Science and religion: Can they be reconciled ?  Or is it necessary to renounce one for the sake of the other ?

This is basically a question arising in modernity.

For much of our history as a species they could barely be separated, let alone counterposed.  On our way up from the mud and the dark, we as a species stumbled upon the earth and looked up at the skies, we struggled to cope and to comprehend and we gave names to stones and gods.

From animism to the pantheons of primitive religions to monotheism, religion evolved reflecting our conceptualisation of the natural world and the social order at any given time in our history.  Primitive gods were idealised functions of a primitive society.  The medieval god was an idealised medieval lord.

However, as our methods of empirical investigation and logical reasoning grew, more and more phenomena once explained by religion came to be explained by science.  Thunder was no longer the startling roar of an angry god but came within the sober scope of meteorological prediction.

The god hypothesis became more and more redundant.  From being the loving father who counted every hair of our heads and cared for every lily in the fields, he became, in the world of newtonian mechanics, a vague first mover who set the mechanism of the world in motion.  God was disappearing from the world, dying the death of 1000 qualifications.

There were moments of classic confrontation in the process.  In the wake of copernican cosmology, Galileo versus the Inquistion.  In the battle over darwinian evolution, there was Huxley versus Wilberforce at Oxford and Darrow versus  Bryan at the Scopes trial in Tennessee.

There have been waves of challenge, conflict and crisis.  There have also been patterns of resolution.  These have taken the form of accommodation and reconciliation or of renunciation of one for the other.

For religious believers, there have been two basic strategies:

The first has  been to assert the harmony of faith and  reason, to affirm that the achievements of science attest to the glory of God, to update the argument from design, according to the most recent science in the tradition of Abelard and Aquinas to Teilhard de Chardin to William Reville's columns in The Irish Times.

The second is  to assert in the tradition of Tertullian: "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem ?", in the tradition of Luther seeing reason as the devil's harlot, in the tradition of Barthes insisting that faith is God's revelation to man and not man's speculation about God.  Various forms of neo-kantian, postmodernist and new age theology take up this strategy, downgrading reason to make room for faith.  Absurd misinterpretations of Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty, of complementarity, of chaos, of fuzzy logic, often come into play.

Where the first stategy finds God in the order of the world, the second, these days, with ever more absurd misinterpretations of quantum physics, finds God in the disorder of the world.  

The first is based on harmony and continuity and respect for science and sees religion as an extension of it in fundamental continuity with it.

The second is based on a radical discontinuity, on emphasis on what science doesn't know more than what it does know, on assertion of other ways of knowing, often with a strong implication that these other ways are superior to science.  Science and religion in the post-wittgensteinian world are just two different language games with nothing much to do with each other.

Counterposed to both of these is scientific secularism, asserting that we have come of age, that we no longer need a god to explain the world, that we are on our own, but we are able, with the powers of empirical investigation and logical reasoning that we have evolved and tested in the fire of experience, to face into the darkness and the light, the light of our knowledge, the darkness where our ongoing search for knowledge may yet bring light.

In this view, there is only one way of knowing and it is science. The word science means  knowledge. What goes on in laboratories and peer reviewed journals is a particular highly formalised part of it, but anything that deserves to be called knowledge is in continuity with it. When the discipline of empirical evidence and logical reasoning are applied to the phenomenon of religion, it is clear that gods are the creations of man, not that man is the creation of a god.

With this introduction to the topic, where intelligent and honourable people are on both sides, I hope that we can have an illuminating debate. It is a difficult but critical debate, as it concerns questions which are at rock bottom at the foundations of our world view: the existence of god, the place of science, the meaning of life. I hope that no one will be inhibited from entering into it.

Portrait of a marxist as a young nun