with each other. If religion and science were both trying to do the same job, then they might be incompatible. But as they have radically dissimilar tasks, if we just keep them in their separate jurisdictions, preventing them from invading each other’s territory, there can never be any real “problem” of science and religion.
According to this “contrast” approach, the impression that religion conflicts with science is almost always rooted in a previous confusion or “conflation” of science with religion or some other belief system. To avoid conflict, then, we must first avoid any mindless melding of science and belief into an undifferentiated smudge. It was, after all, the inability of medieval theology to distinguish religion’s role clearly from that of science that made Galileo’s ideas seem so hostile to believers in the sixteenth century.
In fact, it is nearly always a prior conflation of science with religion that leads eventually to the sense that there is a conflict between them. The uncritical mixing of science with religion before the scientific era is what led to the lamentable condemnation of Galileo by the Church and to the hostility that many scientists still feel toward religion. Now, however, we should know better: religion and science have no business meddling in each other’s affairs in the first place. To avoid conflict, therefore, our second approach claims that we should carefully contrast science with religion. They are such completely independent ways of understanding reality that it is meaningless to place them in opposition to each other.
Conflation, in this view, is an unsatisfactory attempt to avoid conflict by carelessly commingling science with belief. Instead of respecting the sharp differences between science and religion, conflation weaves them into a single fabric where they fade into each other, becoming indistinguishable. Today, for instance, some conservative Christians argue that the biblical stories of creation give us the best scientific information about the beginnings of the universe and life. They call their fusion of science and belief “creation science,” an amalgamation that renounces the Darwinian theory of evolution in favor of a literalist interpretation of the biblical accounts of the world’s creation. It insists that the biblical stories are “scientific” and that they should be taught in public schools as the best alternative to evolutionary biology.
Another common brand of conflation is “concordism.” Rather than rejecting modern science outright, concordism forces the biblical text to correspond, at least in a loose way, with the patterns of modern science. In order to salvage the literal truth of the biblical book of Genesis, for example, some religious scientists match the six days of creation with what they consider to be six corresponding epochs in the scientific account of cosmic evolution. Religion, in this interpretation, must be made to look scientific at all costs if it is to be intellectually respectable today. In his book Genesis and The Big Bang, physicist Gerald Schroeder, for example, argues that relativity theory, with its challenge to the common sense notion of absolute simultaneity, once again allows us to take literally the six-day sequence of creation as depicted in the Bible. He attempts to show that what from one frame of reference appears as a single day may be billions of years from another. So the Bible agrees with science after all and physicists can now embrace religion!74
This conflation of science and religion is born out of a very human craving for unity in our understanding of the world. Because it seems to harmonize science and religion so neatly, it appeals to millions of people. At first sight, its blending of religion with science would seem to be a credible way of avoiding conflict. However, history shows that eventually the incommensurate strands of science and religion will begin to unravel, and a sense of conflict will take the place of superficial agreement. New developments in science, such as in evolutionary biology, geology, or astrophysics, put an end to easy alliances of the Bible and scientific interpretations of nature. Avoiding conflict by ignoring the vast differences between science and religious scriptures leads inevitably to fruitless confrontations. Unfortunately, these are what the mass media focus on, giving many people the impression that science and religion are perpetual enemies. The “contrast” approach proposes a very simple way of heading off any such appearance of conflict.
III. Contact
The method of contrast may be an important step toward clarity, but it still fails to satisfy those who seek a more unified picture of reality. As Ian Barbour might say, it is a helpful first approximation, but contrast leaves things at a frustrating impasse.75 The urge to discover the coherence of all of our ways of knowing is too powerful for us to suppress indefinitely, so I suggest here that we consider a third approach—one that I shall simply call contact.
This way of relating religion to science is not content to leave the world divided into the two realms defined by the contrast position. Yet it also does not wish to revert to the superficial harmony of conflation either. It agrees that science and religion are logically and linguistically distinct, but it knows that, in the real world, they cannot be easily compartmentalized, as the contrast position supposes. After all, religion in the West has helped shape the history of science and scientific cosmology, in turn, has influenced theology. It is impossible to separate them completely, even though we can try to make clear logical distinctions in our definitions of them.
In addition, it seems unlikely that just any old cosmology will be compatible with just any old theology, as the contrast position would seem to allow. The kind of world described by evolutionary biology and big bang physics, for example, cannot peacefully coexist with the picture of God that Newton, Descartes, and perhaps even Thomas Aquinas idealized. Whether they are aware of it or not, theologians always bring at least implicit cosmological assumptions to their talk about God. But it often happens that these assumptions are scientifically out of date. The contact approach, therefore, is concerned that theology always remain positively “consonant” with cosmology.76 Theology cannot rely too heavily on science, but it must also pay attention to what is going on in the world of scientists. It must seek to express its ideas in terms that take the best of science into account, or else it will become intellectually irrelevant.
For that reason, the contact approach looks for an open-ended conversation between scientists and theologians. The word “contact” implies coming together without necessarily fusing. It allows for interaction, dialogue, and mutual impact, but forbids both conflation and segregation. It insists on preserving differences, but it also cherishes relationships.
Contact proposes that scientific knowledge can broaden the horizon of religious faith and that the perspective of religious faith can deepen our understanding of the universe. It does not hope to prove God’s existence from science but rather is content simply to interpret the latter’s discoveries within the framework of religious meaning. The days in which scientific ideas could be used to seal arguments for God’s existence are over. So this third approach will not attempt to shore up religious doctrines by appealing to any scientific concepts that may on the surface seem to require a transcendent grounding. Nevertheless, it considers it fruitful to survey and interpret the results of science with a sensitivity and consciousness that has already been shaped by religious faith.
The kind of religion we are discussing in this book, for example, characteristically strives to instill in its followers a special way of looking at things. Rooted in the story of Abraham, the prophetic faith traditions invite their followers to look for the promise that lies in all things. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam think of genuine “faith” as a confidence that new life and undreamed of possibilities are latent even in the most desperate of situations. The authentic religious attitude, then, is a steadfast conviction that the future is open and that an incalculable fulfillment awaits the entire cosmos.
At first sight, such a hopeful orientation of consciousness would seem to be anything but compatible with the “realism” that science demands of us. And yet, as we shall note often in the following chapters, many religious thinkers have found what they consider to be a remarkable accord between a faith-perspective shaped by a sense of reality’s promise, and the universe now coming to light as a consequence of new developments in science.
It is probably
