VIKING, MAY 2015There are no heated discussions about reconciling sport and religion, literature and religion, or business and religion; the important issue in today’s world is the harmony between science and religion. But why, of all human endeavors that we could compare with religion, are we so concerned with its harmony with science?
The answer, to me at least, seems obvious. Science and religion—unlike, say, business and religion—are competitors at discovering truths about nature. And science is the only field that has the ability to disprove the truth claims of religion, and has done so repeatedly (the creation stories of Genesis and other faiths, the Noachian flood, and the fictitious Exodus of the Jews from Egypt come to mind). Religion, on the other hand, has no ability to overturn the truths found by science. It is this competition, and the ability of science to erode the hegemony of faith—but not vice versa—that has produced the copious discussion of how the two areas relate to each other, and how to find harmony between them.
One can in fact argue ...
