Science and Religion 267ultimate metaphysical questions. Most proponents of the notion that sci-
ence and religion occupied “separate spheres” advanced the claim that
whereas the interaction of natural phenomena constituted the appropri-
ate realm of science, the province of religion comprised the private, sub-
jective domain of meaning and values. Adoption of that perspective led
partisans of that view to suggest that any confl ict that persisted between
theology and science resulted from careless trespassing.^29
Robert A. Millikan, a Nobel Laureate in physics, provided a particularly
infl uential exposition of the separate- spheres doctrine. In 1923 he secured
the signatures of more than thirty eminent scientists, clergymen, and
theologians to a widely circulated “Joint Statement upon the Relations of
Science and Religion.” According to this statement, science and religion
“meet distinct human needs” and thus “supplement rather than displace
or oppose each other.” Whereas the “purpose of science is to develop,
without prejudice or preconception of any kind, a knowledge of the facts,
the laws, and the processes of nature,” the role of religion “is to develop
the consciences, the ideals, and the aspirations of mankind.”^30
Proponents of “neo- orthodoxy” sought to sever completely the con-
cerns of theology from the infl uence of the natural sciences. Emerging
from liberal Protestantism during the late 1920s, neo- orthodoxy claimed
the support of a sizable number of theologians and well- educated clergy-
men for the next half century. Convinced that religion centered on the
redemptive activity of a “wholly other” God, the neo- orthodox joined the
Swiss theologian Karl Barth in maintaining that God’s revelation in the Bi-
ble, grounded in Jesus, provided the appropriate foundation of Christian-
ity. E. G. Homrighausen, a Reformed clergyman who went on to obtain a
professorship at Princeton Seminary, asserted that whereas natural science
was “a blind leader” that “cannot redeem us from our hopeless and mean-
ingless existence,” the Christian Gospel “offers man that which can save
him from frustration, meaninglessness, defeat, limitation, and sin.”^31
The conviction that religion and science consisted of separate en-
terprises continued to fi nd support in the second half of the twentieth
century. Theologians and clergy who found sustenance in the insights
of existentialism, for example, maintained that in contrast to science,
which addressed all phenomena, including human beings, as objects of
analysis and maintained indifference toward the human condition, reli-
gion centered on the “existential encounter... of the inward self with
God’s Word in faith.” On a different front, some partisans of analytic
philosophy, an approach to linguistic analysis similar to that of logical
positivism but devoid of its hostility to religious discourse, espoused the
notion that theological and scientifi c approaches to human experience