VIKING, MAY 2015The battle between science and religion is regularly declared over, ended with an amicable truce. Accommodationists on both sides assure us that the disparate pursuits occupy nonoverlapping spheres of inquiry (science deals with the natural world; religion with meaning, morals, and values). After all, there are many religious scientists (two notables are evangelical Christian Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, an observant Catholic), so how can there be possibly be a conflict?
But despite these claims, the dust hasn’t settled. Why do 55 percent of Americans aver that “science and religion are often in conflict”? Why are less than 10 percent of all Americans agnostics or atheists, yet that proportion rises to 62 percent of all scientists at “elite” universities, and to 93 percent among members of the National Academy of Sciences? I consider these questions and more in my latest book, Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible.
My conclusion: the conflict between science and religion is deep, endemic, and unlikely to be resolved. For this conflict is one between faith and fact—a battle in the long-fought war between rationality and superstition.
The friction exists because science and religion are both in the business ...
