VIKING, MAY 2015
The battle between science and religion is regularly declared over, with both sides having reached an amicable truce. “Accommodationists” on both the religious and scientific sides assure us that there is no conflict between these areas, that they deal with separate spheres of inquiry (science deals with the natural world, religion with meaning, morals and values), or even that they can somehow help each other via an unspecified “dialogue.” After all, we’re told, there are many religious scientists (two notables in my field are Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and evangelical Christian, and Kenneth Miller, an observant Catholic who is also biologist at Brown University), so how can there be possibly be a conflict?
But despite these claims, the dust hasn’t ...
