Science and Religion: Nature as Interpreted Book
Arie Leegwater, Professor of Chemistry
Minds in the Making

Editor's note: The author gave this address at Calvin College as ARIHE (Association of Reformed Institutions of Higher Education) lecturer for 2005-06. The ARIHE lectures are co-sponsored by the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship and Seminars in Christian Scholarship as part of the Christian Perspectives in Science series at Calvin College.

This is the first of two lectures. The second will appear in a subsequent edition of Minds in the Making.

If there is one metaphor we have inherited from the past, it is the recurring one of the book of Nature and its complement, the Word of God, the Scriptures. Two books, two readings, two revelations, two "sciences": theology and natural science, faith and philosophy, faith and science, religion and science.

If they indeed are to be viewed as books, the resulting question becomes, how to read them? And how to relate them? What are the keys to knowledge, to sure knowledge? And what is involved in reading: Is there a plain literal reading or are we "resigned" to interpretation(s)?

I aim to address some of these issues in this lecture, speaking as a physical scientist who has an inherent love for the history of his discipline, chemistry, and the contextual setting for its development. I have re-titled my lecture:

On the Incompatibility of Science and Religion?

1. Introduction

In a recent article with the arresting title: "A Designer Universe?" Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Laureate in Physics, concluded his essay with these remarks:

I am in favor of a dialogue between science and religion, but not a constructive dialogue. One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not shrink from this accomplishment.1

Other scientists such as the physical chemist Peter Atkins polemically state similar sentiments:

Science and religion cannot be reconciled, and humanity should begin to appreciate the power of its child [science] and to beat off all attempts at compromise. Religion has failed, and its failure should be exposed. Science with its currently successful pursuit of universal competence.should be acknowledged king.2

My aim in this lecture is to challenge the assumptions of both Atkins and Weinberg, and countless other natural scientists who maintain that if religion and science are in dialogue, science will inevitably triumph. More importantly, I want to suggest that the very metaphor of dialogue may not properly capture the relationship of science and religion. I would like to turn to the history of science to support this view.

2. First Pass on Science and Religion

Historians of science have felt compelled to consider the relationships between science and religion. David Livingstone, for example, has identified four specific relationships: conflict, competition, cooperation, and continuity.3 John Brooke has highlighted three in his insightful book Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives: i.e., warfare, separation or complementarity, and intimacy.4 Approaches to this subject have been marred both by polemical intentions surrounding the warfare or conflict thesis and by an inability to grasp and cope with the complexity of the issues involved. What is clear is that a variety of interpretive frameworks have been utilized to depict the historical relations between science and religion. Despite these various readings the conflict model is by far the most dominant one both in the public's mind and, as illustrated by Weinberg and Atkins, for many professional scientists as well.           

Recently there has been a sustained interest in exploring these relationships in a more systematic way. First let me mention the 'revival' of theology/science discussions. I think here, in particular, of the work of John Polkinghorne, Arthur Peacocke, and Ian Barbour, all scientist-theologians, as well as the work of Thomas Torrance and Wolfgang Pannenberg.     

The locus of topics treated over these past twenty years has been on broad theological themes, in an effort to find 'bridging concepts' or 'cross-traffic' between theology and science. The questions have been concerned with God's existence, God's action in the world, and themes of eschatology. Big, expansive questions: frequently with grand claims, but, all too often, in attempts to answer them, too little attention has been paid to historical narrative, nuance, and context. In turn, the discussions have also been hamstrung by the implicit assumption, put crudely, that science's role is to raise questions that theology must attempt to answer. The science, its form, content, exposition, structure, and context, is assumed as a given, something theology must respond to if faith is to be credible to today's scientifically dominated world.5

Often contemporary discussions of science and religion give the impression that theology, particularly in its Christian theistic form, is either being used to 'sacralize' nature or is being employed as a complement to science in the interpretation and description of the 'physical' world. For many the metaphor of warfare between science and religion would appear to be dated; rather it has been replaced by metaphors of rapprochement (harmony, complementarity). As comforting as that position may be for many evangelical scientists and historians of science, this venture in harmonization, in my opinion, too easily cuts off debate and discussion.6

