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ESSAY Science and Religion: Bridging The Great Divide: by George Johnson

This document summarizes an essay about the relationship between science and religion. It discusses how scientists and religious believers have long viewed each other with some conflict and sought to subsume the other. However, there are also many people who are both scientific and religious who want to find a bridge between the two. Recent decades have seen a revival in efforts to reconcile science and religion through books, conferences and other works. The document then focuses on a recent large conference sponsored by the Templeton Foundation that brought together scientists, most of whom were also religious believers, to discuss resolving conflicts between science and their faith.

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Cherry Mae Bunag
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60 views2 pages

ESSAY Science and Religion: Bridging The Great Divide: by George Johnson

This document summarizes an essay about the relationship between science and religion. It discusses how scientists and religious believers have long viewed each other with some conflict and sought to subsume the other. However, there are also many people who are both scientific and religious who want to find a bridge between the two. Recent decades have seen a revival in efforts to reconcile science and religion through books, conferences and other works. The document then focuses on a recent large conference sponsored by the Templeton Foundation that brought together scientists, most of whom were also religious believers, to discuss resolving conflicts between science and their faith.

Uploaded by

Cherry Mae Bunag
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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ESSAY; Science and Religion:

Bridging the Great Divide


By George Johnson
June 30, 1998

EVER since science began drifting away from religion, centuries ago, each has dreamed
of subsuming the other. Scientists, in their boldest moments, speak of explaining away
all the mysteries by empirical inquiry, leaving no need for ancient wisdom. And the
faithful, fervently believing in spiritual forces unmeasurable by any meter, find it absurd
that God's children would aspire to heaven solely by building telescopes and computers
-- scientific Towers of Babel. They have longed for a reality beyond the shadowplay of
the material realm.

Left between these extremes are many people who are both scientific and religious, and
confused about whether a bridge can ever cross the divide. Every few decades, this hope
for reconciliation, or ''dialogue,'' experiences a revival. The most recent may be the
biggest, with books, conferences and television shows trying to find a common ground
between two fundamentally different ways of thinking about the world.

In the 1970's scholars tried to merge science with Eastern religion; the emphasis now is
on rejoining science with monotheistic, usually Christian, faith.

Not all the work is motivated by religious passion. In his new best-selling book,
''Consilience'' (Knopf), the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson tries to revive the
Enlightenment dream of a unified system of knowledge that would embrace not only the
sciences but also morality and ethics, removing them from the uncertainties of religion.
Here the effort is not to make science spiritual but to make religion scientific.
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But most of the longing for reconciliation comes from the religious side. With a $3
million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, whose considerable resources are
fueling much of the metaphysics boom, a modest newsletter on science and religion was
reborn this year as a glossy magazine called Science & Spirit. ''We see a growing number
of individuals looking toward religion to explain what science cannot, and asking science
to validate religious teachings,'' the publisher, Kevin Sharpe, said.

This fall, PBS will broadcast ''Faith and Reason,'' a documentary written and narrated by
Margaret Wertheim and partly financed with $190,000 from the Templeton
Foundation, featuring interviews with scientists about God. In the last two years, a
steady stream of books has appeared with titles like ''Cybergrace: The Search for God in
the Digital World'' and ''God & the Big Bang: Discovering Harmony Between Science &
Spirituality.''

The Conference

A Universe With Purpose

The Templeton Foundation also gave the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences
$1.4 million for a heavily promoted conference called ''Science and the Spiritual Quest,''
held this month in Berkeley, Calif. For four days scientists, most of them Christians,
Jews or Muslims, testified about their efforts to resolve their own conflicts over science
and religion. All seemed to share the conviction that this is a purposeful universe, that
there is a reason to be here.

''Theology is not some airy-fairy form of metaphysical speculation,'' said John C.


Polkinghorne, a Cambridge University particle physicist turned Anglican priest whose
books include ''Quarks, Chaos & Christianity'' and the newly published ''Belief in God in
an Age of Science.'' Like science, he said, religion is rooted in encounters with reality --
though in the latter case these include spiritual revelations whose truths lie in the
unreachable realm of the subjective. The pervading question was whether this kind of
experience could ever be studied scientifically.

For most of the century people have espoused the view that science and religion should
be kept apart to avoid the inevitable combustions. But to logical minds it has always
been troubling that two opposing ways could exist to explain the same universe. Science
and religion spring from the human obsession to find order in the world. But surely
there can be only one true explanation for reality. Life was either created or it evolved.
Prayer is either communication with God or a psychological salve. The universe is either
pervaded by spiritual forces or ruled by nothing but physical laws.

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