Science and Religion

Are science and religion at war, indifferent to each other, in dialogue, or in deep harmony? The popular image — Galileo before the Inquisition, evolution against Genesis — suggests inevitable conflict, and the "conflict thesis" was influential for a century. But historians and philosophers of religion now widely regard that picture as a myth, or at least a gross oversimplification, and the question has become one of typology: what are the possible relations, and which fits the actual history and the genuine logical points of contact? The flashpoints — evolution and design, miracles and natural law, the fine-tuning of the cosmos, the cognitive science of belief — recur throughout these notes; this page gives the framework.

This page sets out Barbour's fourfold typology and Gould's NOMA, the historical critique of the "conflict thesis" (Galileo), the status of methodological naturalism, and the specific tension over miracles and law.

Four models of the relationship

Ian Barbour's influential fourfold typology organises the options:

• Conflict. Science and religion make competing claims about the same domain (the age and origin of the world, the descent of humans, the occurrence of miracles), and at most one can be right. Both scientific materialism (science disproves religion — the New Atheist line) and biblical literalism (religion trumps science — young-earth creationism) are conflict positions; they agree on the framework (rivalry) and differ only on the winner.
• Independence. Science and religion occupy separate domains, ask different questions, and use different languages, so they cannot conflict. Science addresses the how, the empirical and mechanistic; religion the why, the meaning, value, and ultimate purpose. This is the most common irenic position (and the Wittgensteinian and independence model of faith and reason belong here).
• Dialogue. The two are distinct but interact at the boundaries — science raises questions it cannot answer (why is there a law-governed universe at all? why is it fine-tuned? why is it intelligible?) that religion may address, and each can inform the other's presuppositions and ethics.
• Integration. A stronger synthesis — natural theology, process theology, or a unified worldview in which scientific and religious claims are systematically woven together (e.g. theistic evolution as a positive account, not a mere truce).

NOMA

The best-known version of the independence model is Stephen Jay Gould's NOMA — "Non-Overlapping Magisteria" (Rocks of Ages, 1999). A magisterium is a domain of teaching authority; Gould's thesis: science and religion are non-overlapping magisteria —

"The magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the universe is made of (fact) and why it works this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap."

On NOMA, the apparent conflicts are boundary violations — creationism trespassing on science's empirical turf, scientism trespassing on religion's evaluative turf — and proper hygiene keeps the peace. NOMA's virtue is irenic clarity; its problems:

• Religions do make empirical claims. Most actual religions assert things within science's magisterium — that the universe was created, that miracles occurred, that there was a literal Adam, that prayer has effects, that humans have non-physical souls. NOMA "saves" peace only by redefining religion to exclude exactly these claims — which most believers will not accept (it presupposes the non-realism or radical liberalism the average believer rejects).
• It can cut both ways unfairly — critics on both sides see NOMA as a diplomatic gerrymander that protects religion from empirical refutation by stipulation, while naturalists think religion's empirical claims have been refuted and theists think science's domain is not as exhaustive as NOMA's tidy division implies.

The conflict thesis as myth: Galileo

The historical claim that science and religion have been in perennial war derives from two 19th-century polemics — John William Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology (1896). Historians of science (Lindberg, Numbers, Brooke) now regard the "conflict thesis" as largely a myth:

• The historical relationship was complex and mostly cooperative: the medieval church preserved and cultivated learning, founded the universities, and many foundational scientists (Copernicus a cleric, Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Mendel an abbot, Lemaître a priest who proposed the Big Bang) were devout. The idea that the medievals thought the earth flat, that the church systematically suppressed science, etc., are 19th-century inventions.
• Galileo, the paradigm "conflict" case, was not a simple science-vs-religion clash. It involved Copernican astronomy, yes — but also Counter-Reformation politics, the limits of the evidence then available (the absence of detectable stellar parallax was a genuine scientific objection to a moving earth), Galileo's own combative personality and his insistence on theological interpretation, and disputes internal to the church. It was a messy episode of overlapping scientific, personal, and institutional conflict, not a clean morality play of free inquiry against dogma.

The upshot is not that there has been no tension — there has — but that "war" badly mischaracterises a relationship that has been variously cooperative, indifferent, and contested.

Methodological naturalism

A key concept for understanding both the peace and the limits of the science–religion relation is methodological naturalism (MN): the working rule that science, as a method, explains phenomena only by natural causes — it does not appeal to supernatural agency (God, miracles) in its theories, regardless of whether anything supernatural exists. MN is to be distinguished from metaphysical / philosophical naturalism, the worldview that nothing supernatural exists.

• MN is what lets a theist be a perfectly good scientist: she brackets divine action methodologically in the lab while believing in it metaphysically — the two are compatible because MN is a rule of method, not a claim about reality.
• MN explains why Intelligent Design is excluded from science (it appeals to a non-natural designer) without science thereby asserting atheism — the exclusion is methodological, and the Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling turned on exactly this.
• The philosophical question (raised under the design argument): is MN a justified constraint (science just is the search for natural mechanisms, and has succeeded spectacularly by so limiting itself) or a question-begging exclusion (if a supernatural cause did operate, MN would guarantee science misses it)? Defenders say MN is a defeasible strategy vindicated by results; critics (ID, some theists) call it a stipulation that pre-decides against design. Even granting MN is only methodological, the conflation of MN with metaphysical naturalism — treating science's bracketing of God as evidence there is no God — is a common and important fallacy on the scientism side.

Miracles, laws, and the genuine points of contact

Where, then, are the real logical contacts (as opposed to mythical "war")?

• Miracles vs. natural law. If a miracle is a violation of law, it seems to conflict with science's law-governed picture; if it is a non-natural event (an agent's input, not a law-breaking), the conflict eases. The deeper issue is special divine action: whether God can act in nature without violating its laws (the NIODA program, quantum indeterminism). This is a genuine point of contact, handled in divine action and miracles.
• Evolution and design. Darwin removed the biological design argument's force by supplying a designer-free mechanism; the conflict is real only if one insists on biblical literalism or on ID — theistic evolution (God works through evolutionary processes) is a widely held non-conflict position. The surviving design argument retreats to cosmic fine-tuning, where the rival is the multiverse, not biology.
• Cosmology and creation. Big Bang cosmology and fine-tuning are sometimes read as supporting theism (a beginning, an ordered start — the Kalām), sometimes as needing no God (no-boundary proposals, the multiverse). A genuine dialogue point.
• The cognitive and natural sciences of religion. The scientific explanation of religious belief (HADD, evolutionary psychology) is offered as a debunking of religion — a conflict move — but, as with all genetic arguments, explaining belief does not refute it (handled in critiques of religion).

Where science and religion sit

The relation of science and religion is best understood not through the discredited "conflict thesis" — a 19th-century polemical myth that misreads Galileo and the largely cooperative history — but through Barbour's typology (conflict, independence, dialogue, integration), with NOMA the best-known independence version (irenic, but only by redefining religion to drop its empirical claims). The pivotal concept is methodological naturalism: a rule of scientific method that brackets the supernatural, compatible with theism and not equivalent to metaphysical naturalism — though conflating the two (treating science's success as disproof of God) is the characteristic error of scientism, just as denying MN's fruits is the error of creationism. The genuine points of contact are few and specific — miracles and law, special divine action, evolution and design, cosmology and creation, the cognitive science of belief — and at each, "conflict" is optional rather than forced, depending on contested interpretive choices (literalism, ID, scientism) rather than on science and religion as such. The topic frames the critiques of religion and connects to nearly every argument in the natural-theology section.