It also creates a burden for natural scientists: for too many the word "theology" sounds like something that scholars advance in order to give Christian meaning to the otherwise secular pursuit of science. At least three options for natural scientists seem to be on offer:

  1. To follow Stephen J. Gould's advice, keep the solution simple: we must distinguish the legitimate sphere of science (the physical universe) from the legitimate sphere of religion (meaning, value, and ethics) and we must ensure that neither intrudes on the other,7

  2. to develop a natural theology in which natural physical events are viewed as mirroring the action and activity of the Godhead, or exemplify God's very nature (Science it is said is "to think God's thoughts after Him"),8 or

  3. to argue that modern science and its methodologies are the fruits of Christianity, so that our science is in principle Christian.9

All of these options have their own particular problems which I cannot now trace.

As much as theology, as a discipline, needs to pay attention to developments in science, there are other issues that need addressing if we wish to understand the relation between science and religion. For instance, how should we assess situations in which science itself begins to assume religious status, that is, when it offers itself as the alpha and the omega, the first and last word, on all matters? Can science harbor its own religion? Or to employ a telling phrase of John Brooke: "[can] the excision of religion from science . itself be a form of religion?" Far more, it seems, is at stake than finding 'bridging concepts' between theology and science.

Recent moves by historians of science have also been made to shift our attention away from a 'history of ideas and concepts' to a concern with scientific practice. The focus is not on what scientists say as much as on what they actually do. The historian's role is not to defend science or tell of its historical triumph in isolation from other developments. The "job of the historian of science," as Roy Porter expresses it, "is not to play historiographer royal to science, but to undertake detached analysis of how science really operates, and to examine its place within a wider spheres of thought, culture, and society."10 But what can this turn to a wider context for the practice of science entail?

Martin J. S. Rudwick, in his bookThe Great Devonian Controversy:The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists, employs a metaphor of sailing to describe some of these current descriptions of natural science and the problems such descriptions generate:

Some philosophers may continue to portray natural science as 'a ship of reason powering its own way through a silent sea of social contingencies' [quoting Barry Barnes]. Those who are concerned with what scientists really did in the past-or with what they do at present-have rightly rejected the image as incompatible with any truthful description of scientific activity. But some have now swung to the opposite extreme, presenting science as the making of model ships in bottles with an entirely questionable relation to any real ships there may be in the world outside.11

Rudwick, in my estimation, makes a noble attempt to offer a more adequate way of describing the relation between our social constructions in the natural sciences, in his case geology, and whatever constraints may be imposed on those constructions by the natural world itself. He chooses to speak of the "shaping" of knowledge, rather than the "discovery" or the "construction" of knowledge in order to express on the metaphorical level the "centrality of that relation."

Rudwick deals with geological fieldwork, where compass map, and hammer are the instruments to hand. The debate is about the Greywacke stratum later to be designated as the Devonian. In analyzing this controversy in fine detail, Rudwick refuses to accept the proposition that historians of science must attend either only to the scientist's interaction with the professional community and general society, or only to the scientist's interaction with the empirical evidence. He shows that the great Devonian controversy was settled through a social process of argument among the proponents of alternative interpretations, and eventually by their virtual consensus around an interpretation that had not been anticipated by any one at the outset. "But did the resolution of the controversy entail anything more than some experts' agreement to agree: did the outcome also embody a genuine improvement in human understanding of the structure and prehuman history of the planet?12 For Rudwick, the social constructive elements do not negate this particular acquisition of a piece of "reliable natural knowledge."

