When Christianity and science come together, the meeting place is often like a battlefield. From the Christian point of view that is a pity, because the central Christian belief, that in Jesus Christ God’s reason entered the world, demands that science be given an independent and honoured place.
It implies that both God’s ways and the world are reasonable and that we can explore them. The scientific interpretation of the empirical world and the Christian interpretation of God’s relationship to the world are compatible.
The two kinds of exploration, of course, work at different levels. Questions of faith have to do with why anything exists at all and with the purpose of human life. Scientific questions ask how the world has the shape that we find it to have. Each way of questioning offers an interpretation of the world at a distinctive level.
Most fights between science and religion have been boundary disputes. They have turned on who has the competence and authority to interpret the world at its different levels.
The emblematic struggles, which have taken on a mythical status, were associated with Galileo and Darwin. In each case churches claimed preemptive rights to exclude scientific interpretations of the movement of the earth and of the origins of life on the strength of a wrong interpretation of scripture. They wrongly moved out of the larger question of why the world exists to pronounce on the question of how the distinctive features of natural phenomena are to be explained.
I think that scientists like Hawking and Dawkins may have the excuse of historical provocation, but make the same mistake in reverse, of arguing that discoveries of how human beings develop prove that there is not a God. Boundaries are not safely crossed. To put it bluntly no discoveries in the natural world can prove that there is a God or define human value and destiny. Nor can they disprove it. Nor can interpretations of faith disqualify scientific conclusions.
But that delineation of boundaries between scientific and religious questions ignores the more interesting question of the overlap between religious and scientific questions. They cannot be kept hermetically sealed, because questions are always asked by people, and most human beings from time to time do ask both questions about how the world we see works, and also about why it exists and what purpose there may be to human life.
And some people are motivated to scientific questioning