One poster:

`Religious faith and science have no quarrel. Both are ways of trying to understand the universe and our place in it. Should either faith or science masquerade as the other the result is confusion.’ D.R. Selkirk, F.J. Burrows

Another:

Religious beliefs notwithstanding, Religious faith and science absolutely DO conflict. Science is an ongoing search for a better understanding of the world and its workings, which continually refines itself with new data. Thus, it continually becomes more accurate and more useful. Religion is a prefabricated, unchangeable theory of the world’s workings, which ignores all data that contradicts it. Science is inquisitive, religion is not. Science responds to data, religion does not. Boiled down to its very essence, the issue is this: science is the search for truth, and religion is the defense of a millenia-old theory.

To which Ken responded:

You seem to think that “religion” (incidentally I suspect that you mean “Christianity” rather than religion in general) has, of necessity, some “unchangeable theory of the world’s workings”. This is not necessarily so.

It is true that most of those I would label “fundamentalists”, whether Christian, Jewwish, Muslim or other, insist on some dogmatic i8nterpretation of their holy writings, and then try to put this on the same level as modern scientific investigations. All that this does is emphasise the truth of what Selkirk and Burrows wrote – these religious people are trying to turn their religious faith into science. They seem to have the mistaken idea that science is the only way to get information about what goes on around us.

In 1954 Professor M. J. Lighthill wrote about the danger of placing too much emphasis on mathematics when investigating the real world. You can read the whole article for yourself on pages 1-10 of volume VII of the journal “Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics” which should be available in your nearest university library. The relevant sentences of the article are:

There are of course two special dangers — overvaluing mathematics and undervaluing it — but even when these extremes are recognized it is not easy to pick the right middle course. Overvaluing it is an obvious danger; mathematics is only one of many valuable ways of viewing the fantastic behaviour of things, and it cannot possibly replace the other essential and essentially different ways like physics, biology, statistics, economics, poetry, love and religion. And, even in the somewhat limited sphere of an engineering problem, the complications are notoriously always far outside the power of mathematics to grasp as a whole. It is necessary only to look at a dam, an automobile, or a guided missile to be assured of that.

So if you want a statement from an eminent mathematician that “poetry, love and religion” are essential, there it is.

Salaam Ken Smith

— Dr Ken Smith – Christian, husband, unpaid mathematician, skeptic, … `Similarly, it is not open to the religious-minded to say: “God or Natural Selection,” or to offer as logical opposites “The Bible or Darwinism”.’ J. Arthur Thomson, in “Science and Religion”