Behind much of the lively controversy on science and religion carried in these columns there lies an assumption. This is that the two interpretations of reality given by science on the one hand and by religion on the other are mutually exclusive. Hence many think that it is impossible to accept both. They say that one cannot be both a true scientist and a believer in God. I argue that their underlying assumption is wrong and that science and religion are in principle compatible and can be complementary.

First of all we observe, as a matter of fact, that many top scientists have been and are believers in God. A few examples will serve to illustrate this. The astronomer who originated the Big Bang theory was the Belgian Catholic priest Lemaitre. To account for new astronomical observations he postulated in the 1920s the theory of an expanding universe starting with an explosion of a superdense nucleus of very small dimensions but colossal mass. The father of modern genetics, Gregor Mendel, was another Catholic, a monk of Brno, in the present Czech republic. Francis Collins, the leader of the worldwide and spectacularly successful Human Genome Project, is a believing Christian who reasoned his way out of his previous agnostic and atheist position.

Happily, the above are facts, but there are also theoretical grounds why numerous scientists find it possible to be both believers in God and at the same time rigorous and successful scientists. Science and religion are two valid but necessarily partial explanations of reality.

The natural scientist employs a special approach in the study of things, namely, he adopts the position of an observer looking out at reality. This procedure was called objectivation by E. Schroedinger in his book Mind and Matter. As Schroedinger points out, while highly successful in terms of understanding and predicting the workings of nature and in controlling it, this approach comes at a price. It leaves out of consideration the person of the observer and therefore excludes subjective experience as a way of achieving knowledge. Thus it essentially excludes art, morality, subjective personal life, and religious experience from its direct concern.

Religion, on the other hand, while based partly on historical data, gives great importance to individual and collective inner religious experience. It employs philosophical reasoning at both a technical and popular level. It looks for meaning and purpose behind all reality and experience. Having his own direct contact with mind and purpose, the religious person postulates mind and purpose behind the whole of reality. Religious man or woman claims some experience of a depth behind objective reality – a reality which goes beyond what he sees by the senses and which makes sense of existence as a whole.

When the two interpretations of reality are taken seriously they can complement each other in line with Einstein’s well-known dictum “Science without religion is blind, religion without science is lame”.