This contextualization of science has gone hand-in-hand with an awareness of the important role that religious beliefs and commitments have played in the past in the shaping and elaboration of scientific world-views and pictures. As Martin Rudwick has commented: "A growing number of historians now routinely treat religious beliefs as a possible constitutive factor in the formulation and acceptance not only of generalized world-views, but also of quite specific scientific theories and even of alleged observational 'facts'."13 But - and this is a large but - "the strength of the historian's empathy for religious beliefs often seems to be directly proportional to the space of time that separates him from them, fading away as one approaches the present day." Even historical studies of science have "escaped only superficially from the powerful triumphalism of modern science."14

3. A Biographical Example of the Religion-Science Connection:

Allow me to give an instance of some scholarship that attempts to bridge some of the conflicting tendencies in the writing of the history of science. Over the past three decades the scientific work of Michael Faraday (1791-1867) has become the object of some of the most detailed and critical studies in the history and philosophy of science. Philosophers such as Joseph Agassi have played out their methodological struggles in an effort to understand Faraday. More recently historians of science have taken their turn. Led first by L. Pearce Williams in his biography, Michael Faraday, and more recently by David Gooding and Frank James they have engaged in a more socially interactive interpretation of Faraday.15 And what a subject: a practicing scientist at the Royal Institution, an elder in a despised Christian 'sect', an experimentalist par excellence! Who indeed was this Faraday? The search for the historical Faraday in the richest and most nuanced sense is well under way. The chosen avenue has frequently become biography.  

That the biographical approach opens up rich veins of research in the history of science has been plain to see. Richard S. Westfall's magisterial biography of Isaac Newton, and the more recent biographies of Charles Darwin by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, and Janet Browne,16 clearly display the advantage of a more particularist point of view. If science has an inherent social element then biography should be able to highlight the interaction of many factors (intellectual, social and religious) more readily in the private life and public lives of a single personage. Written by Geoffrey Cantor, an accomplished Jewish historian of science, his biography of Michael Faraday (1991) aims to provide a "constructive synthesis" of Faraday's "understanding of the external world" and his inner, religious and moral self.

Previous biographers of Faraday have allowed Faraday's letter to Ada Lovelace, in which he wrote, "there is no philosophy in my religion," to cloud their interpretation by assuming that religion and science were carefully segregated or compartmentalized by Faraday. Cantor concedes that this strategy was followed by Faraday in public, but that a close examination of archival materials, the diaries of Faraday's nieces and other sources, religion as practiced by the Sandemanians was the central shaping influence in both Faraday's public and private life. In this most sensitive of biographies, Cantor moves from an understanding of Faraday's participation in the closed Sandemanian fellowship to the public Faraday as lecturer and investigator at the Royal Institution. These various strands are integrated or woven together by Cantor's suggestion that Faraday's deep passion for science and religion reflects the deep-seated psychological needs of his personality. By focusing on an individual Cantor wishes to avoid two extremes:

  1. the conflict thesis of science and religion, and

  2. a revisionism which usually seeks the support of a specific religion for the development of science.

Both of these extremes Cantor maintains assume static versions of science and religion with corresponding essentialist definitions of each. Seeing Faraday as an active agent, as believer and scientist Cantor hopes to bridge the domains, or better yet, make the talk of domains passé.

Before I raise some questions about this particular biographical approach to the writing of history of science, allow me to highlight some similar issues brought forward in John Brooke's book: Science and Religion. Brooke tells us openly what he has presented:

The principle aim of this book has been to reveal something of the complexity of the relationship between science and religion as they have interacted in the past. Popular generalizations about that relationship, whether couched in terms of war or peace, simply do not stand up to serious investigation. There is no such thing as the relationship between science and religion. It is what different individuals and communities have made of it in a plethora of different contexts.17

The historical episodes Brooke examines are ones chosen to display a range of interactions between science and religion: such as, parallels between science and religion in the Scientific Revolution, divine activity in the mechanical universe, science and religion in the enlightenment, fortunes and functions of natural theology, and religious belief and the historical sciences. But even in a book as ably crafted as John Brooke's there remain some lingering questions. Do the categories of religion and science really do justice to the complex historical situations Brooke describes? Are these in fact the categories one should use? Or do they merely reflect a language game in which usage 'defines' meaning?

