THEY WERE DOING SO WELL UNTIL PHYSICS DISPROVED MATERIALISM:

Religion vs science: can the divide between God and rationality be reconciled? (Paul Vallely, 11 October 2008, Independent.co.uk )

The relationship between science and religion has had a long and chequered history since the settled days of the medieval consensus, which saw faith and the natural sciences as part of a cosmic whole. Galileo put paid to that with his insistence that the earth revolved around the sun. The Catholic Church, which saw man and his planet at the centre of the universe – and which already felt its authority threatened by the rise of Protestantism – locked horns with him. The clash became a metaphor for the irreconcilability of scientific materialism and biblical literalism.

Things changed with Isaac Newton. His laws of physics led to a world view which relegated God to background status as the designer of a clockwork world which he wound up and then left to its own devices. Newton's celestial mechanics brought an advance in our scientific understanding but didn't really work for a faith that wanted to believe that, through the historical Jesus, God had become, in the words of the song "a slob like one of us".

Next came Darwin. At first many saw his theory of evolution as a threat to religion but mainstream Christianity soon accepted evolution as the answer to the "how" of creation, leaving the "why" questions of meaning and morality to faith. Science and religion exercised authority over two discrete compartments of life between which there could be no link.

But through the latter half of the 20th century a synergy developed. In cosmology the science of the expanding universe and the Big Bang chimed in with a moment of creation. The inherent uncertainty that quantum physics discovered at the subatomic level overturned Newton's mechanics and created room for a "God of the gaps". Process theology embraced evolution and said men and women are called to play a part in an ever-ongoing creation. Advances in neuro-science showed that mental and spiritual phenomena depend upon biological processes, undermining the old dualist notions about body and soul and offering a more holistic body-mind-spirit axis. [...]

It is perhaps significant here that the two main instigators of the campaign to have Reiss ousted from his Royal Society job, Sir Harry Kroto and Sir Richard Roberts, are now based in the United States where creationism is a major phenomenon. Polls suggest that around 45 per cent of Americans are creationists with 40 per cent believing that God worked through evolution and just 10 per cent saying it was nothing to do with a God.

The experience of being a secularist in the US is clearly a radicalising one. "I don't know if it is too late to stop the slide in Britain but I think it is in the US where [the religious right] have now almost complete control over politics, the judiciary, education, business, journalism and television," Kroto, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1996, has said, adding darkly: "The Royal Society does not appreciate the true nature of the forces arrayed against it."