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in religion is misguided and thus that Science and Religion are incompatible. He suggested in The selfish gene (1976) that religion is a "meme" or a group of memes, an idea expanded by Susan Blackmore in The meme machine (1999). A meme is to the ideas of an individual what genes are to the genotype which makes up an individual. Essentially, a meme is an idea which will spread from one mind to another through communication, much like genes are passed on to the next generation. This characterisation of religion as a "mental parasite" appeals to naturalists like Dawkins because it explains religion's influence and origins without undermining the physicalist basis of naturalism. Dawkins' position is that investigation into the natural world will show that there is no need to posit a God-figure, and therefore that atheism is the only tenable position for scientists. So the question of where Science and Religion interact is a silly one, since the two are completely incompatible. This position, of course, assumes that there will always be a scientific explanation and that appeal to a higher power will never be necessary. As Allister McGrath notes Dawkins seems to deduce from the fact that one need not appeal to God in science that God does not exist. Both the premise and the deduction are dubious. This philosophical posturing aside, it is obvious that the fields of Science and Religion do interact in modern society and it is important to discover the source of the conflicts in an effort to resolve them.

One big area of interaction between Science and Religion is the metaphysical aspect of the latter contradicting the knowledge arrived at through the scientific method. The most publicised and most hotly contested example of this type of interaction is the subject of creationism. Creationism is the belief that the world was created by an all-powerful (normally Christian) god. Within the creationist community there are differences in opinion as to whether the world is literally 6000 years old as estimated by Archbishop Ussher in the sixteenth century, and as to whether the six days of creation were six periods of twenty-four hours or whether a looser definition of 'day' is necessary. This biblical literalism comes into conflict with proponents of evolution, the theory that modern lifeforms evolved through a series of small mutations and natural selection from simpler organisms as first described by Charles Darwin. Creationists also argue with cosmologists who claim that

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