If, in fact, it is dangerous to abstract science and religion from their social contexts, could not an equal danger be that they could also be thoroughly swallowed up or emasculated by their contexts? What is to prevent religion or science from becoming mere vacuous references to socially shared conventions? There appears to be an internal tension or dialectic at work in Brooke's thought. On the one hand Brooke does not want to guarantee or assume too much when he uses the terms science and religion, ever apprehensive about essentialist overtones and potential distortions of the historically contingent moment. Thus, the typically historian's concern or nervousness when persons speak of "the relationship between science and religion." But, on the other hand, Brooke has to admit that science and religion have a tenacity that is simply amazing. He doubts "[W]hether belief in the supreme worth of every human life.can be sustained without reference to the transcendent."18 How does one give an appropriate account of that state of affairs?

This tension is also present in Cantor's view of religion. There are times when he views religion as fundamental, as a "way of life," or as a defining mark of what it is to be human. On the other hand, religion becomes identified too easily with the biblical and moral beliefs of a sectarian community, and how they are appropriated and practiced by an individual member of that community. That tension in the 'meaning" of religion invites some sort of resolution. Cantor attempts to integrate and weave these strands together by suggesting that Faraday's deep passion for science and religion reflect the deep-seated psychological needs of his personality. Faraday's search for order in nature and his inner longing for a father figure are to be found in science and religion respectively.19

4. Hints at a Historiography

In addressing issues of science and religion as Christian scientists who wish to engage fellow scientists, Christian or not, we need first to grapple more directly with the problems within the scientific field itself, and attempt to develop ways of addressing these problems that reflect Christian philosophical insight and historical sensitivity. This positive work needs to go beyond apologetics or a muted natural theology that employs design arguments of one type or another. A biographical-historical approach seems to offer a promising way to fill this need. By it one can look to the problems the scientist chooses to work on and the way he or she formulates them, to the kind of mathematical argument that she brings to bear, to the experimental evidence she marshals, to the conceptual experiments she devises, to what she finds easy or evident, and what she finds difficult and in need of discussion, to what she perceives the range and the scope of the theory to be both with respect to the subject proper and to its impingement on other areas. In short, historical studies need to be sensitive to various traditions in which an individual scientist finds her place-either by spirited reaction or quiet acceptance.

But, granting that newer historical perspectives allow more factors - sociological, political, religious beliefs, etc.-to play a role in the historical development of science, does the turn to the 'concrete' person (or social group) in real life situations add anything substantive to the discussion? Is it indeed a plus point when religious opinions and commitments are viewed as 'mere' factors and are seen as adding their own peculiar language to the scientific enterprise? We need to embrace a major tenet of Christian scholarship, i.e. that religion occupies a far more central role than what is usually ascribed to it. Consequently, one needs to search for that role even in more modern scientific situations. We need to address this question not just to the Newtons, Faradays, Maxwells, and Darwins of bygone centuries, but to more modern scientists as well.

Of course, very much depends on how we conceptualize the realities involved. Science, defined in terms of its content and methodology, a methodological naturalism if you will, will fail to take seriously the rich context of scientific practice. It will then be easy to dismiss or minimize religious matters as irrelevant. Similarly, if religion is identified with theology or biblical doctrines, or limited to devotional practices, the role of faith will be greatly reduced in its ability to fund scientific practice. But what if we consider religion as not coming in from the outside as a fremd Körper to scientific practice, but rather define religion as a response to God's revelation in the Scriptures and creation that holds for every sphere of human endeavor? How would that shape or alter our view of the relation of science and religion?

