Religion Transcending Science Transcending Religion
The nature of the relationship between science and religion has long been a central concern to both philosophers and theologians. For the most part, the relationship has been described in warfare imagery. Until this century, moreover, it was generally assumed that science and religion were locked in mortal combat with victory assured to science. However, some modifications of this simple picture emerged with the birth of post-Newtonian physics, and particularly so with the ascendancy of the Copenhagen interpretation of indeterminacy in quantum physics. This did not, as some thought, bring about a reversal of the fortunes of religion in the discussion, but the ambiguity of modem physics did spawn a detente between the two communities.1 Indeed, the stage was set for the construction of ‘compatibility systems’designed to show how science and religion constitute an essential unity — each incomplete in itself and a complement to the other.2 Some who are involved in the ongoing discussion, in fact, have gone so far as to claim that earlier analyses of the relationship between the two communities in terms of warfare imagery were simply wrong. In support of their claims they point to the espousal by some in the religious community of the very scientific discoveries that the philosophers have seen as destructive of religious belief.3