SECULAR211Father in bringing about the end of
history. Jesus’ radical ethic is to be under-
stood on the grounds that it is an interim
ethic, useful during the brief interim
between the first coming of Jesus and the
eschaton. His works include The Quest of
the Historical Jesus (1906), Paul and His
Interpreters (1911), The Psychiatric Study
of Jesus (1913), On the Edge of the Prime-
val Forest (1920), Cultural Philosophy
(2 vols. 1923), Christianity and the Reli-
gions of the World (1924), Memoirs of
Childhood and Youth (1924), Mysticism of
Paul the Apostle (1930), More from the
Primeval Forest (1931), Out of My Life
and Thought: An Autobiography (1931),
Indian Thought and Its Development
(1935), From My African Notebook (1938),
and Peace or Atomic War? (1958).
SCIENCE AND RELIGION. In the West,
the relationship between science and reli-
gion can be viewed in three ways. Proba-
bly most widely represented in popular
culture is the conflict thesis, according to
which religion has often served to impede
scientific progress. The conflict thesis was
advanced by John William Draper and
Andrew Dickson White in the nineteenth
century, who highlighted the church’s
resistance to Copernicus, Galileo, and
Darwin. A second thesis is that religion
provides an essential foundation for the
practice of science. Acknowledging the
regrettable times when the church failed
to recognize good science, Alfred North
Whitehead and others argued that theism
provided early modern scientists a philo-
sophical foundation for expecting the
world to have a natural order that was
rationally intelligible and explainable.
Newton’s claim that as a scientist he
sought to think God’s thoughts after him
supports this positive stance. A third posi-
tion may simply be called the complexity
thesis, which neither sees science and reli-
gion in essential conflict nor sees religion
as foundational to science. Such an out-
look was articulated by William Whewell
in the nineteenth century and Stephen Jay
Gould in the twentieth century. Questions
that arise in the literature on science and
religion include: Does big bang cosmol-
ogy support a theistic understanding of
the cosmos? Does it appear that the emer-
gence of life in the solar system rests
on fine-tuning and is this best explained
naturalistically or in terms of theism? Is
evolutionary biology able to account for
the emergence of consciousness, morality,
and religion? Is evolutionary biology
compatible with traditional Christianity?
What impact might contemporary neu-
rolog y have on the assessment of religious
experience? Does contemporary physics
support presentism (the idea that all
times are equally real) and does this sup-
port the thesis that there may be a divine,
eternal being for whom all times are pres-
ent? Does science support or undermine
concepts of freedom and responsibility?SECULAR. Today the term is used fre-
quently as “nonreligious,” but originally it