By acknowledging, or dare I say it, defining humans as being God related, or fixated on some imagined substitute, we may expect religion to play itself out at various points. If religion is the central pivot of human existence, which gives life as a whole its ultimate orientation it should be reflected within scientific practice. I am using the word religion now in the sense of commitment to a presumed source of ultimate meaning-an origin, the divine, the transcendent, if you will. The Biblical Scriptures, as I understand them, describe as idolatry the worship of the creature rather than the Creator, that is, identifying some aspect, institution, thing, event, relationship, as the first and last word about the world-a revelation, if you will.

Therefore, religion, I would argue, is not some additional factor-one among many-constitutive of human action and personality, but rather religion lies at the very heart of what it is to be human. We are religious creatures through and through. All things have a 'sacred' depth dimension in the sense that all things derive there meaning as dependent creatures from their Creator. So the challenge, as I see it, is to determine as clearly as we can how this identifying mark of humans as God's imagers, i.e. built in relationship with him, comes to expression both in the lives and work of others as well as ourselves. Granted, it will not necessarily be easy to identify expressions of an individual's religion, particularly in some of the more exact sciences. But I am convinced that religion deals with more than the motivations for doing science, the moral/ethical application of scientific discoveries, or the impingement of scientific discoveries and theories on particular theological formulations.

5. Two ChemistsBriefly Considered

I would like to give two examples, two brief illustrations of this line of inquiry. Each would demand far more elaboration than I can give it here. These examples are not from physics and biology as tempting as that prospect may be. It is clear that these twin sister disciplines to chemistry dominate the field of discussion and debate. Check any academic bookstore. Rather, I want to relate a story about chemistry, the Cinderella discipline, if you will, to the other two. Chemistry is a centrally positioned discipline much maligned, but with a long tradition considerably different than biology or physics.

Chemistry's feet may be unadorned by glass slippers, but it stands firmly on solid ground. So two vignettes, which illustrate, I trust, the movement that scholarship, and Christian scholarship in particular, can take as it begins to probe beneath the surface. I propose, then, to look at two different chemists: Wilhelm F. Ostwald (1853-1932), a German chemist, monist and atheist, and Charles A. Coulson (1910-1974), an English-Methodist quantum chemist and Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford.

Take the case of Wilhelm Ostwald, a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry in 1909.

Ostwald wanted to develop a general chemistry (an 'allgemeine Chemie'), which would undergird all of the subspecialties of chemistry. Ostwald's aim was to be constructive, to reconstruct and reformulate the principles of chemistry along more general and intuitive lines. He considered a good chemical theory to be one that satisfied two requirements:

  1. it should consist of functional relations among measurable quantities, and

  2. it must provide a main or general law from which special laws referring to particular systems could be derived.

Energy and its transformations were to be the lodestone for Ostwald's science of energetics. Matter, he argued, "is nothing but a complex of energy factors."20 Energy has a right (besides space and time) to be a central concept since "everything that happens is in the final instance nothing but a change of energy." Atomic models or atoms are nothing but "graven images," as he described them in his famous 1895 Lübeck address, "Overcoming Scientific Materialism."21 Permit me to give you a portion of Ostwald's description of his conversion experience in 1890 to pure energetics, taken from his autobiography:

In the earliest morning hour I walked from my hotel to the zoological garden [Tiergarten], where I experienced in the sunshine of a marvelous spring morning a true Pentecost, an outpouring of the spirit over me..Everything regarded me with new unaccustomed eyes, and I felt as if I were experiencing all of these blisses and splendors for the first time..The thought process required for the general formation of the energetic conception of the world then took place without any effort―indeed, with positive feelings of bliss. All things looked at me as if I had just been placed in Eden , in accordance with the Biblical account of creation, and was now giving each thing its true name."22

The strength of Ostwald's energeticist doctrine in chemistry is simultaneously its major weakness. The relatively abstract mathematical description of energy and its various exchanges required the isolation, either theoretically or experimentally, of a physical system and a conscious neglect of its typical properties and structure. This neglect, or better yet reduction, of subsuming typical properties as instantiations of a general law, ran counter to the major thrust of 19th century and contemporary chemistry, namely, stereochemistry, valence theory, bonding, structure-reactivity relationships, and chemical synthesis.

