A User's Guide to Our Present World

The reader is about to embark on a journey of discovery and perhaps even reckoning. Religion and science have been understood as inherently at odds and inimical toward each other. However, both employ metaphor: religion when it calls the spirit descending upon Jesus a dove, science when it describes electrons as a current flowing through a wire, for only fluids flow and electrons are not a fluid. Both use myths: some religions in the sense that there was a Golden Age of humans in a garden, science when it promises unlimited progress. Both enlist hypothetical entities: some religions when a storm heralds that the gods are angry, science with the existence of a vacuum and a frictionless surface. And each bears its fundamentalist contingent: just observe a debate between creationists and evolutionists and the zeal and fervor with which the Bible and Darwin must be defended at any cost, no matter what. Given all this, it becomes readily apparent that religion and science display more in common than was once expected. And that is precisely what is in peril in the following pages—our expectations. May the intrepid traveler benefit from the voyage.

Herb Gruning is an assistant professor of theological ethics at the Seminary Theology Department of Huron University College at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. He is the author of four other books, How in the World Does God Act?, God and the New Metaphysics, God Only Knows: Piecing Together the Divine Puzzleand Who Do We Think We Are?, plus one chapter and has taught religion and science and several additional courses at five colleges and universities in both Canada and the U.S.
Caption for photo:
This is our version of Canadian Gothic. Please note that I am on the right.
Photo Credit:
Ken Bignell