Can We Resolve the Never-Ending Tension Between Science and Religion?

A possible light at end of an eternal tunnel

The central conflict between science and religion didn’t start with either science or religion. It started with scientists and religionists.

Their dogged insistence on being right, or righteous, has fueled one of humanity’s longest-running debates. Each is inclined to minimize, deride and dismiss the other as they continue to reinforce their own perspectives.

In some ways, this conflict feels like the tension in a split personality. Each holds to its own view, its own temperament, and gives no quarter to the other. What’s real to one is fiction to the other.

And this warring personality idea isn’t too far off the mark. After all, science and religion are disciplines that arise from the different modes of thinking and perceiving, and these modes exist in the minds of us all.

Each discipline represents a different part of our mind

Reality is made of many different things and exists on many different levels. So the fact that our minds have adapted to detect and engage with those different levels seems, well, natural.

Science aims at discovering facts

As a discipline, science grew from the part of our mind oriented toward cause and effect, toward fact discernment and mathematical quantification. This part searches the material levels of reality always measuring, weighing, examining.

It was this kind of thinking that taught Brene Brown, “if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.” To science, if a thing can’t be represented by, or reduced to a fact, it isn’t real. And from a purely physical-material view, this is accurate.

Science is forever looking for physical causes and effects and will continue its flight of discovery until it finds the original cause of causes, the thing that set everything we know in motion.

Religion aims at experiencing values

Before I talk about how religion is different, let me clarify something. The religion I’m referring to here is personal religion, not institutional or organized religion. Organized religion has become a system of religious philosophy. And like all long-running organizations, it has tended to ossify over time. By now most organized religions are incredibly rigid and unyielding in their principles.

Personal religion is something else entirely.

It is “ . . . the experiencing of divinity in the consciousness of a moral being of evolutionary origin . . .” (Urantia Book, 101:1.1 (1104.4)).

Personal religion deals with experience and values. It aims to understand spiritual values such as love, patience, goodness, hope, faith. It tries to identify and then live out the ideal expression of these ideas.

Over time, our understanding of values grows and evolves, and the ideal expression changes as well. What good means to a child is different than what good means to a grandparent. Given enough time and growth of understanding, this experience becomes the faith-grasp of divinity, and an individualized and personal experience with Deity.

Science and religion are essential parts of the human condition

Though one would like to minimize the other, we can’t ignore either since they are a part of us. Or rather, the internal perspectives which give rise to them, a part of our human nature, are an integral part of us.

To deny one and focus solely on the other invites disaster. Everything that sustains us, that gives us life, and makes us better is a combination of multiple things. A healthy diet is water plus food, not one or the other. Healthy emotional relationships are giving plus receiving. Fascinating music is sound and silence, repetition plus variation.

The great athletes, artists, and teachers learn how to combine different approaches for maximum benefit, and that starts by recognizing the essential elements of the art. The art of living has its elements too, of which scientific insight and spirit-value recognition are two indispensable parts. Ideally, we would want to unify their two perspectives to better move through life.

If we minimize one, we do so to our detriment. And yet, that is just what the organized institutions have been doing, for about as long as each as been around.

Which one is primary?

This is the question, the one fueling debate over the millennia. Is science more important, and gives us more answers, or does religion offer more? Which should sway over the other?

Controlling the terms of the debate

It’s incredibly difficult to parse an answer to this question because neither one will give you a straight answer about the other. One of the central features of this debate is that each side wants to control the terms.

Science wants religion to explain itself, but only in quantitative terms that science understands. Belief, faith, hope, love — all these are empty to science and carry no explanatory power. Science is looking for the mathematical proof of love (and therefore God), and so far religion has come up woefully short.

Religion, on the other hand, wants science to justify itself in qualitative terms: values. Religion scoffs at science’s lack of hope and belief, its unwillingness to even try to see beyond the veil of what can be “proven”. In response to this criticism science merely rejoins that “hope is not a method” and goes back to its microscope.

With each side demanding the other explain itself in inflexible foreign terms, it’s going to be a long time before either side is happy.

It seems we’ll never get to the answer of which one is more important, though it’s tough to figure it out anyway, seeing as both are intrinsically linked together. It’s like asking which came first, yin or yang?

However, there is a way forward.

Scientists and religionists are the problem. They are also the solution.

Love, patience, and forbearance might not be a measurable phenomena, but they are deeply real to the scientist. What young astronomer wasn’t filled with acceptance and belonging when her dad took her into the backyard on a warm summer night to gaze at the Pleiades through a telescope?

Plumbing, water pressure, hydrodynamics might not be affected much by spiritual values. They are just a handful of thousands of physical facts and formulas overlooked by non-scientists every day. But what religionist doesn’t enjoy a soothing bath after a long day of exercising patience and forbearance while teaching spiritual principles?

The institutions of science and religion might be at odds with each other. But each is incredibly important to the people who sustain those institutions. If thousands of years can’t reconcile the institutions, perhaps a place to begin is inside of us.

If we can see both as a means to explore and explain very different, but essential parts of reality, perhaps we can find a narrative that relates the two, even if it’s just a personal narrative.

Over time, personal narratives like these can combine and evolve, and maybe, just maybe, elevate others to higher planes of universe perspective.