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Science and Religion: Partners in Education?*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
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Believing as I do that the ‘problem’ of science and religion is not a problem at all, provided that each is seen in the correct way and that each does not try to encroach upon the other, it will be my purpose in this paper to point out some of the difficulties in educating secondary school pupils into this fact. In popular thought, and in the thought of the average pupil, science produces severe problems for the religious believer, and it is assumed that the scientist is the purveyor of truth, whilst the religious believer is one who clings to unscientific beliefs in the attempt to hold on to his faith. In popular thought a scientist could not believe in religion because science has supposedly disproved the foundations of religion piece by piece over the centuries. Such a view, however, of science and religion is totally wrong.
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- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1978
References
page 402 note 1 Monod, J., Chance and Necessity (Fontana, London, 1974), p. no.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 402 note 2 ibid., p. 137.
page 402 note 3 Having been created by chance, living structures then continue, of necessity, to reproduce themselves; ibid., ch. I, pp. 114ff
page 403 note 1 Ramm, B., The Christian View of Science and Scripture (Paternoster, Exeter, 1964).Google Scholar
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page 404 note 1 A somewhat similar view is accepted by A. Peacocke, although at times he still seems to see the two accounts as alternatives: cf. Peacocke, A., ‘Chaos or Cosmos’, New Scientist, LXIII (1974).Google Scholar
page 405 note 1 I owe my analogy to Toulmin, S., The Philosophy of Science (Hutchinson University Library, London, 1967), ch. 4Google Scholar, although I have modified its use. I have used the analogy in other fields in ‘Three Dimensional Theology’, The Churchman, LXXXIX (1975). The picture of religion and science as being two maps of a different type (as an O.S. map differs from a geological map) is preferable to the picture of Prof. Coulson who depicts the maps as being of the same type but as picturing different sides of reality; cf. Coulson, C. in Barbour, I. G. (ed.), Science and Religion (S.C.M., London, 1968), p. 75.Google Scholar There are limits, however, to the concept of complementarity between religion and science, and the maps that each draws; cf. Barbour, I. G., Issues in Science and Religion (S.C.M., London, 1966), pp. 290–294.Google Scholar
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page 409 note 2 J. Monod, op. cit., p. 159.
page 410 note 1 ibid., p. 160.
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page 411 note 1 For further details on this cf. my own articles, ‘Religious Studies and the Quest for Truth’, in the British Journal of Educational Studies, XXIV (1976), and ‘Indoctrination and the R.E. Teacher’, in Third Way, vol. 2, no. 1 (1978).
page 412 note 1 For further details concerning the unverifiable assumptions of mathematics and theology, cf. Carnes, J. R., ‘Metamathematics and Dogmatic Theology’, in the Scottish Journal of Theology, XXIX (1976)Google Scholar; cf. also Polanyi, M., ‘Genius in Science’, Encounter, XXXVIII (1972), pp. 46–48.Google Scholar
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