Science and Faith: Enemies, Strangers, or Partners?

Are science and faith enemies? Not necessarily. They have clashed at times. But many people, including many working scientists, hold both without feeling torn. Most scholars who study the subject now reject the idea of an endless war between the two. How science and faith should fit together in your own life, though, is not something an experiment can decide. That question belongs to philosophy and belief as well as to science.

Think of two people watching the same sunset. A physicist explains why the sky turns red. A poet or a person of faith asks what the moment means. Sometimes they disagree. Often they are simply answering different questions. Here are the main ways people fit those answers together, two famous stories, and what scientists say they believe.

What are the main ways to think about science and faith?

The physicist and theologian Ian Barbour, who won the Templeton Prize in 1999, offered a simple map that is still widely used. As summarized by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, it has four parts:

• Conflict. Science and religion are rivals, and one must win. This view leans on stories like Galileo’s trial and the fights over Darwin.
• Independence. They ask different questions in separate areas, so they need not clash. The biologist Stephen Jay Gould called this “non-overlapping magisteria.” A magisterium is an area of teaching authority.
• Dialogue. They share some common ground, such as assumptions and methods, and can learn from each other.
• Integration. They can be joined more closely, for example through natural theology, which uses reason and findings about nature to argue for God’s existence.

These boxes overlap, but they help. When two people argue about “science and religion,” they are often standing in different boxes without knowing it.

What really happened with Galileo and with Lemaître?

Two popular books from the 1800s helped spread the “war” story: John William Draper’s in 1874 and Andrew Dickson White’s in 1896. Today, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia, most scholars in the field are critical of this conflict model. They see it as based on a shallow, one-sided reading of history.

Take the most famous case. In 1633 the Roman Inquisition found Galileo “vehemently suspect of heresy” for defending the idea that Earth moves around the Sun. He was made to publicly take back that view. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest and died in 1642. That was a real injustice.

But the full story is messier than “church versus science.” According to the Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry on Galileo, the trial unfolded amid tense politics, including the Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War. Galileo was a personal friend of the reigning pope, Urban VIII. And the proof from ocean tides that Galileo offered in his 1632 book was doubted even in his own time. In a 1992 address, Pope John Paul II said that most theologians of Galileo’s day failed to tell the difference between Scripture and their own reading of it. He called the supposed basic opposition between science and faith a “sad misunderstanding” that now belonged to the past.

Now meet Georges Lemaître (1894–1966), a Belgian Catholic priest ordained in 1923 and a professor at the Catholic University of Louvain. In 1927 he proposed that the universe is expanding. In 1931 he suggested that it began from a single “primitive atom.” That idea grew into what we now call the Big Bang theory (see What Does the Big Bang Actually Explain?). In 2018, members of the International Astronomical Union voted to recommend renaming the Hubble law, which describes cosmic expansion, the Hubble–Lemaître law.

In 1951 Pope Pius XII gave a speech that linked the new cosmology to the Christian idea of creation. He never named Lemaître, but the reference to the “primitive atom” was clear. Lemaître was troubled. According to his university’s archives, he felt his theory was not yet proven. He also felt the speech blurred a physical beginning with the religious idea of Creation. Over his life, he worked to keep those two questions distinct.

What do scientists actually believe?

More than many people expect. A 2009 Pew Research Center survey of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that 33% believed in God and 18% in a universal spirit or higher power. Another 41% believed in neither. By comparison, in a 2006 Pew survey of the general public, 83% said they believed in God. So these scientists were much less likely to believe than other Americans, yet about half believed in some kind of God or higher power. Pew notes that its sample may not represent all U.S. scientists.

A larger study led by Elaine Howard Ecklund at Rice University gathered survey answers from 9,422 scientists in eight regions, including India, Turkey, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States. In each region, only a minority saw science and religion as being in conflict: 32% in the U.K. and 29% in the U.S.

The public sees less conflict up close, too. In a 2014 Pew survey, 59% of U.S. adults said science and religion are often in conflict. But only 30% said their own religious beliefs conflicted with science, while 68% said they did not.

How do a thoughtful believer and a thoughtful skeptic see it?

These are perspectives, not evidence. Careful, honest people hold each one.

A thoughtful believer’s view

Many believers see science as a way to learn how the world works, and faith as a way to ask why there is a world at all and how to live in it. On this view, a discovery about nature cannot threaten God, because God is not one more object inside nature. Some find that the universe’s deep order, and our ability to understand it, adds to their wonder. Lemaître’s life offers one model: do rigorous science, and don’t press it into service as proof of God.

A thoughtful skeptic’s view

Many skeptics point out that religions often make claims about the physical world, such as miracles, historical events or the origins of life. Those claims can be checked, so they cannot simply be walled off from science. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes this as a real problem for the “independence” model. Skeptics may add that natural explanations have often replaced supernatural ones, so strong evidence should be required for any claim of the supernatural.

God Plays Dice welcomes both. You can explore these questions here whether you pray, doubt or have never decided. Nobody’s worldview is the punchline. For more on where the line falls, see Can Science Decide Whether God Exists?

What don’t we know?

Science cannot tell us whether God exists, whether the universe has a purpose, or how to weigh faith against doubt. Those questions sit outside what experiments can test. There is no single agreed answer about how science and faith should relate; Barbour’s boxes are tools, not verdicts. And surveys capture what certain people said at certain moments, mostly in certain countries. Beliefs shift over time and across cultures.

What would change the answer?

New historical research can change how we tell stories like Galileo’s. New surveys, especially from more countries, could show beliefs among scientists and the public shifting. And whenever a religious claim makes a clear, testable prediction about the physical world, science can check it. That is one place where the two meet directly. For how to think about that kind of test, see What Would Count as Evidence?

Whatever you believe, the questions are big enough for all of us. Keep asking them honestly, and keep listening to people who answer differently. For more on that kind of honesty, read The Courage to Say “I Don’t Know”.