Relationship between science and religion

The relationship between science and religion concerns how scientific inquiry and religious belief interact, including their methods, claims, conflicts, and possible forms of compatibility.

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Conflict thesis: The historical claim that science and religion have been persistently opposed. This model treats recurring disputes as evidence of an enduring struggle between the two.
Scientific method: A systematic approach to investigating the natural world through observation, testing, and revision. Its procedures provide a point of comparison with religious ways of forming and assessing claims.
Galileo affair: The seventeenth-century conflict over Galileo’s defense of heliocentrism and the Catholic Church’s scriptural interpretation. It became a lasting emblem of science–religion conflict, though its history is more complex than the emblem.
Stephen Jay Gould: An American paleontologist and science writer who proposed non-overlapping magisteria for science and religion. His framework is one of the clearest modern attempts to define separate domains.
Fine-tuned universe: The observation that physical constants appear to lie within ranges permitting complex structures and life. Its interpretation divides physical explanations from arguments for purposeful design.
Non-overlapping magisteria: Stephen Jay Gould’s proposal that science and religion address distinct domains of empirical fact and moral meaning. It resolves conflict by assigning each domain different kinds of questions.
Falsifiability: The property of a claim that could be contradicted by some possible observation. It shapes disputes over whether particular religious claims are scientifically testable.
Scopes trial: The 1925 Tennessee trial testing a law against teaching human evolution in public schools. It made evolution, biblical authority, and public education a highly visible American controversy.
Ian Barbour: An American scholar of science and religion who developed a fourfold typology of their relations. His conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration categories organize many contemporary discussions.
Anthropic principle: A family of ideas explaining how observations of the universe are constrained by the existence of observers. It offers a selection-effect account often weighed against theological explanations of cosmic life-permitting conditions.