The Encounter of Religion and Science

Perhaps no single feature of modernization has been more challenging to traditional religious ways—and more nurturing of secularization—than the encounter of religion with science.

Many more examples could be drawn from the history of religions and the history of science to illustrate the ongoing potential for conflict between these two domains. Of course, religions are not always hostile to science. In fact, as we have already noted, sometimes modern scientific theories seem almost to converge with ancient religious outlooks. Acquiring a more sophisticated perspective on the encounter of religion and science requires us to consider the underlying reasons for both conflict and convergence.

Fundamental to the scientific method is dependence on empirical data, the observable “facts” of any given situation. To a large extent, religions do not rely only on the observable as a source of determining truth. Religious belief is often characterized precisely by commitment to the nonobservable, such as a supernatural being. This term, “supernatural,” indicates another point of contention between religion and science. For whereas science takes it for granted that the universe consistently obeys certain laws of nature, religions commonly embrace belief in beings and events that are not subject to these laws.

A miniature illustration from the “Automata of al-Jazari,” a Muslim scholar, inventor, engineer, mathematician, and astronomer who lived from 1136 to 1206.

And yet these issues of natural laws and of the observable versus the unobservable also lead to points of convergence between science and religion. Certain basic and extremely significant scientific questions remain unanswered. For example, what is the ground of consciousness? What causes gravity? What, if anything, existed prior to the Big Bang, and what caused its existence? Science and religion can perhaps generally agree on one point: mystery abounds. Granted, the scientific response to a mystery is “let’s solve it,” whereas the religious response typically is “this is a mystery and is meant to be.” But in the meantime, mysteiy abides, allowing for a certain kind of convergence. It is probably no accident that the percentage of scientists in the United States who regularly attend religious services is almost the same as the percentage for the general population.—

Religion and the Environment

Another topic that involves the relationship of religion and science is perspectives on the environment. As the following chapters will show, for the most part, recently such perspectives are not characterized by conflict in this regard; on the contrary, environmentalists in most of the world’s religions readily accept the facts and projections as established by science, and they look to their traditions for ways of understanding and responding to them.

Currently, the fact of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activities is on the forefront of many environmental concerns. But the upsurge in concern among religiously minded people has been growing for several decades, from times when other environmental problems loomed large, such as pollution, of land, water, and air, and the threat of nuclear disasters, as experienced all too tangibly at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986. The gas leak disaster at Bhopal in 1984 singlehandedly launched environmentalist movements in India.

Environmental responses to these and other threats have varied depending on specificities of place, time, and cultural predispositions, but for every religious tradition, activists draw upon deeply rooted beliefs regarding the sanctity of the natural world and humanity’s appropriate role, oftentimes seen as divinely sanctioned, in caring for it.

Self-Assessment 1.3

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