Religion and Science

Almost every culture in human history has had a religious framework. Almost every religion offers some form of cosmology, some account of the origin of the world and of humanity, and some sort of scientia, some wisdom about how to relate to the world.

The reason why the interaction of religion and science has been of such interest since the mid–nineteenth century is that modern Western sciences, as they have developed from the seventeenth century on, seem to have dispensed with the underlying religious basis out of which they grew (which was largely that of Christianity). So this article will concentrate on the interaction between modern Western sciences and theology, predominantly Christian theology, while acknowledging that there have been other very important interactions—for example, between the medieval sciences and Islam and Judaism, and between Chinese medicine and Daoism.