Albert Einstein said it best, “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. Einstein understood what today’s “leading” scientists (at least those who write anti-religion best sellers) and today’s “leading” public religious figures (at least those who proclaim to know precisely what God wants with regard to public policy) sadly prove in their dismissal, denial, and rejection of each others truths. It seems like the responses to the question of the relationship between science and religion, that take up the most oxygen these days, are either fundamentalist scientific views (Dawkins and Hitchens and co.) that claim religion is a superstitious relic from the past or a survival trick that nature uses to reproduce the species or the religious fundamentalist view (Dobson and Perkins and co.) that science is part of the fallen world and has no access to the Real truth. As entertaining as the fight between these two fundamentalisms is it has led to an impoverishment of public conversation – a disenchanted, flattened experience of the world on the one side and an anti-science literalism that claims dogma and mythic beliefs as truth on the other.
The present tension between science and religion is just the next iteration of the centuries old conflicts of reason an revelation, material and spirit, facts and values, matter and consciousness. Of course, ordinary people, as opposed to our absolutist friends, embrace the fact that there is both scientific knowledge of the material world and religious knowledge of our inner world of values, meaning, and purpose. We can not have no alliance or even mutual respect between these two ways of knowing and explaining reality as long as either overreaches. When science reduces values, spiritual experiences, and transpersonal waves of consciousness - our interior realities - to brain states and chemicals it overextends. Such narrow science can not but be in conflict with religion and ought to be, for the consequence of such science is that we all lose touch with powerful experiences of higher levels of consciousness attested to by mystics of every tradition who have used time tested techniques that any one can use to have similar deep religious experiences. By the same token, when religion makes empirical truth claims about the material world such as the universe was created in six days, a bush was not consumed by fire, seas split, a virgin gave birth, people die and days later are resurrected, or people do not die but fly to heaven, it overextends. Such narrow religion can not but be in conflict with science and ought to be for the consequence of such religion is that we diminish the power of good science to help us master and understand the physical world by replacing knowledge of the material world with superstitious dogma and creed.
Can we have an alliance of science and religion? Not as long as science functions as scientism and actually imagines that it is the exhaustive way to explain reality and not as long as religion imagines that its myths and stories actually explain the material world better than science. When science respects its limits to powerfully explain the external, physical and material world and religion respects its limits to powerfully illuminate our interior experience, our inner world, and our higher levels of development and consciousness, then there can indeed be mutual respect and even an alliance. This would be science that transcends the narrow scientific materialism of our fundamentalist scientists and religion that transcends the literalist, ethnocentric understanding of the myths and stories of our religious fundamentalists. One might call this a more humble science and more humble religion each of which invites the other to develop its own potentials to understand the depth and breadth of this radiant Kosmos.
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