Despite these drawbacks and difficulties, the late 19th century energeticists advanced their program in reaction to the tradition of classical physics: "tracing the phenomena of nature back to simple laws of mechanics," as Heinrich Hertz expressed it. The energeticists employed a broad range of arguments: scientific, methodological, philosophical, and most centrally religious. The latter is, I would argue, manifest in Ostwald's commitment to an energy principle of cosmic proportions. Ostwald, in his Vorlesungen über Naturphilosophie, minces no words about the universal scope of his energetics: it would be an energetics complete with a theory of happiness, an encyclopedia of the sciences, a theory of spirituality, an energetic understanding of consciousness, an argument for Esperanto, and supplemented by numerous Sunday monistic sermons, many of which exhorted listeners to conserve energy.23

Ostwald's focus on energy as the explanatory principle and final constituent of reality developed gradually. This focus was undoubtedly nourished by a scientific positivism. But in the end his energy considerations both in theory and practice served as a religion, as a substitute source of meaning and revelation. His "graven images" may not have been atoms, but rather they became energy in its many manifestations. And who gives things their true name?

Let us turn lastly to Charles A. Coulson (1910-1974) delivering his 1951 Tilden Lecture: "The Contributions of Wave Mechanics to Chemistry." In concluding his lecture he states:

You must surely have been struck by the way in which, all along, modern wave mechanics has taken up ideas of the past, and refurbished them. How astonishingly fruitful have been those semi-formulated concepts of the classical chemists: and how necessary, in a sense, it has been for wave mechanics to give flesh and blood to the spirit which it has inherited..At every turn we have seen how wave mechanics has taken their work and has added to it the quality of a deeper understanding. That of course is always how science proceeds, building the past into the present and enriching it thereby.24

At first reading it strikes one as a wonderful, literate, summary of the development of wave mechanics in chemistry from 1926 to 1951. And yet if we look more closely at the statement, particularly at the phrase, "give flesh and blood to the spirit which [wave mechanics] has inherited," a whole new vista is open to our view. Another horizon of experience and interpretation seems to fund this description. Does it reflect a different reading or narrative of Nature? In this case a Christian incarnational one: Nature not read as organism, as magical, as mechanism, as an economy, or as an entangled bank, but as God's incarnational involvement with the earth?

If I had the time I could provide a context for this turn of phrase. At least allow me to say that whole new vistas open up if we begin to situate or contextualize the statement: Coulson as a young student influenced by Methodist theologies of experience during his stay at Cambridge in the 1920s, by Canon Charles Raven's Anglican theology of incarnation, by Michael Polanyi's views on personal knowledge, by a concern for the positivist turn in much of scientific practice; for a "spirit" that gives and receives, and thereby considers scientific practice to be a religious activity. Such fine-grained analysis is necessary if we wish to understand Coulson and the role of religion in his life and scientific practice.

There is evidence that Coulson's life displayed a unity of belief and action, and that this unity was displayed in a variety of ways. Coulson's belief in a personal religious experience, the role of a group's fellowship in confirming that experience, and a call to holiness affected Coulson's approach to his scientific co-workers, his research group and their activities, and his general promotion of science to a wider public. Secondly, one can show, how Coulson's style of attacking scientific problems in quantum chemistry, his view of the role of models and imagination in scientific work, and his emphasis on the wholeness or unity of personal experience shaped his view of the science/religion connection.

