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The real conflict is not between religion and science at all, it is between Christianity and humanism. Science is merely a set of tools and a body of data used to investigate the natural world. And religion is a way of living life to prepare for what happens after life. There may be inconsistencies, but each person deals with that on his own and decides how much inconsistency he wants to accept.

The fact is, science began with the ordered philosophies of monotheistic cultures. The reasoning goes that if there is a God who made and maintains the physical creation, then that God has also set up meaningful and logical rules that govern the creation, and man can figure those rules out by studying the creation. Cultures that believed in multitudes of gods running around doing whatever they felt like doing had no such foundation for understanding the world.

There have been many Christian scientists through history (since the scientific revolution, anyway). While they may not have agreed with your or my specific beliefs about doctrine and such, renowned scientists like Newton, Kepler, Galileo, and more recently Mendel and Maxwell, and many others, were all to some degree seeking to learn more about God by learning about God's creation.

So science and religion are not directly in conflict. What is conflicting is the worldview presented by Christianity, which states that the world was created by God and that everything was carefully designed; and that of humanism, which states that the world created itself (somehow) and that everything is due to time and chance. These views have many implications with several different variations, but there is no compromise between those two views, and in fact, people who attempt to compromise are merely making a greater conflict for themselves later when they discover the inconsistencies.

The biggest problem occurs when scientists who subscribe to one view or the other look at the natural world and attempt to interpret what they see based on what they believe. In other words, the world is how it is for both, but both sides claim they have the right answer because they interpret the evidence to fit what they believe. Very few people look at the evidence to decide what to believe. Only one view can be right. The question is, which view contains the fewest internal and external inconsistencies? That is a question that each person has to answer for himself by looking very carefully at both the "evidence" (natural phenomena and data) and the "interpretations" (how people explain this data). The truth will be revealed in the end.

Learn more about this author, Reiko Yukawa.
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