understand why the two enterprises should experience any conflict. Science tries to document the
factual character of the natural world.... Religion, on the other hand, operates in an equally
important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings and values-subjects that the
factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve.The astronomer most associated with early conflict between Christianity and science, Galileo Galilei
(1564-1642), also believed that faith and science led to different kinds of truth that emanated from a
common source:
I think that in discussions of physical problems we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural
passages, but from sense experiences and necessary demonstrations; for the holy Bible and the
phenomena of nature proceed alike from the divine Word, the former as the dictate of the Holy Ghost
and the latter as the observant executrix of God's commands.RESEARCH QUESTIONS
• Why has conflict often characterized the relationship between Christianity and science?
• How does the scientific method differ from the methods employed to gain theological knowledge?
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
0 Is conflict between Christianity and science necessary?
• Do you agree that people arrive at knowledge about the natural world and knowledge about God using
different research methods? And must these forms of knowledge be kept separate?
- HATING GOD
In one of his early notes, Preston writes that hatred of God, or of the idea of God, might be a kind
evidence for God's existence (see page 32). Consider these words written by the protagonist Maurice
Bendrix at the end of Graham Greene's novel The End of the Affair:
I sat on my bed and said to God ... You haven't got me yet. I know Your cunning. It's You who take us
up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You're a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I
don't want Your peace and I don't want Your love.... With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness
as a harvester ruins a mouse's nest. I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.Does it make sense to hate something that doesn't existto talk to something that doesn't exist?A theme that runs through Greg's notes is that his negative reaction to the idea of God is really a
response to the false, scientifically unverifiable or dubious beliefs people have defended in the name of
God. In an interview with Greg, John M. Thoday of Cambridge University recalled:
There came a time when I was about 16, when I read a hymn to myself that we were about to sing,
and it said, "Lord we love thee. We deplore that we do not love thee more." And I said to myself,
"Anybody who can write trite dreadful stuff like that, killing the English language, is unfit to talk to
me." And I ceased to be religious for the rest of time.