Science and Faith: A New Introduction

Is science compatible with religious faith? Does science rule out the existence of a personal God? After Darwin, can anyone honestly believe in divine providence? Do miracles really happen? Was the universe created or did it “just happen”? Isn’t life reducible to chemistry? Is your mind anything more than your brain? Can’t science now explain morality, and can’t we be good without God? Are human beings special in the vast universe? Is there life after death? This book lays out three distinct ways in which people who have been exposed to science are now responding to the questions just listed. The first kind of response claims that scientific method and discoveries now make religious faith and theology obsolete. Representatives of this “Conflict” approach include the so-called New Atheists (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens) who claim that modern science makes the existence of God inconceivable for reasonable people. A second kind of response (“Contrast”) insists that science and faith are each concerned with completely different sets of questions, and so it makes no sense to place them in competition or conflict with each other. A third approach (“Convergence”) seeks a synthesis in which both science and faith keep their respective identities while still relating closely to each other in a shared pursuit of meaning and truth. This approach proposes that science and faith, as long as they are not confused with each other, can together contribute to a richer view of reality than either can achieve on its own. Highlights: • Provides a tidy and readable outline of the main questions raised by the natural sciences for many people today • Appeals to a wide audience including skeptics, agnostics, atheists and people of faith in the traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam • Written in a concise and readable style for students, scientists, educated lay people, teachers, scholars, book groups, evolutionary biology, and cosmology †