My impression is that scientists are as likely to be religious believers as any other section of the community. Nevertheless there is a feeling abroad that somehow science and religion are opposed to each other. Someone like myself, who is an Anglican priest and a (now honorary) professor of theoretical physics, is sometimes regarded either with the amazement appropriate to the strange mixture of the centaur or the wariness appropriate to the sleight-of-hand artist. Neither image is, I think, just. In fact, science and theology seem to me to have in common that they are both exploring aspects of reality. They are capable of mutual interaction which, though at times it is puzzling, can also be fruitful.
Much of the uneasiness felt in the mutual relationship of science and theology stems historically from the critical attitude of the Enlightenment. In important aspects we now live in a post-Enlightenment age. Part ...