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Relationship between religion and science

overview of interactions

The relationship between religion and science has been a subject of study since classical antiquity, addressed by philosophers, theologians, scientists, and others. Perspectives from different geographical regions, cultures and historical epochs are diverse, with some characterizing the relationship as one of conflict, others describing it as one of harmony, and others proposing little interaction.

Even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato's faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

A

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  • Since religion intrinsically rejects empirical methods, there should never be any attempt to reconcile scientific theories with religion. An infinitely old universe, always evolving, may not be compatible with the Book of Genesis. However, religions such as Buddhism get along without having any explicit creation mythology and are in no way contradicted by a universe without a beginning or end. Creatio ex nihilo, even as religious doctrine, only dates to around AD 200. The key is not to confuse myth and empirical results, or religion and science.

B

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  • My experiences with science led me to God. They challenge science to prove the existence of God. But must we really light a candle to see the sun?
    • Wernher von Braun from a letter to the California State board of Education (14 September 1972)
  • In this age of space flight, when we use the modern tools of science to advance into new regions of human activity, the Bible ... this grandiose, stirring history of the gradual revelation and unfolding of the moral law ... remains in every way an up-to-date book. Our knowledge and use of the laws of nature that enable us to fly to the Moon also enable us to destroy our home planet with the atom bomb. Science itself does not address the question whether we should use the power at our disposal for good or for evil. The guidelines of what we ought to do are furnished in the moral law of God. It is no longer enough that we pray that God may be with us on our side. We must learn again that we may be on God's side.
    • Wernher von Braun quoted in Bob Phillips, Phillips' Book of Great Thoughts & Funny Sayings (1993), 42
  • Can the Christian proclamation today expect men and women to acknowledge the mythical world picture as true? To do so would be both pointless and impossible. It would be pointless because there is nothing specifically Christian about the mythical world picture, which is simply the world picture of a time now past which was not yet formed by scientific thinking. It would be impossible because no one can appropriate a world picture by sheer resolve, since it is already given with one’s historical situation.
    • Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1984), p. 3
  • We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament.
    • Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1984), p. 4

C

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  • The most difficult thing to reconcile is science and religion … And so we created a 
dilemma for her character that plays right into Mulder’s hands. So that cross she wears,
 which was there from the pilot episode, is all-important for a character who is torn 
between her rational character and her spiritual side. That is, I think, a very smart
 thing to do. The show is basically a religious show. It’s about the search for God. You 
know, "The truth is out there." That’s what it’s about.
  • I would not expect religion to be the right tool for sequencing the human genome and by the same token would not expect science to be the means to approaching the supernatural. But on the really interesting larger questions, such as ‘Why are we here?’ or ‘Why do human beings long for spirituality?,’ I find science unsatisfactory. Many superstitions have come into existence and then faded away. Faith has not, which suggests it has reality.

D

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  • It is completely unrealistic to claim, as Gould and many others do, that religion keeps itself away from science's turf, restricting itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims.

E

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  • From a Christian perspective, God is not a "thing", an object that exists like the desk I am sitting at exists, but a person with whom I am in a vital relationship. "Knowing" is not of the same order as knowing an electron, a chromosome or a galaxy: this presupposes a theoretical model and objective experimental verification. Proving the existence of the atom is one thing, but the same procedure cannot be used for the God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ. The relationship I form with him is about freedom.
  • Journalist: What is the difference between a "great watchmaker" god and the God of Jesus Christ? The "great watchmaker" refers to the poetry of Voltaire: it is based on the idea that the world is a clock, that is, a mechanical construction. The model is the vision of Newton and the founders of modern science, such as Descartes. It is known that Pascal was critical of this God "of philosophers and wise men". The God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ presents another "profile", if we can put it that way. Its power manifests itself in its opposite, as Saint Paul of Tarsus vigorously underlined. This shows us the divine creative action in a very different way than according to the model of the manufacture of a machine.

F

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  • Throughout his March article Gray argued for cautious, inductive reasoning—something that was impossible when one routinely made a priori assumptions about the role of a divine Creator in the workings of nature.
  • The problem with invoking the Creator to explain the natural world, of course, was that it foreclosed other hypotheses. It favored dogma at the expense of logic and empiricism.

G

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J

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  • Early Buddhism emphasises the importance of the scientific outlook in dealing with the problems of morality and religion. Its specific dogmas are said to be capable of verification. And its general account of the nature of man and the universe is one that accords with the findings of science rather than being at variance with them. ... The scientific revolution does not have the same adverse effect on Buddhism as it had on other religious traditions. ... Buddhism ... holds that the honest impartial search for truth even in matters moral and religious is no bar to one’s spiritual progress. ... A scientific outlook was thus considered necessary not only for discovering the truly moral and religious life but even for the continual self-examination which such an outlook demands.

K

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  • The alternative of science or religion is fictitious once it be granted that the functions of religion are primarily symbolic, expressive and orientative. Every culture must define its ends as well as perfect its means. The logical and symbolic expressions of the ultimate values of a civilization cannot arise directly from scientific investigation, though it is fair to demand that they should not rest upon premises contrary to known fact or proven theory. A mechanistic, materialistic "science" hardly provides the orientations to the deeper problems of life that are essential for happy individuals and a healthy social order.
    • Clyde Kluckhohn, in Mirror for Man (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1949), pp. 248-249

L

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  • Once you realize that the Bible does not purport to be a textbook of science, the old controversy between religion and science vanishes...
    • Monsignor Georges Lemaître, Einstein and Relativity; Lemaître and the Expanding Universe
  • Religion to me is science, and science is religion. In that deeply-felt truth lies the secret of my intense devotion to the reading of God's natural works. It is reading Him. His will — His intelligence

N

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  • "Will to truth" does not mean "I do not want to let myself be deceived" but—there is no alternative—"I will not deceive, not even myself"; and with that we stand on moral ground. ... You will have gathered what I am getting at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato's faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine.

