The concluding paragraphs of this article: God Or Science? A Belief In One Weakens Positive Feelings For The Other, are:
“What is really intriguing is that the larger effect happens on the opposite belief,” she said. “When God isn’t being used to explain much, people have a positive attitude toward science. But when God is being used to account for many events – especially the things that they list, which are life, the universe, free will, these big questions – then somehow science loses its value.”
“On the other hand, people may have a generally positive view of science until it fails to explain the important questions. Then belief in God may be boosted to fill in the gap,” she said.
The most obvious implication of the research is that “to be compatible, science and religion need to stick to their own territories, their own explanatory space,” Preston said. “However, religion and science have never been able to do that, so to me this suggests that the debate is going to go on. It’s never going to be settled.”
The study appears in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
This sort of study supports a conclusion I arrived at years ago — that modern man has separated his understanding of his world into mutually exclusive domains of knowledge. To separate knowledge in this way is to separate the world into mutually exclusive domains of being. Only one domain at a time can be real and other domains retreat into a dream-like existence. Some can manage to live in one domain at a time but those will usually do so by giving up the truthful aspects of the other domain. You can have atheistic curmudgeons and nutty Christians and those who think political or social claims trump science and religious traditions but few there are in these modern times who can live in one world that is reasonably complete in acknowledging the claims of empirical knowledge and religious revelations or insights, of aesthetic instincts and practical knowledge whether of growing food or holding together communities.
Science and religion don’t “need to stick to their own territories, their own explanatory space.” That way lies cognitive dissonance. I’ve spoken of this problem in The Only Sane Christian in the Modern World and A Thomistic Take on Madness and Modernism. Years ago, I also wrote a darkish novel, A Man for Every Purpose, which remains unpublished. The early pages of that novel can be downloaded here.
What is needed — ideally — is a single view of physical reality which men of good faith can agree upon. That single view can be the foundation of speculative knowledge in all those specialized fields we create because of human limitations. This website has been created by the belief that the best such single view is a Thomistic existentialism updated to account for modern empirical knowledge. Moreover, I do advocate a more complete worldview in which Catholic Christian teachings are acknowledged as true. I believe that a greater sanity results when we accept such a worldview and can recognize that Creation exists, that this universe is a particular phase of that Creation, and that truths are not separate from the being of that Creation. Creation, hence being even as seen in our concrete world, is unified, coherent, and complete.