---
title: "Relationship between science and religion"
chunk: 4/16
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_science_and_religion"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:40:18.112185+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

According to Guillermo Paz-y-Miño-C and Avelina Espinosa, the historical conflict between evolution and religion is intrinsic to the incompatibility between scientific rationalism/empiricism and the belief in supernatural causation/faith. According to evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, views on evolution and levels of religiosity in some countries, along with the existence of books explaining reconciliation between evolution and religion, indicate that people have trouble in believing both at the same time, thus implying incompatibility. According to physical chemist Peter Atkins, "whereas religion scorns the power of human comprehension, science respects it." Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco describes a hope that "the confrontation between science and formal religion will come to an end when the role played by science in the lives of all people is the same played by religion today."
Geologist and paleontologist Donald Prothero has stated that religion is the reason "questions about evolution, the age of the earth, cosmology, and human evolution nearly always cause Americans to flunk science literacy tests compared to other nations." However, Jon Miller, who studies science literacy across nations, states that Americans in general are slightly more scientifically literate than Europeans and the Japanese.
According to cosmologist and astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss, compatibility or incompatibility is a theological concern, not a scientific concern.  In Lisa Randall's view, questions of incompatibility or otherwise are not answerable, since by accepting revelations one is abandoning rules of logic which are needed to identify if there are indeed contradictions between holding certain beliefs. Daniel Dennett holds that incompatibility exists because religion is not problematic to a certain point before it collapses into a number of excuses for keeping certain beliefs, in light of evolutionary implications.
According to theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg, teaching cosmology and evolution to students should decrease their self-importance in the universe, as well as their religiosity. Evolutionary developmental biologist PZ Myers' view is that all scientists should be atheists, and that science should never accommodate any religious beliefs. Physicist Sean M. Carroll claims that since religion makes claims that are supernatural, both science and religion are incompatible.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins is openly hostile to religion because he believes it actively debauches the scientific enterprise and education involving science. According to Dawkins, religion "subverts science and saps the intellect". He believes that when science teachers attempt to expound on evolution, there is hostility aimed towards them by parents who are skeptical because they believe it conflicts with their own religious beliefs, and that even in some textbooks have had the word 'evolution' systematically removed. He has worked to argue the negative effects that he believes religion has on education of science.
According to Renny Thomas' study on Indian scientists, atheistic scientists in India called themselves atheists even while accepting that their lifestyle is very much a part of tradition and religion. Thus, they differ from Western atheists in that for them following the lifestyle of a religion is not antithetical to atheism.

==== Criticism ====
Others such as Francis Collins, George F. R. Ellis, Kenneth R. Miller, Katharine Hayhoe, George Coyne and Simon Conway Morris argue for compatibility since they do not agree that science is incompatible with religion and vice versa. They argue that science provides many opportunities to look for and find God in nature and to reflect on their beliefs. According to Kenneth Miller, he disagrees with Jerry Coyne's assessment and argues that since significant portions of scientists are religious and the proportion of Americans believing in evolution is much higher, it implies that both are indeed compatible. Elsewhere, Miller has argued that when scientists make claims on science and theism or atheism, they are not arguing scientifically at all and are stepping beyond the scope of science into discourses of meaning and purpose. What he finds particularly odd and unjustified is in how atheists often come to invoke scientific authority on their non-scientific philosophical conclusions like there being no point or no meaning to the universe as the only viable option when the scientific method and science never have had any way of addressing questions of meaning or God in the first place. Furthermore, he notes that since evolution made the brain and since the brain can handle both religion and science, there is no natural incompatibility between the concepts at the biological level.
Karl Giberson argues that when discussing compatibility, some scientific intellectuals often ignore the viewpoints of intellectual leaders in theology and instead argue against less informed masses, thereby, defining religion by non-intellectuals and slanting the debate unjustly. He argues that leaders in science sometimes trump older scientific baggage and that leaders in theology do the same, so once theological intellectuals are taken into account, people who represent extreme positions like Ken Ham and Eugenie Scott will become irrelevant. Cynthia Tolman notes that religion does not have a method per se partly because religions emerge through time from diverse cultures, but when it comes to Christian theology and ultimate truths, she notes that people often rely on scripture, tradition, reason, and experience to test and gauge what they experience and what they should believe.

==== Conflict thesis ====