It insists that the biblical stories are “scientific” and that they should be taught in public schools as the best alternative to evolutionary biology.

Another common brand of conflation is “concordism.” Rather than rejecting modern science outright, concordism forces the biblical text to correspond, at least in a loose way, with the patterns of modern science. In order to salvage the literal truth of the biblical book of Genesis, for example, some religious scientists match the six days of creation with what they consider to be six corresponding epochs in the scientific account of cosmic evolution. Religion, in this interpretation, must be made to look scientific at all costs if it is to be intellectually respectable today. In his book Genesis and The Big Bang, physicist Gerald Schroeder, for example, argues that relativity theory, with its challenge to the common sense notion of absolute simultaneity, once again allows us to take literally the six-day sequence of creation as depicted in the Bible. He attempts to show that what from one frame of reference appears as a single day may be billions of years from another. So the Bible agrees with science after all and physicists can now embrace religion!74

This conflation of science and religion is born out of a very human craving for unity in our understanding of the world. Because it seems to harmonize science and religion so neatly, it appeals to millions of people. At first sight, its blending of religion with science would seem to be a credible way of avoiding conflict. However, history shows that eventually the incommensurate strands of science and religion will begin to unravel, and a sense of conflict will take the place of superficial agreement. New developments in science, such as in evolutionary biology, geology, or astrophysics, put an end to easy alliances of the Bible and scientific interpretations of nature. Avoiding conflict by ignoring the vast differences between science and religious scriptures leads inevitably to fruitless confrontations. Unfortunately, these are what the mass media focus on, giving many people the impression that science and religion are perpetual enemies. The “contrast” approach proposes a very simple way of heading off any such appearance of conflict.

III. Contact

The method of contrast may be an important step toward clarity, but it still fails to satisfy those who seek a more unified picture of reality. As Ian Barbour might say, it is a helpful first approximation, but contrast leaves things at a frustrating impasse.75 The urge to discover the coherence of all of our ways of knowing is too powerful for us to suppress indefinitely, so I suggest here that we consider a third approach—one that I shall simply call contact.

This way of relating religion to science is not content to leave the world divided into the two realms defined by the contrast position. Yet it also does not wish to revert to the superficial harmony of conflation either. It agrees that science and religion are logically and linguistically distinct, but it knows that, in the real world, they cannot be easily compartmentalized, as the contrast position supposes. After all, religion in the West has helped shape the history of science and scientific cosmology, in turn, has influenced theology. It is impossible to separate them completely, even though we can try to make clear logical distinctions in our definitions of them.

In addition, it seems unlikely that just any old cosmology will be compatible with just any old theology, as the contrast position would seem to allow. The kind of world described by evolutionary biology and big bang physics, for example, cannot peacefully coexist with the picture of God that Newton, Descartes, and perhaps even Thomas Aquinas idealized. Whether they are aware of it or not, theologians always bring at least implicit cosmological assumptions to their talk about God. But it often happens that these assumptions are scientifically out of date. The contact approach, therefore, is concerned that theology always remain positively “consonant” with cosmology.76 Theology cannot rely too heavily on science, but it must also pay attention to what is going on in the world of scientists. It must seek to express its ideas in terms that take the best of science into account, or else it will become intellectually irrelevant.

For that reason, the contact approach looks for an open-ended conversation between scientists and theologians. The word “contact” implies coming together without necessarily fusing. It allows for interaction, dialogue, and mutual impact, but forbids both conflation and segregation. It insists on preserving differences, but it also cherishes relationships.

Contact proposes that scientific knowledge can broaden the horizon of religious faith and that the perspective of religious faith can deepen our understanding of the universe. It does not hope to prove God’s existence from science but rather is content simply to interpret the latter’s discoveries within the framework of religious meaning. The days in which scientific ideas could be used to seal arguments for God’s existence are over. So this third approach will not attempt to shore up religious doctrines by appealing to any scientific concepts that may on the surface seem to require a transcendent grounding. Nevertheless, it considers it fruitful to survey and interpret the results of science with a sensitivity and consciousness that has already been shaped by religious faith.

The kind of religion we are discussing in this book, for example, characteristically strives to instill in its followers a special way of looking at things. Rooted in the story of Abraham, the prophetic faith traditions invite their followers to look for the promise that lies in all things. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam think of genuine “faith” as a confidence that new life and undreamed of possibilities are latent even in the most desperate of situations. The authentic religious attitude, then, is a steadfast conviction that the future is open and that an incalculable fulfillment awaits the entire cosmos.

