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Science and Religion in Conflict, Part 1: Preliminaries

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Abstract

Science and religion have been described as the “two dominant forces in our culture”. As such, the relation between them has been a matter of intense debate, having profound implications for deeper understanding of our place in the universe. One position naturally associated with scientists of a materialistic outlook is that science and religion are contradictory, incompatible worldviews; however, a great deal of recent literature criticises this “conflict thesis” as simple-minded, essentially ignorant of the nature of religion and its philosophical and theological underpinnings. In this first part of a two-part article, I set out the wide-ranging background required for a proper understanding of the debate as a preliminary for the second part, in which Ian Barbour ’s influential four-fold typology of science-religion relations is critically assessed, leading to the conclusion that the conflict model is not to be so easily dismissed.

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Notes

  1. McGrath holds a doctorate in molecular biophysics, placing him in the category of scientist-theologians.

  2. In 2015, 31.2% of the world’s population identified as Christian according to pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/05/, last accessed 30 January 2022. The next largest group was Muslims comprising 24.1%.

  3. See https://sciencecouncil.org/about-science/our-definition-of-science/, last accessed 23 March 2021.

  4. Some authors maintain a distinction between materialism and naturalism, and even between various subtle flavours of the two. To avoid undue complication, I will treat them as loosely synonymous for the purposes of this paper.

  5. ... as is plain to see from the book’s combative subtitle: A Scientist Refutes Religion-Denying, Reason-Destroying Scientism.

  6. An apologist is one who defends Christian belief against criticism.

  7. https://www.biola.edu/blogs/good-book-blog/2016/what-is-theology, last accessed 6 December 2021. “Biola” stands for Bible Institute of Los Angeles.

  8. Pantheism holds that ‘God’ is a metaphor for the whole of creation, i.e., God is identical with the universe and everything within it, and has no separate existence as a personal or anthropomorphic entity.

  9. The Bible (or more precisely, the letters of Paul of Tarsus) says: “And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14).

  10. In The Demon-Haunted World, he cites Thomas Huxley (1825–95) to the effect that assertions should “require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified” (Sagan, 1996, p. 80).

  11. One of these, the use of sponges soaked in lemon juice, is even to be found in the Talmud. So much for tradition as a source of religious knowledge in Judaism.

  12. Such as grace, theodicy, hamartiology, Christology, soteriology, lapsarian, kenosis, noetics, pneumatology, gospel, exigesis, hypostatic unity, eschatology, heurmeneutics, perichoresis, ...

  13. From Dawkins’ speech at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, 15 April 1992.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Keith Ward and John H. Brooke for taking the time to reply with commendable good grace to several questions that I posed to them during the writing of this two-part paper.

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Damper, R.I. Science and Religion in Conflict, Part 1: Preliminaries. Found Sci (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-022-09870-0

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