Ending the War between Science and Religion: Can Rhetorology Do the Job? 1

Every effort to relate science and religion can be described as overly ambitious, even dangerous. But the topic deserves, and has been receiving, many books, with astonishingly different titles and approaches. ² Wherever we look on the public scene, we see quarrels between defenders of religion or science (sometimes called “reason” or “secular humanism”), the combatants making little or no effort to understand one another, aiming their clever ripostes at targets that are not really there. And our books and journals are full of advice, useful and useless, about how to turn the warfare into dialogue. ³