Are science and religion compatible?
At a recent public forum at New York's American Museum of Natural History, the answer from a panel of scientists and scholars was a nuanced yes.
Kenneth Miller, a biologist at Brown University and a practicing Roman Catholic who calls himself a religious scientist, said science and religion are intertwined and can never be separated. "All of human experience and knowledge are one," he told the audience at the museum-sponsored event.
But if there was general agreement about the connection between science and faith, panel members also suggested there are ways the two can -- and perhaps should -- stand apart.
Nancey Murphy, a professor of Christian philosophy at the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, spoke of her experiences as a Catholic who later embraced a strain of charismatic Protestantism. While supporting the interrelationships between science and religion, she also said she believes the scientific worldview -- which rational, liberal Protestantism accepts -- does not allow for miracles.That, she said, is one noticeable divide between religious conservatives and liberals, and she, for one, cannot deny the existence and importance of miracles.
Varadaraja V. Raman, a Hindu and an emeritus professor of physics and humanities at Rochester Institute of Technology, called religion and science the loftiest examples of humanity's aspirations and strivings, but he, too, emphasized key differences: science is the effort of finite minds to grasp infinite complexities, religion the effort to grasp the foundation of those infinite complexities.
Both disciplines have limitations, Raman said. Religion can't tell us about the substance of material conditions, while science can't supply ethical or moral answers.
It was no accident that the forum on science and faith was held at the American Museum of Natural History. The stately building overlooking Central Park is currently the site for "Darwin," the most extensive exhibition on Charles Darwin ever mounted, according to the museum. It features original manuscripts, letters, specimens, memorabilia, and two live tortoises from the Galapagos Islands, a key site in the travels that led the British naturalist and author of THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES to his conclusions about evolution and natural selection.
The exhibition methodically chronicles Darwin's life and scientific contributions, but it doesn't shy away from the arguments that greeted his work -- 19th-century cartoons, for example, lampooning Darwin's thinking by portraying monkeys in human settings. The exhibition also places the current debate about evolution and intelligent design in historical context and suggests that controversies over Darwin's thought are almost cyclical events, to be expected every few decades.
Unlike past eras, however, when the religious-scientific divide might have been sharpest, with religious figures on one side and scientists wholly on the other, the exhibition also features videotaped testimonies from well-known contemporary biologists and paleontologists who strike a conciliatory tone, suggesting, as one says, that there is "nothing inherently contradictory about being a scientist and having religious faith." (Darwin himself entered the University of Cambridge prepared to become a clergyman.)
Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, says in one of the exhibition's taped interviews that "the tools of science are the way to understand the natural world, and one needs to be rigorous about that."
