The history of science and religion is as old as humanity itself, and it has been one of conflict and cooperation. In modern times, there is a movement to bring science and religion together to create a new paradigm for the future.
When did the history of science and religion begin? The question can be traced back to prehistoric times. Primitive people living in tribal groups began to use fire and create various tools through scientific thinking. They also shared a belief in gods and practiced religion by selecting priests to honor the spirits of the dead and performing divination. In other words, the history of science and religion is as long as the history of mankind. However, this long history is full of conflicts. Theologians, who believed that God created everything, were at odds with scientists who dared to question God’s creation of nature. During the Middle Ages, when religious authority was at its peak, scientists whose research went against dogma were labeled heretics and persecuted. As time went on and the Scientific Revolution made science more authoritative than religion, existing religious doctrines were denounced as unscientific, and spiritual experiences were dismissed as lies. As such, science and religion have been in a constant battle for dominance, each denying the other. However, in recent years, science and religion have not been at odds, but rather have come to recognize each other and are seeking to coexist in harmony. But what is it about the modern relationship between science and religion that is different from the past that makes coexistence possible? In this article, we will describe the theories of the modern relationship between religion and science, and consider whether this relationship is likely to be sustainable in the future. Along the way, we will discuss intelligent design and creation science, which are often misunderstood as examples of how science and religion can coexist, and criticize their contradictions.
When it comes to theories about the relationship between science and religion, we can’t forget Ian Barber. Barber’s 1988 book is still the most widely used categorization of the relationship between science and religion. He categorizes their relationship into four main categories: conflict, independence, dialog, and integration. Let’s start with conflict, which is the view that science and religion are inherently in conflict. Conflict theories can be divided into two main positions: the active position that one or the other must disappear, and the passive position that one or the other will gradually disappear. Advocates of conflict theory mainly rely on historical evidence and explain human history as a conflict between science and religion. Especially in the early modern period, conflict theory was often used to argue that religion has hindered human progress and that we should eliminate religion and build a bright future based on science. However, the historical sources used to support conflict theory were found to have been manipulated, the relationship between science and religion was too simplistic, and the dangers of science were highlighted by the world wars, which led to the decline of conflict theory. It is now marginalized in academia and is practiced only by anti-intellectual fanatics, some atheists, and anti-religionists.
One of the theories that has emerged to replace the collapsed conflict theory is independentism. Independence theories literally claim that the realms of science and religion do not overlap and are therefore irrelevant. The most prominent example is Gould, who argued for NOMA, or non-overlapping magisterium. This means that if religion cannot deny the empirical and fact-based conclusions of science, and science cannot be said to have a higher moral wisdom than religion, then science and religion should be mutually humble and not invade each other’s territory. The American theologian Langdon Gilkey makes the same argument for independence, but interprets the spheres of science and religion slightly differently. He argues that while science asks “how” questions, religion asks “why” questions; that is, while science looks for interactive, secondary causes, religion looks for ultimate primary causes. Independentism is welcomed by many scientists and theologians because it allows people to believe and think as they wish without having to relate science and religion. However, the downside of independentism is that it doesn’t allow religions to make outlandish claims, such as creation science. Currently, the most prominent advocates of independentism are academics like Stephen Jay Gould and Massimo Filiuchi. While they are not in favor of religion, they take the position that science should not be allowed to interfere with religion, or vice versa. Most non-religious people or those who are indifferent to religion also take the position of independence.
Along with independence, the other two theories that are often mentioned as alternatives to conflict theories are dialogical and integrative. These two theories are similar in that they argue that science and religion are closely connected and should develop together. However, they differ slightly in that one sees science and religion as mutually beneficial, while the other sees science and religion as needing each other. These two theories, which Barber called “the most satisfying” in , are rapidly gaining adherents in recent years as people warn against scientific universalism.
The first proponents of the dialogical theory were scientists such as Albert Einstein and Michael Faraday. They argued that no matter how far science advances, it will never be able to identify the first event that triggered all events, and that they believe in God based on their own objective judgment. Einstein went so far as to say, “Science without faith is incomplete, and faith without science is blind.”
In the case of integralism, a relatively recent proponent is a group of scientists and Catholic bishops in the United States called the Society of Scientists. They argue that science and religion can complement each other to provide a more insightful approach to complex topics that are emerging, such as biotechnology. Some integrationists even argue that through the integration of science and religion, the entire universe can be explained by a single, indivisible theory. However, the full integration of science and religion is still in the wind, and is not yet a reality.
