the complementarity of science and religion 145the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the 300-
year-old Royal Society.There is even an Oxford Institute of Science and Spirit that awards a cer-
tificate in conjunction with the American, Union Institute.
Upon close inspection it would appear that there are two versions of the
complementarity principle as it relates to the relationship of science and reli-
gion: a weak version, according to which nonconflictual cooperation between
scientists and religionists prevails, but the level of cooperation is not specified,
and a strong version according to which, for all complementary statements,
the alteration or absence of one of the statements would necessitate a change
in the other, as MacKay held.^8 Here the relationship between science and re-
ligion must be closely monitored by each to insure integrity. This latter defi-
nition is implied in Templeton’s description: “they are talking about the same
things, with complementary accounts, presenting different aspects of the same
event which in its full nature cannot be described by either alone.”^9 Whatever
version one chooses, the result is that science and religion are allies that co-
operate at a fundamental level. MacKay used a model proposed by C. A. Coul-
son to explain this version of complementarity.^10 He said that science and
religion are like the front and side projections of a the plan of a building. One
would need both to reconstruct the building, though the projections are or-
thogonal, and hence “blind,” to each other.
Another form of the one domain thesis is the conflict theory, according to
which science and religion say different, contradictory things about the same
domain. This is the view of certain conservative Christians for whom the bib-
lical view of creation differs from scientific theories of cosmology and for whom
evolution is considered both bad religion and bad science, while religion is
thought to be good science. On this basis, many of these groups have spon-
sored efforts to have evolution taught concurrently with what they dubiously
call creation science. Even though it is called “science,” it conducts no inde-
pendent research.
When it is held that science and religion do not conflict, this is often based
on the supposition that they are about two domains, the natural and super-
natural. I have labeled this the “compartment theory,” and the strategic advan-
tage of this theory is that science and religion cannot be in conflict, since they
are about different things. The ground is open in this claim for scientists to
deny the reality of the supernatural, but when this happens, scientific natural-
ism simply prevails. I will try to make a reasonable case for the belief that there
is but one domain, and it is human experience.
A recent advocate of the compartment theory is Stephen Jay Gould who
calls it the “separationist” claim.^11 He seems to have been swayed into a pro-
nouncement about this claim by his reaction to two developments. The first is
the theories of the discoverer and curator of the Burgess Shale fauna, C. D.