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Therefore the stem cell debate is not a confrontation between Science and Religion, but between Religion and individual scientists' own ethical values. Whether the embryos involved in this research constitute "lives" is not something that can be decided scientifically, since "life" is a term as difficult to pin down as "religion" is.

Science has been remarkably successful at telling us about our world. In the past 400 years since Galileo and Newton started a new age of rational science, we have learned a huge amount about everything from the tiniest particles to the most massive stars. Is it legitimate to claim that science explain everything about the physical world? Or that science is the only way to gain knowledge about the physical world? It certainly seems that we have done remarkably well without resorting to other possible sources of knowledge. These claims assume that the physical world is all that there is and therefore that there is no transcendent reality to which one could or may have to appeal. In fact, the first real modern scientists (such as Newton and Boyle) believed that their enquiries into the nature of the world were a way of investigating and glorifying God's work. Their rational conclusions would be validated by the fact that the world had been created by a rational God. Their faith was the inspiration and justification of their investigation of the world. Newton's epitaph, written by Alexander Pope, reads "Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night; God said 'Let Newton be' and all was light."

Science can tell us nothing about any non-physical realm or any ethical concerns. Its methods and theories deal solely with our physical reality. Science tries to explain everything it possibly can about our physical world without recourse to any non-physical entity. Even if particular scientists believe that there is some kind of non-physical world, appeal to that reality in a scientific theory would be considered unsatisfactory. So maybe the role of Religious knowledge, through revelation, is to tell us about what exists outside of the physical realm and to influence our moral values.

The interaction between Science and Religion is a lot subtler than is suggested by the highly publicised antagonisms over embryonic stem cell research or the creationism debate. In my mind it is clear that revelation is not a legitimate source of knowledge about how our rational physical world works, and that there is no inherent morality to Science. Morality in science should stem from the ethical sensibilities of individual scientists (whether religiously motivated or not) and moderated by the scientific community as a whole. Revelation can be seen as a legitimate source of truth about things outside of our physical world such as facts concerning the existence of an afterlife, of God and so on. Faith can also be seen as a legitimiser of rational enquiry into the natural world; something only possible thanks to the rationality of the creator. Although the ethical sensibilities of religious groups will still bring about conflicts of a kind, this should not be seen as a battle between Science and Religion, but something concerning individual scientists and their personal moral values. As such we can see that at a general level Religion as Science are not incompatible, or even in conflict, but that they are complementary in a number of subtle but important ways.

Learn more about this author, Eric Blair.
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