Monday’s announcement that Bernard d’Espagnat, a French physicist and philosopher of science, has been awarded the 2009 Templeton Prize highlights once again the long-running debate over the relationship between faith and science. D’Espagnat has theorized that quantum physics could provide insights into alternate spiritual realities. He has said that recent discoveries in the field may be “signs providing us with some perhaps not entirely misleading glimpses of a higher reality and, therefore, that higher forms of spirituality are fully compatible with what seems to emerge from contemporary physics.”

D'Espagnat

Yet even that qualified statement can cause agita among scientists and theologians, as well as the general public. The late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously referred to religion and science as “non-overlapping magisteria” that should each tend to their own fields, and history is replete with examples of conflict when the two intersect. In fact, this year marks 400 years since Galileo developed the telescope and began the observations that would get him into trouble with the Catholic Church, and 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and 150 years since he published his historic book, The Origin of Species.

While Rome made peace with astronomy – in December 2008 Pope Benedict XVI paid tribute to Galileo as a scientist who helped the faithful “contemplate with gratitude the Lord’s works” – the United States continues to be an arena for science-faith disputes.

In March, as he lifted a ban on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, President Barack Obama announced he intends to separate politics and science. But religious conservatives and others point out that such a division is not always possible, or even desirable, especially when it comes to moral issues like stem cell research and human cloning and the like.

In terms of the debate over Darwin vs. creationism, Americans remain divided. A Gallup Poll taken Dec. 17, 2010, showed that 16% of Americans accept the theory of evolution, 38% believe God guided a process of human development over millions of years and a full 40% believe God created humans in present form approximately 10,000 years ago.

Can this fraught relationship be saved? Should it be saved? Much is at stake, from climate change to abortion policies to science curriculums in schools across the country.

Resources

• ReligionLink has a number of editions related to science and religion. They include a January 2011 update on Darwin Day, a January 2011 edition on defining brain death in the wake of health care controversy, an August 2010 edition on in-vitro fertilization and the fate of frozen embryos and editions addressing ongoing controversies over evolution, creationism and intelligent design.
• The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has an overview, “The Conflict Between Religion and Evolution,” published in February 2009, as well as a 2010 poll of how religious beliefs shape attitudes about the environment, abortion and others. Also see a December 2007 analysis, “Science in America: Religious Belief and Public Attitudes” and an August 2007 analysis, “How the Public Resolves Conflicts Between Faith and Science,” by Pew researcher David Masci.
• The Templeton Prize is funded by the John Templeton Foundation, which is dedicated to fostering work on the “Big Questions,” as its late founder, Sir John Marks Templeton, put it, “of science, religion and human purpose.” The Templeton Prize is the largest annual monetary prize given to an individual. It is valued this year at $1.42 million.
• Americans United for the Separation of Church and State has a January 2011 update on the controversy over teaching intelligent design (ID) and creationism in public schools five years after the December 2005 decision in the Pennsylvania case, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, that ruled that teaching creationism or ID was a form of religious indoctrination.
• In a Feb. 11, 2009, NPR segment, “Darwin Finds Some Followers in the Pulpits,” religion reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty interviewed a Methodist pastor in Georgia who said congregants are often afraid to ask their clergy basic questions about faith and science. When this Methodist pastor brings it up he says the response is usually, “Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”
• In a Feb. 16, 2009 column printed on USA Today, “How to honor religion and science,” Presbyterian pastor Henry G. Brinton argues that the U.S. needs a national conversation about religion and science. Such a conversation, he says, might help diffuse tensions over what to teach in public schools and how to bridge the secular-religious divide.