The Free Press, Mankato, MN

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June 29, 2008

Your View: Science, religion can work in partnership

Religion and science are not enemies or otherwise in major opposition.

The two are not necessarily oppositional, but, rather, complementary in making a whole of life through faith and reason. Science is an approach, religion more an accomplished end-game.

Religions can be and often have been major forces for divisiveness rather than forces for fuller community among peoples, congregations, denominations, countries, tribes , neighbors or first-graders.

Pastors cannot do it alone. Each of us has a substantial opportunity to diminish the chasm between the questioning styles of science and the answering proclivities of faith. In fact, the major divide between science and religion resides in religions (largely) starting with the final answers, whereas science largely builds up from observational evidence and accompanying theory. One starts with the finished product and the other works from the ground up. Perhaps the two can meet at a good spot.

Science, by and large, does not assert a monopoly on truth. Some practitioners of religions have a discomfiting (at best) unyielding premise of being exclusively correct — of having a monopoly on salvation, for example. This is certainly troubling arithmetic, as a half-dozen or more competing claims to 100 percent “rightness” are not readily harmonized, but, rather, furnish fuel for ongoing friction and fatalities.

Science, in turn, is frequently guilty of insufficient humility, but yet its sin may be less offensive to the future of this world or any other ones.

The two can dance together with good will and thoughtfulness. The joys and values of each need a partner.

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