O

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  • The reason why all those we have mentioned hold false opinions and make impious or ignorant assertions about God appears to be nothing else but this, that scripture is not understood in its spiritual sense, but is interpreted according to the bare letter.
    • Origen of Alexandria, “How divine scripture should be interpreted,” On First Principles, book 4, chapter 2, § 2, Readings in World Christian History (2013), p. 69.
  • Our contention with regard to the whole of divine scripture is that it all has a spiritual meaning, but not all a bodily meaning; for the bodily meaning is often proved to be an impossibility.

P

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  • Both Religion and science require a belief in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations... To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view.
    • Max Planck Religion and Natural Science (Lecture Given 1937).

S

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  • Pythagoras, Ptolemy, Kepler, Copernicus, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton and Einstein... These great men, they have been the makers of one side of humanity, which has two sides.  We call the one side religion, and we call the other science.  Religion is always right.  Religion protects us against that great problem which we all must face.  Science is always wrong; it is the very artifice of men.  Science can never solve one problem without raising 10 more problems.
    • George Bernard Shaw, in a dinner speech at the Savoy Hotel, London (28 October 1930), as quoted by Michael Holroyd, "Albert Einstein, Universe Maker," The New York Times (14 March 1991).
  • Since this is the age of science, not religion, psychiatrists are our rabbis, heroin is our pork, and the addict is the unclean person.

V

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  • For instance, do you know the story about Father on the day they first tested a bomb out at Alamagordo?  After the things went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.'  And do you know what Father said?  He said, 'What is sin?'

W

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  • And though much has been written foolishly about the antagonism of science and religion, there is indeed no such antagonism. What all these world religions declare by inspiration and insight, history as it grows clearer and science as its range extends display, as a reasonable and demonstrable fact, that men form one universal brotherhood, that they spring from one common origin, that their individual lives, their nations and races, interbreed and blend and go on to merge again at last in one common human destiny upon this little planet amidst the stars. And the psychologist can now stand beside the preacher and assure us that there is no reasoned peace of heart, no balance and no safety in the soul, until a man in losing his life has found it, and has schooled and disciplined his interests and well beyond greeds, rivalries, fears, instincts, and narrow affections. The history of our race and personal religious experience run so closely parallel as to seem to a modern observer almost the same thing; both tell of a being at first scattered and blind and utterly confused, feeling its way slowly to the serenity and salvation of an ordered and coherent purpose. That, in the simplest, is the outline of history; whether one have a religious purpose or disavow a religious purpose altogether, the lines of the outline remain the same.
    • H. G. Wells, The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (1920) Book VI Christianity and Islam, Ch. XXIX The Beginnings, The Rise, and the Divisions of Christianity, §3 The new universal religions, pp. 275-276 (1924 edition).

Z

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  • Eine Religion, welche nicht oder nicht mehr fähig ist, sich auf die Höhe der erworbenen Wissenschaft zu erheben, ist eine tote Religion.
    • A religion, which is not able or no more able to raise to the height of acquired science, is a dead religion.
      • Leopold Zunz Quoted in Lippische Mitteilungen aus Geschichte und Landeskunde, Volume 75, p. 127.
  • If I deny the existence of the transcendental sphere, then everything is exhausted in the immanent and the most rigorous component of logic, thus the mathematical structure, should prove the theorem of the denial of God [...]. Why can science never discover God? Because, if science discovered God, God would be the greatest discovery of all time, but it would not be God, because God is everything; science can only discover the fundamental components of immanent reality. [...] Since science discovers that there is a rigorous logic that governs the world from its smallest structures, such as the structure of the proton [...], at the boundaries of the cosmos, if there is a rigorous logic, it is legitimate to ask, "Will there be an author of this logic?".

See also

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Philosophy of science
Concepts Analysis • A priori and a posteriori • Causality • Demarcation problem • Fact • Inductive reasoning • Inquiry • Nature • Objectivity • Observation • Paradigm • Problem of induction • Scientific method • Scientific revolution • Scientific theory •
Related topics Alchemy • Epistemology • History of science • Logic • Metaphysics • Pseudoscience • Relationship between religion and science • Sociology of scientific knowledge
Philosophers of science Plato • Aristotle • Stoicism
Averroes • Avicenna • Roger Bacon • William of Ockham
Francis Bacon • Thomas Hobbes • René Descartes • Galileo Galilei • Pierre Gassendi • Isaac Newton • David Hume
Immanuel Kant • Friedrich Schelling • William Whewell • Auguste Comte • John Stuart Mill • Herbert Spencer • Wilhelm Wundt • Charles Sanders Peirce • Henri Poincaré • Pierre Duhem • Rudolf Steiner • Karl Pearson
Alfred North Whitehead • Bertrand Russell • Albert Einstein • Otto Neurath • C. D. Broad • Michael Polanyi • Hans Reichenbach • Rudolf Carnap • Karl Popper • W. V. O. Quine • Thomas Kuhn • Imre Lakatos • Paul Feyerabend • Jürgen Habermas • Ian Hacking • Bas van Fraassen • Larry Laudan • Daniel Dennett


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