Question: Do you think religion and science complement each other or contradict each other?

Susan Cartwright answered on 29 Apr 2020: last edited 29 Apr 2020 1:15 pm

Galileo said, “The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” This encapsulates a lot of what I’d want to say (with the caveat that I am not a religious person at all). In many respects religion and science have different goals and different methodologies, and it is possible to consider them entirely separately and use each for its intended purpose: religion to tell you how to go to heaven, science to tell you how the heavens go. Many of my friends and colleagues are sincerely religious, and it doesn’t seem to have any impact on their scientific work.

Problems arise when religious texts, which were typically written hundreds if not thousands of years ago, are used as an excuse to dismiss scientific findings. That’s what got Galileo into trouble: some passages in the Bible, if interpreted literally, require that the Sun goes round the Earth and not vice versa. In my view, it is not sensible to interpret ancient religious texts as being literally true: even today, we say things that are not literally true (we talk about the Sun rising and setting; we do not talk about our location on the Earth’s surface rotating towards and away from the direction of the Sun, even though we know that’s what’s happening). Sometimes that literal interpretation leads to religion and science becoming opposed: the Book od Genesis, taken literally, is not at all consistent with modern science, and this has led to a long-running opposition to teaching evolution in American schools. “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (Theodosius Dobzhansky), so not teaching evolution is very bad for public understanding of biology.

On the other hand, historically, religion and science have often been allies. Astronomy is often called the oldest of the sciences, and while some ancient astronomy had practical uses (understanding the motions of the Sun and Moon is essential to designing a good calendar), much of it was religiously driven (there is no practical application for understanding the motion of the planets, predicting eclipses, or inventing spherical trigonometry so that you can determine the direction of Mecca). The great flowering of science in the mediaeval Islamic world was driven by an interpretation of the Qu’ran that made seeking knowledge of the world a religious commandment.

I’m an atheist: I can’t reconcile the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent deity with what actually happens in the world (pick any two out of the three…). But I think that religion’s impact on science gets a bad press: people think of Galileo (who did, to a certain extent, ask for it: if you claim you’re presenting both sides of the question in a dialogue, it’s really not tactful to call the guy presenting the Pope’s view “Simplicio”!) and of the arguments about evolution in the US, and do not credit the great Islamic scientists, the monks who maintained literacy and learning through the European dark ages, the Jesuit priest who invented modern classification of stars, the Belgian cleric who co-invented modern cosmology, and the many sincerely religious scientists practising tofay.