A brief look at Coulson's views on the science/religion nexus will have to suffice. Coulson introduced an analogy of a mountain, Ben Nevis, as a basis for extending and clarifying his arguments on religion and science. The artist, the poet, the historian-they each have their own particular perspective. Each attempts to describe his encounter with the mountain, in terms that make sense. To say 'Ben Nevis is a grassy slope,' or to say, ' Ben Nevis is a rocky mountain,' may seem at variance, but it is equivalent to saying: 'An electron is a wave and a particle.' Which model or description you prefer depends on the particular problem you wish to solve. In a telling statement, illuminating the primacy of experience, Coulson remarked: "There is no conflict, nor can there be, since both descriptions start from the same basic origin-our experiences-and experience can never contradict itself."25

It would appear that science and religion, for Coulson, merely exhibit complementary views and features of reality. But what does this ultimately imply for the position of Christianity? Is it just one among many possible viewpoints, each equally valid, each equally true? Here Coulson admitted the analogy of the mountain broke down and displayed its limitations. Much of religion, taken as theology, he argues, can be considered as a view corresponding to art or science. But, Coulson argued, there are other parts of religion that cannot be thought of at all as "views." He identified a non-discursive element, which he was convinced could never be explained or adequately described, similar to Pascal's phrase: "The heart has her reasons, of which reason by itself knows nothing". As Coulson expressed it:

To accept Nature as, in some senses, given: to receive the gift, and behave in a creaturely fashion towards it: to believe that it carries with it meaning and significance; and to seek, in reflection, what that meaning is-this surely is to act religiously. But in that event, religion is not merely one view of the mountain. It is some attitude which colours all the separate views, and gives them a depth which otherwise they would lack, more or less as a yellow filter reveals a pattern of clouds in a sky that without it appears pure blue.26

What then did Coulson mean by religion? For him, "religion is the total response of man to all his environment." The word total is crucial for Coulson's definition. By it he meant to convey the whole person: thoughts, emotions, and human relationships. Similarly the term environment included everything—echoing the words of St. Paul—"all things in heaven and in earth."

6. Concluding reflections

What can we learn from this brief historical excursion into the life and work of two widely diverging chemists? One, that the turn to biographical narrative (to quote John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor in their Gifford lectures) "to move the focus away from the history of ideas and instead engage the life and experience of the individual, since it is through our life experiences that we directly engage both science and religion,"27 though enriching our purview, will not capture all the constitutive relationships between science and religion. In fact it often does not take seriously enough the depth dimension of religion, its defining nature as to what it means to be human. We may 'engage' science as active participants in its investigative regimen or as casual observers and commentators of its grand theories, but religion is not something we "engage." We may participate in religious practices, cultic events, worship services, but "life lived is religion." We need to assume a stance which allows us to get beyond viewing a person as a Christian and a scientist. Only then will we do justice to a person such as Charles Coulson.

And secondly, this brief historical analysis raises the perhaps more troubling issue whether religion necessarily requires God-talk; that is, must religion involve a form of theism? If we insist on this definition we will likely miss the religious dynamic in thinkers like Ostwald. For the atheist Ostwald, at least, we can see a concerted effort to eradicate traditional religion from science by a substitute religion, an Ersatzreligion as he himself called it. Religion, for him, is not irrelevant.   It does not function as a factor or merely provide a context. Rather it is the very ground for scientific practice and life in its totality.

In conclusion, let me repeat what I said earlier: "In addressing issues of science and religion as Christian scientists who wish to engage fellow scientists, Christian or not, we need to grapple more directly with the problems within the scientific field itself and attempt to develop ways of addressing these problems that reflect Christian philosophical insight and historical sensitivity." This positive work needs to go beyond apologetics or a muted natural theology that employs design arguments of one type or another.

Notes

1. Steven Weinberg, "A Designer Universe," The New York Review of Books 46, no. 16 (1999): 46.

2. Peter W. Atkins, "The limitless power of science," in Nature's Imagination, ed. John Cornwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995): 132.

3. David N Livingstone, "Science and Religion: Towards a New Cartography," Christian Scholar's Review 26, no. 3 (1997): 271-273.

