War between science and religion is far from inevitable

In his 2015 book Faith versus Fact, the biologist and polemicist Jerry Coyne launched one of his many attacks on religion in the name of science: science and religion, he wrote, are “incompatible in precisely the same way and in the same sense that rationality is incompatible with irrationality”. These sorts of generalities have been quite common down the years, often reinforced by references to the condemnation of Galileo by the Roman Catholic Church in 1633 or the altercation in Oxford in 1860 between T H Huxley and bishop Samuel Wilberforce over evolution. More...