For centuries, it seems, we humans have been trapped between two seemingly opposing worldviews: the empirical rigor of science and the faith-based certainties of religion. The dichotomy is both ancient and surprisingly modern, echoing debates about heliocentrism in Galileo’s time, to today’s fierce arguments about evolution, climate change, and the origins of the universe.
Yet, as Neil deGrasse Tyson and others have suggested, this opposition need not be as implacable as it is often portrayed. Science and religion, when understood in their most profound sense, can coexist, offering complementary perspectives on humanity’s search for meaning and truth.
To argue for the compatibility of science and religion is not to ignore their profound differences. Science, at its core, is a systematic process for building and organizing knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. It is grounded in observation, experimentation, and falsifiability.
Religion, on the other hand, is rooted in faith, tradition, and spiritual experience. Its territory is the realm of ultimate questions. Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the purpose of life? What happens after death? These are questions that science, by its very methodology, is ill-equipped to answer.
Yet, the history of both is far more interrelated than the popular narrative suggests. The scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, for example, was propelled not by atheism but by the convictions of deeply religious individuals. Johannes Kepler, who described the laws of planetary motion, believed that he was ‘thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” Isaac Newton, the father of classical physics, wrote more on theology than on science. Far from seeing their scientific work as antithetical to their faith, they viewed it as a way to marvel at the intricacy and beauty of creation.
This supposed conflict between science and religion is a relatively recent phenomenon, sharpened by the rise of scientific naturalism and the reaction of religious fundamentalism. The infamous Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ of 1925, in the U.S. state of Tennessee, pitting Darwinian evolution against a literal reading of Genesis, has come to symbolize this clash. But, the lines are not as clear-cut as they first appear.
Many religious traditions, especially within Catholicism and mainline Protestantism, have found ways to reconcile evolutionary theory with scriptural interpretation. The Catholic Church, for example, officially accepts evolution as compatible with faith, as articulated by Pope Pius XII, who in his 1950 encyclical Humani generis, said that “there is no intrinsic conflict between Christianity and the theory of evolution. In a 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul II reinforced this view when he said that ‘evolution is more than just a theory.”
The Jewish tradition, too, has a long history of allegorical scriptural interpretation, allowing for the harmonization of Genesis with the scientific theories of the origins of the universe. Maimonides, the great medieval philosopher, argued that if empirical evidence contradicts a literal reading of scripture, the text must be interpreted differently. Likewise, many Islamic scholars during the Golden Age of Islam saw the study of nature as a form of worship, uncovering the signs (ayat) of God in the world.
On the scientific side, it’s also a misconception to believe that all scientists are hostile to religion. Francis Collins, the geneticist who led the Human Genome Project, is a devout Christian.
In his book, The Language of God, he wrote movingly about his journey from atheism to faith, arguing that ‘science is not threatened by God, it is enhanced.” He sees his work in genetics as an exploration of the ‘language’ in which God has written the code of life.
In a similar vein, Albert Einstein, though skeptical of organized religion, often spoke of his sense of ‘cosmic religious feeling,’ a reverence for the laws and harmony of the universe.
How, though, is coexistence possible when science and religion offer fundamentally different ways of knowing? The answer lies in recognizing that they ask different questions. Science seeks to answer the ‘how’, how do organisms evolve, how does the universe expand, how do diseases progress? Religion, on the other hand, addressed the ‘why’: why is there a universe in the first place, why does life have meaning, and why should we act ethically?
As Stephen Jay Gould, the renowned evolutionary biologist, argued, science and religion are compatible, but address different subjects. Science has its subject, the material world, and religion its moral discourse, and each leaves the other room to maneuver. Science cannot yield values, and religion cannot produce empirical truths.
This is not to say that there are never conflicts. There are, especially when religious dogma makes claims about the natural world. But these disputes are not inherent to the disciplines themselves, but to specific interpretations. When the Church condemned Galileo for advocating that the Earth revolved around the Sun, it was not science that was condemned, but a challenge to ecclesiastical authority. There are very few people today who see the Earth as the center of the universe.
In the end, the quest for coexistence between science and religion is a struggle for intellectual humility. Both have their limits. Science cannot answer the question of ultimate purpose, and religion cannot offer testable predictions about the material world. Together, though, they reflect a uniquely human longing to understand, to discover, and to find meaning in the vastness of the universe. | NWI
