Where the science–religion dialogue is going wrong

Abstract

In 1987, the John Templeton Foundation was established to ‘encourage a fresh appreciation … of the moral and spiritual dimensions of life’. Unfortunately the current science and religion dialogue has not taken shape in a helpful way; rather, it has become reductionist. For a start, many of the prominent writers in this field reduce ‘religion’ to a certain form of liberal Protestantism, and in the process secularise the mysterious and read the Bible as though it was about our contemporary understanding of Western science. The situation is in reality no better in the field of ethics. Here also the dialogue is reductionist, in that it assumes that there is a religious answer, or at least a religious approach, to the ethical issues that scientific and technological advances bring forth. For those of us who continue to think that Templeton style dialogue between religion and science is important, there is thus a strong need to extricate the conversation from the reductionist rut in which it has become snared.