Science and Religion

The popular tendency that places religion and science at opposite extremes, as two completely separate and antagonistic things, like two boxers ready to beat each other to death, is by now legendary. This image was built up over the centuries; it reached its climax in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, known as the dark ages of science because of the endless religious persecutions of scientists; and it persisted for many more centuries. Great men ended their days at the stake, burned alive for studying the human body or for contradicting religious dogmas; and many others were publicly humiliated. Famous are the cases of Michael Servetus, Galileo Galilei, and Charles Darwin. This turned out to be a drag on the progress of science, and set the scientist and the religious man against each other.

Today being a scientist is not the antonym of being religious. Science is no longer the antipode of religion. The blind opposition between faith and experimentation survives only in the backward minds of some fanatics of both camps. The image of the disheveled scientist mixing smoking substances in his laboratory, a believer only in his formulas, and that of the priest with the crucifix in his hands refusing to look through the telescope, are nothing but mistaken stereotypes. Today these specimens have become extinct. Today science and religion are coming together. The Catholic Church publicly apologized for its persecutions of past eras, and scientists have focused their research on the field of the intangible, the mental, and the spiritual. This change of tendency had to happen sooner or later, since the scientist and the religious man seek the same thing: the truth. Extraordinary men have catalyzed this titanic rapprochement: Saint Augustine embodies science reinforced by faith, Teilhard de Chardin embodies faith reinforced by science.

The scientist and the religious man differ not in the end, but in the means. The scientist strives to build his path to knowledge of the truth that surrounds him through his own means, trusting in his senses and his reasoning. The religious man trusts by faith that he is already walking this path to knowledge of the truth. The scientist, as he goes on discovering the perfection and vastness of the Universe and the infallibility of its Laws, gradually opens his mind to the indispensable idea of a Creator for so beautiful a creation. Foolish would be the one who pretended not to notice the presence of God, as if in studying the work of art one were not also coming to know the Artist who created it. The true religious man, being also a seeker of the truth, should not fear that scientists seek it walking on their own feet and starting from their own steps, for all travelers who seek the truth will find it. Fanatical would be the one who considers it a heresy to seek the truth by one’s own means and to experience it according to reason. Only the man who has experienced the truth feels no need to keep searching, for he does not doubt. As long as faith is theoretical, doubt will exist. One’s own experience has, for each person, the last word. If a man experiences God in his heart, he is satisfied, and that is enough for him to believe.

Now, after many centuries, the man of science is not the adversary of the man of faith. Rather, the man of faith can have in science a way to demonstrate the greatness and perfection of the divine work; and the man of science can have in faith in God the ultimate conclusion of his experimentation and his search. A man of faith can experiment and a man of science can have faith. The way of science is slow. The way of religion is dark. But the destination is one and the same. For the integral man it is possible to unite the experimental method of science with the transcendence of religion. Only poor minds divorce faith from science.

Today the man of science has within his reach a scientifically structured method that will lead him to explore the depths of his own nature and will allow him to discover within himself that God exists, that we are part of him, and that all men are one in his presence. This method, called Dynamic Meditation or Creative Imagination, awakens man to the truth about himself and about what surrounds him.