ABSTRACT
The existence of a basic conflict between religion and science has been asserted by many writers, 1 and this conflict is well summed up in the words of Zenryu Tsukamoto, a Japanese historian, who has recently described scientific rationalism as, ‘a resistance movement to God or more precisely to the Christian church’. 2 The concept of a conflict between the attitudes of scientists and the belief systems of the Christian religion receives some support from recent studies of the religious beliefs of scientists. 3 It is also true that since the eighteenth century in the western world there has been much antagonism between men of science and men of religion. Of course not all men of science have come into conflict with religion and the fact that many leaders of the Scientific Revolution of the eighteenth century were Puritans has been used by some authors to support a suggestion that there was a direct connection between the rise of Protestantism and the origins of modern science. Other authors have countered that argument by pointing out that many scientists of that period were Catholics.