In the following, we’ll discuss intelligent design and creation science, which are often mistaken for a merger of science and religion, but are not the same thing at all. I’ll explain these two concepts because many people mistakenly believe that they are examples of science and religion coexisting. However, they are far from coexisting, as they are concepts of religion disguised as science. First, intelligent design is the theory that the world was designed by a transcendent, intelligent being whose existence or absence cannot be proven. It starts with the limitations of evolutionary theory, which can explain how we got from the first cell to the higher forms of life, but not how the first cell came to be. Furthermore, a cell is a machine made up of many parts, and if one of those parts is missing, the cell loses its function. Cells of this complexity are referred to in intelligent design theory as having “irreducible complexity,” arguing that it would be too difficult to create an object of this complexity by chance. However, this thesis has been debunked by Richard Dawkins’s “blind watchmaker” argument and is no longer popular today. In a nutshell, the blind watchmaker argument states that any structure, no matter how complex, can arise by chance if feedback is present. The probabilities are so large that we can say with certainty that anything is possible given enough time. Richard Dawkins used this argument to demonstrate that even the most complex cell could arise spontaneously with enough time and feedback. As a result, intelligent design has been largely forgotten and abandoned by academia. Today, it is mostly used by some theologians to make Christian creationism look like a scientific argument. They substitute God for the intelligent being in intelligent design and try to justify creationism with a seemingly scientific method of argumentation. In the end, intelligent design as it is currently practiced is a pseudo-scientific theory that takes the term God out of Christian creationism.
Creation science is a similar concept. Creation science is a discipline that uses the scientific method to prove that the history recorded in the Christian Bible is true. Some of its most prominent claims include the existence of Noah’s Flood, the idea that there was a time in the past when the Earth was completely submerged in water for over a year, and that humans and dinosaurs coexisted, as evidenced by the carvings in the temples of Angkor Wat. However, most of these claims are based on fabricated or pieced-together evidence, and they are the result of a research method that can hardly be called a scientific method of analysis, as they ignore all other evidence against them and accept or deny evolution as it suits their convenience. In other words, creation science is nothing more than a veneer of science on religious beliefs, and it is criticized by both scientific and religious sides.
So far, we have analyzed the four main theories of the relationship between science and religion: conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration, and refuted two false examples of the coexistence of science and religion. So, what kind of relationship will science and religion have in the future? I believe that science and religion will walk a path of integration. In the modern era, we have come to recognize the limitations of both religion and science. In the Middle Ages, religion was very developed, and people found spiritual fulfillment and strong communities. However, the development of science and technology was poor, and most people lived in poverty. In the modern era, science has advanced to the point where it has changed the entire environment around us, which has led to an increase in living standards and life expectancy. However, despite being able to fulfill more material needs, we can’t say that modern people are happier than in the past. On the contrary, new social problems have arisen, such as the rise of criminals with a lack of ethical consciousness and the increasing number of people who feel lonely. In order to proactively solve these problems, the convergence of science and religion is inevitable.
Separationism, which claims that science and religion are separate, cannot effectively solve modern problems. For example, the loneliness of modern people and the increasing number of elderly people who are abandoned are the result of the breakdown of communities in the past. The easiest way to solve these problems is to create communities again. However, the modern world is very different from the past. People move around more and prefer to have many shallow relationships rather than a few deep ones. In order to effectively create and maintain a community in the modern era, it is important to have people share religious beliefs to make them feel connected, and to use technology to make it easy and fast to meet anywhere. In other words, it is difficult to create a community without the cooperation and even full integration of science and religion. In addition, Professor Lawrence of Johns Hopkins University has argued that people in the past moved more freely between scientific and religious thought than modern people, and some clerics in the Vatican have also hinted at the possibility of integrating science and religion, saying that “science and religion both come from a common root in nature.” Science and religion are not separate concepts at all, but have a great deal in common: they are explanatory systems that humans have created to explain the phenomena around them. The difference is that religion was developed with a focus on uniting people and maintaining community, while science was developed with a focus on improving people’s living standards. In the future, there will be no trade-off between the security of community and the improved standard of living that comes from science. In other words, in the future, science and religion will not “coexist” but “fuse” to create a new paradigm, which will allow humanity to enjoy an unprecedented golden age of material abundance and spiritual stability at the same time.
