ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an outline of the course of religion and science, and their periodic, very public collisions at times of scientific advancements. Recent scholarship on the relationship between science and religion falls into three main groups: the first group argues that science and religion are not mutually exclusive. The second group comprises atheists such as Christopher Hitchens. The third is a middle group, exemplified in the journal Zygon, who attempt to resolve the schism between science and religion, to get them to pull together as a team rather than act as adversaries, because it is essential for a viable dynamics of human culture. The chapter presents that the psychoanalytic perspective and Freud's works on religion offer the theoretical scaffolding upon which some of the timeless questions concerning the genesis of religious belief can be understood and how it is employed in the service of perverting human nature for secular or political purposes.