4. John H. Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): 2-4.

5. Some representative books include: Arthur R. Peacocke, God and Science: A Quest for Christian Credibility (London: SCM, 1996); Arthur R. Peacocke, Paths From Science Towards God: The End of all Knowing (New York: Oneworld Publications, 2001); John Polkinghorne and Michael Welker, eds., The End of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000); John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); John Polkinghorne, "Cross-Traffic Between Science and Theology," Perspectives on Science & Christian Faith 43, no. 3 (September 1991): 144-151; Ian Barbour, Religion in an Age of Science: The Gifford Lectures, 1989-1991 (New York: HarperCollins, 1990); Ian Barbour, When Science Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers, or Partners? ( New York : HarperCollins, 2000); and Thomas F. Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology: Theology and Science at the Frontiers of Knowledge (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985).

6. See, for example, the complementary view of Richard Bube, Putting it All Together (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995). For one evangelical response consult. J.P. Moreland, "Complementarity, Agent Theory, and the God-of-the-Gaps," Perspectives on Science & Christian Faith 49, no.1 (March 1997): 2-14.

7. Stephen J. Gould, Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999).

8. Brooke, Science and Religion (cit. n. 4): 82-225.

9. R. Hooykaas, The Christian Approach in Teaching Science (London: The Tyndale Press, 1960): 12. See also Hooykaas's influential book: Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972).

10. Roy Porter, "What is the History of Science?" History Today 35 (May 1985): 49.

11. Martin J.S. Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985): 15.

12. Ibid., 450.

13. Martin J. S. Rudwick, "Senses of the Natural World and Senses of God: Another Look at the Historical Relation of Science and Religion," in The Sciences and Theology in the Twentieth Century, ed. Arthur R. Peacocke (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981): 245.

14. Ibid., 245.

15. See Joseph Agassi, Faraday as a Natural Philosopher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971); L. Pearce Williams, Michael Faraday (New York: Basic Books, 1965); and David Gooding and Frank A.J.L. James,eds., Faraday Rediscovered: Essays on the Life and Work of Michael Faraday, 1791-1867) (Basingstoke , 1985).

16. Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Adrian Desmond and James R. Moore, Darwin (New York: Warner Books, 1992); Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, vol. 2 ( New York : A.A. Knopf, 2002); Geoffrey Cantor, Michael Faraday: Sandemanian and Scientist (London: Macmillan, 1991). I mention only these few, but there has been a plethora of biographies written in recent years on Tycho Brahe, Albert Einstein, Rosalind Franklin, Galileo Galilei, Werner Heisenberg, Robert Hooke, Thomas H. Huxley, Lord Kelvin, Lisa Meitner, etc.

17. Brooke, Science and Religion (cit. n. 4): 321.

18. Ibid., 347.

19. Cantor, Michael Faraday (cit. n. 16): 259-288.

20. Wilhelm Ostwald, "Studien zur Energetik [I]," Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Köninglich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig . Mathematisch-Physische Classe [Berichte] 43 (1891): 271-288, 275. Also see "Studien zur Energetik II: Grundlinien in der allgemeinen Energetik," Berichte 44 (1892): 211-237; Arie Leegwater, "The Development of Wilhelm Ostwald's Chemical Energetics," Centaurus 29 (1986): 314-337.

21. W. Ostwald, "Die Űberwindung des wissenschaftlichen Materialismus," in Abhandlungen und Vorträge (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann Verlag, 1904): 224.

22. W. Ostwald, Lebenslinien (Berlin: Klasing & Co., 1926) vol. 2, 160-161.

23. W. Ostwald, Vorlesungen über Naturphilosophie (Leipzig: Von Veit & Co, 1902); W. Ostwald, Monistische Sonntagspredigten, Nrs. 1-76 (Berlin: Deutschen Monisten-Bundes, 1911-1913).

24. Charles A. Coulson, "The Contributions of Wave Mechanics to Chemistry," Journal of the Chemical Society (1955): 2069-2084, 2084.

25. Charles A. Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science (London: Oxford University Press, 1953): 25.

26. Ibid., 33

27. John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998): 247.

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