Science and Religion: A Symbiosis

by Richard F. Haglund, Jr.
Originally published in Autumn-Winter 1973
Sometimes people ask if religion and science are not opposed to one another. They are: in the sense that the thumb and fingers of my hand are opposed to one another. It is an opposition by means of which anything can be grasped.
—SIR WILLIAM BRAGG
For most of us, there is little doubt that science was victorious in its centuries-long warfare with theology. From Galileo—kneeling in the robes of a penitent criminal before his Inquisitors, pleading for mercy on the grounds of age and infirmity—we have come full circle, to William Jennings Bryan in the dock at the Scopes “Monkey Trial”—trying desperately to demonstrate the Bible as the infallible guide to the story of Creation, then succumbing without dignity to the pitiless goad of Clarence Darrow.
But this picture of a single titanic intellectual and spiritual conflict, with science emerging at last triumphant and religion banished to the nether realms of social myth and private ethical concerns, is far too simple. The war of science against religion has actually been waged on three broad fronts: a social revolution, which in Jacques Barzun’s words “has enthroned science in the name of increased production, increased communication, increased population and increased specialization’; an intellectual revolution, directed at achieving “a comprehensive knowledge of the cosmos through science”; and, most significantly, a revolution in consciousness, that is, in man’s felt way of perceiving himself and the world about him.
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