ABSTRACT
What religions have said about the universe does not always appear to correspond with what science reports. Religion and science even seem incompatible at crucial points. The Darwinian picture of life, more dramatically than any other development in modern science, tempts people to place the whole of religion in the realm of illusion. In Darwinian perspective the ultimate reason why ideas about the gods persist and religions continue to survive is because they are biologically adaptive. Sigmund Freud, who thought of religion as made up totally by the human imagination, realized that at least to its devotees it is about something real. He himself was convinced, of course, that religion is only a matter of people's projecting childish wishes and fears onto an inhospitable cosmos. A closer look at Stephen Jay Gould's writings about science and religion will show that he could reconcile them only by understanding religion in a way that most religious people themselves cannot countenance.
