Rector’s Reflections
Tuesday 11th March 2025
Science and Religion in the Modern World
As you may or my be aware, we are currently in the middle of British Science Week, and in honour of this I am starting a new series of reflections on the subject of Science and Religion in the Modern World.
Let me begin by making a few preliminary comments. First, this is an enormous topic, so I am only going to look at a few aspects of the subject. There will inevitably be many important aspects of the topic which I will not have the time or space to mention. Secondly, I will narrow “Religion” in this context to mean Christianity. This is simply because I do not have the knowledge or understanding to write about the relationship between Science and non-Christian religions, for example Islam or Hinduism. Finally, you may be wondering what I might be meaning by using the phrase “the Modern World”. Basically, in this context I am using it as a shorthand to describe the last 40 years or so. This means that I will be not going to back to the rise of Modern Science in the 16th and 17th centuries. Nor, for that matter, will I be focussing solely on the very latest developments in the world of Science and Religion, although I will make a few references to contemporary developments.
Enough by way of preliminary comments. Let me now start with the first of my reflections on this topic.
In general, over the last 40 years or so, Science and Religion have tended to live separate lives and been happy to do so. They have been like two neighbours who will wave to each other, but who are happy to keep themselves to themselves. Scientists get on with doing their scientific stuff, and religious folk get on with doing their religious stuff, and the two worlds generally keep themselves separate. If the two worlds do happen to meet, for example in the case of a Scientist who is also a practicing Christian, the Scientist will metaphorically take off their lab coat when they enter the Church building. Similarly, a practicing Christian who is also a Scientist will metaphorically don their lab coat when they enter the lab, and take it off again when they leave the lab at the end of the day’s work.
On occasion, Scientists and religious folk will intentionally seek to get to know each other better, which is all for the good. And on occasion, there will be those Scientists and religious folk who wish to break down the barriers between Science and Religion. This can be a fruitful and mutually enriching process, and it happens to be something which I very much enjoy doing. It can be very interesting to explore what Science and Religion may have in common, and how each discipline might inform, inspire and perhaps challenge the other.
However, there are some rare occasions when the encounter between Science and Religion is anything but friendly. An example of this is the so-called New Atheism, associated with Richard Dawkins and others, which was popular for a while about 10 or 15 years ago. This New Atheism pitted a fundamentalist belief in Science against a fundamentalist belief in religion. It proclaimed a highly simplistic approach to both Science and to Religion, and has largely died a death, although it attracted attention in its day.
The view that Science has the only true answer to every problem and every question is sometimes known as Scientism. There are indeed some Scientists who claim that Science has all the answers to everything , and so a religious approach to a question is by definition misguided and wrong, but such Scientists are rare in number. I should add that there are also sometimes religious folk who take a similar approach, but on the other side : in their case, it is the Scientists who must be wrong because their Scientific explanation goes against what the Bible tells us is true.
This combative approach puts the relationship between Science and Religion in terms of a competitive game, where there is only one winner : it’s either Science or it’s Religion. I think most people find this is a meaningless way of looking at things. Science and Religion tend to ask different sorts of questions, and use different sorts of ideas and language. Even when Scientists and religious folk disagree about something, they can both be right, because they are right in different ways and for different reasons. Truth can be complex and multifaceted, and that’s the way it is.