ABSTRACT
From one point of view, religion and science simply have nothing to do with each other. Religions are concerned with scriptural traditions and rituals, with which all members of a community engage, in order to give themselves a sense of identity, history, moral values and spirituality; they are practised by billions of people worldwide, from the most to the least educated, richest to poorest. Science, in contrast, is an elite, educated, professional activity involving expensive high-tech instruments and complex mathematics; it is engaged in by a group of intellectual, expert researchers and theoreticians who push back the frontiers of human knowledge and discover the true nature of the universe. On this view, studying ‘religion and science’ might seem like studying ‘football chants and electronic engineering’ or ‘modern dance and nuclear physics’ – an absurd attempt to bring together and compare two totally unrelated subjects.