At first sight, such a hopeful orientation of consciousness would seem to be anything but compatible with the “realism” that science demands of us. And yet, as we shall note often in the following chapters, many religious thinkers have found what they consider to be a remarkable accord between a faith-perspective shaped by a sense of reality’s promise, and the universe now coming to light as a consequence of new developments in science.

It is probably in the area of “contact” that the most interesting conversations between scientists and theologians are occurring today. Admittedly, these conversations sometimes resemble high-wire acts and the participants occasionally plunge back down into either conflation or contrast. Contact is much more difficult to stabilize than the other approaches. To avoid burning up in the fire of conflation or being frozen in the ice of contrast, it assumes, at times, a rather fluid and even turbulent character. Its efforts to find coherence are interesting and promising, but seldom completely conclusive.

Nevertheless, according to the contact position, though scientific “facts” are always in some sense our own constructs and are inevitably theory-laden, they are not simply wild guesses that have no reference to a real world existing independently of our preferences. This appreciation of the mind’s capacity to put us in touch with the real world—in an always provisional way—is known as “critical realism.” Critical realism maintains that our understanding, whether scientific or theological, may be oriented toward the real world; but precisely because the world is always too big for the human mind, our thoughts are also always open to correction.77

Science and religion make meaningful contact with each other, especially when they decide to play by the rules of what we are calling critical realism. Accordingly, good science hopes more or less to approximate the way things are, but it is always willing to be critical of its contemporary ways of representing the world. And in the case of religion, the same critical realism allows that though our religious symbols and ideas need constant correction, they may nonetheless reflect—in an always limited way—a Transcendent Reality which is truly “there” and which always necessarily transcends our subjective narrowness.

Scientific theories and religious metaphors, in this epistemological setting, are not just imaginative concoctions, as much modern and postmodern thought asserts. Rather, they bear an always tentative relationship to a real world and its ultimate ground. This world beyond our representations is always only incompletely grasped, and its presence constantly “judges” our hypotheses, inviting us continually to deepen our understanding in both science and religion. It is their mutual sharing in this critical openness to the real that provides the basis for genuine “contact” between science and religion.

IV. Confirmation

While it would be quite fruitful to leave our discussions in science and religion at the stage of contact, I would personally prefer to go even further. I appreciate all the efforts to discover consonance between science and religion, but I envisage an even more intimate relationship of religion to science than any of the first three approaches has yet explicitly acknowledged. I propose that religion is supportive—in a very deep way—of the entire scientific enterprise.

Religion, of course, should not be solicited to reinforce the dangerous ways in which scientific knowledge has often been applied in practice. My suggestion is simply that religion essentially fortifies the humble desire to know that gives rise to science in the first place. I call this approach “confirmation,” a term equivalent to “strengthening” or “supporting.” It holds that religion, when carefully purged of idolatrous implications, fully endorses and even undergirds the scientific effort to make sense of the universe.

I am aware that science has come under heavy criticism today. Many critics even think that it is responsible for most of the ills of the modern world. Were it not for science, they say, we would have no nuclear threat, no global pollution of the air, soil, and water. We and our planet would probably be better off without it. Science, they claim, is at root an assault upon nature, a crushing exercise in control. It is a Faustian effort to wrest all mystery from the cosmos so that we can become masters of it. Some even argue that science is inherently patriarchal, an exploitation of nature closely tied to our culture’s oppression of women.

Obviously theology would not wish to endorse science if it were inherently connected to these evils. But I suspect that much criticism of science mistakenly identifies it with trends and motives that can, at least in principle, be clearly distinguished from science itself. Essentially speaking, I consider science to be a modest but fruitful attempt to grasp, with mathematical clarity, some small part of the totality of reality. Any pretensions to omniscience, such as we find in scientism, are not a part of science at all—a point that Appleyard cannot accept, but one that the contrast position rightly clarifies in its protest against conflation.

Most criticisms of science fail to distinguish the humble desire to know that constitutes its basic dynamism from other human desires—such as the will to pleasure, to power, or to security—that place science in servitude to impulses that have nothing to do with truth-seeking. When I say that religion supports science, therefore, I am not arguing that it favors all the twisted ways in which science is exploited and conflated. I am simply saying that the disinterested desire to know, out of which science grows and flourishes, finds its deepest confirmation in a religious interpretation of the universe.