Questions on Science and Religion

Endless questions have arisen about the relation of science and religion. Disputes still rage and misunderstandings rule. On occasion some claimed that harmony developed at long last between those two most disparate subjects. In this book an internationally recognized authority on that relation offers a key to fourteen important questions, concisely listed in the table of contents. The key is derived from the author's now more than four-decade-long work, available in almost fifty books and five hundred articles. The key is the unique status of quantities in the conceptual domain. The truth of any proposition in science rests with quantitative procedures. And since quantities are everywhere where there is matter, science has a universal competence. Yet this competence appears very narrow when compared with the non-quantitative conceptual domain, usually summed up as the domain of qualities or values. Religion relates to this latter domain whose grasp gives, however, no competence about the domain of quantities. Hence the mutual irreducibility of religion and science. It assures respective autonomy to both. All misunderstandings about the relation of science and religion arise from an oversight of their respective conceptual competence. The two are equally needed, but in two very different senses. This difference may disturb the scientistic reductionist as well as the uninformed religionist. Anyone else will have to live in peace with the difference which is between knowing how the heavens go, and how to go to heaven.