Science and Religion 269with the whole of reality” and thus incorporate the revelations of science
within its purview. William Grosvenor Pollard, a physicist who became
also an Episcopalian clergyman, emphasized that science and religion
were both incomplete human enterprises. Whereas science was “fully
competent to deal with any element of experience which arises from an
object in space and time,” it was necessary to invoke the existence of a
transcendent, “non- conceptual” realm of experience that he described as
“supernature” to account for why the natural world possessed the proper-
ties it did. Ian Barbour, a Carleton College professor who received graduate
training in both physics and theology, warned that Christianity must not
“disparage or neglect the natural order.” After all, he reminded his readers,
“if Christianity is radically interiorized, nature is left devoid of meaning
and the stretches of cosmic history before man’s appearance are unrelated
to God.”^34
For their part, conservative Protestants believed that it was imperative
to bring theological perspectives to bear on the natural world and typi-
cally criticized claims that investigation of the natural world should re-
main the exclusive preserve of the scientifi c community. In 1954 Bernard
Ramm, a conservative evangelical theologian committed to the idea that
“a positive relationship must exist between science and Christianity,” affi rmed
in his widely read work, The Christian View of Science and Scripture, that
the natural world served as a resource for scientists and biblical theolo-
gians alike. Ramm acknowledged that biblical descriptions of nature ran
the gamut from “popular” and “prescientifi c” to “non- postulational,” but he
insisted that theologians had the right to draw on biblical perspectives in
affi rming that divine purpose and “a personal, meaningful, valuational
core” lay at the very heart of the cosmos. He concluded that “the empha-
sis in science is on the visible universe and in theology the emphasis is on
the invisible universe, but it is one universe.”^35
Not all conservatives followed Ramm in seeking to harmonize science
and religion by abandoning a literal reading of the Bible. In 1961 the bibli-
cal theologian John Whitcomb, Jr., teamed up with the engineer Henry M.
Morris to write The Genesis Flood. Affi rming a fundamentalist commitment
to “the verbal inerrancy of Scripture,” Whitcomb and Morris insisted that
since the province of science was limited to “present processes” and use of
the scientifi c method depended on “experimental reproducibility,” evolu-
tionary theory and uniformitarianism were no more rigorously scientifi c
than the scriptural narrative. Hence, people trying to understand creation
and subsequent natural history were free to invoke biblical testimony.
While they conceded that their own position did not qualify as science,