Religion and Science Do Not Conflict

Many people find the topic of evolution and religion troubling and confusing. Some were raised in very strict churches that preached that evolution is atheistic and that to even think about the evidence of evolution is sinful. Fundamentalists have long tried to drive a wedge between traditional Christians and science, arguing that their interpretation of the Bible is the only one and that anyone who accepts the evidence for evolution is an atheist.

But this is not true. The Catholic Church, along with most mainstream Protestant and Jewish denominations, has long ago come to terms with evolution and accepted it as the mechanism by which God created the Universe. The Clergy Letter Project includes the signatures of more than 10,000 ministers, priests, and rabbis in the United States who accept evolution and do not view it as incompatible with religious belief. A number of studies have shown that about fifty percent of active scientists (Larson and Witham 1997) are also devoutly religious, including many of the prominent figures in evolutionary biology (Francisco Ayala, Kenneth Miller, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Francis Collins, and many, many others) and paleontologists (such as Peter Dodson, Richard Bambach, Anne Raymond, Mark Wilson, Patricia Kelley, Daryl Domning, Mary Schweitzer, and Simon Conway Morris), and they resent being called atheists by fundamentalists. As the late Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in his book Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, science and religion can be seen as nonoverlapping but equally valid means of understanding the world around us, and neither should encroach upon the domain of the other. Science helps us understand the natural world and the way it works, but it does not deal with the supernatural, and it does not make statements of what ought to be, as do morals and ethics. Religion, on the other hand. focuses on the supernatural and transcendent, with strong emphasis on the moral and ethical rules that humans should follow, but it is not a guide to understanding the natural world. When science tries to proscribe morals or ethics, it falters; when religion tries to interfere with our understanding of the natural world, it overreaches. For example, when Copernicus and Galileo showed that the Earth is not the center of the Universe, the Church eventually had to recant its error and regret its persecutions.

Many religious organizations accept evolution and science.