Science, Religion and Human Identity

The relationship between science and religion has long been a subject of much contention. In the popular mind the relationship has been characterised largely by conflict. Contemporary scholarship has tended to defuse this understanding, but without replacing the “warfare” metaphor with anything equally concrete. In this paper, I explore the historical relationship between science and religion and argue, adopting and adapting Stephen Jay Gould’s famous model, that science and religion are best understood as NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria) but POMA (partially-overlapping magisteria), with the overlap being on the question of the nature, identity and value of the human. Touching on John Philoponus, Galileo, Maxwell, and Einstein among others, I show that time and again the relationship between science and religion has been most interesting, most lively, but also most fruitful when it has focused on the linked questions of how should we understand the human, and who gets to adjudicate on this issue. I conclude by pointing out that this is going to be an increasingly important issue in the 21^st century, which calls out for an intelligent form of religious humanism in some contemporary technology debates..