ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that progress on the issue of sustainable living depends on using both the intellectual knowledge provided by science and the moral understanding derived from religion. It reviews the history of interaction between science and religion and the philosophical underpinnings of each in order to highlight similarities and differences. The chapter shows the complementarity of science and religion by considering how the perspectives of geology and theology can together provide a richer understanding of the issues underlying the question of sustainability. Human understanding of nature has played a central role in religious thought as far back as we can see. Although science seems at first to be a purely objective way of perceiving the world, it is more than a naive sensory encounter with reality. Like any intellectual encounter, science is an operation of consciousness as well as perception; nature as understood by science is not nature itself, it is nature as organized by our minds.
