Book Review: When Science Meets Religion

I just finished reading this book by Ian Barbour and I must say it wasn't exactly what I wanted or expected. It is a very dense summary of the work done at the intersection of Science and Religion. The author intends to answer questions about what the latest scientific discoveries mean to religious faith. He does this by dividing the responses into four groups. The first group is conflict and this group believes that you must either accept science or religion, but you can't have both. This group includes atheists like Richard Dawkins or Carl Sagan as well as creation scientists and those who believe in Intelligent Design. The second group believes that science and religion are independant and look at the world in two complementary ways. This means that science has nothing to say about religion and religion has nothing to say about science. The last two groups incorporate dialogue and integration between the two fields.

Because of the large amount of work in this field, the author was unable to really give justice to all the ideas. Sometimes he cut out some more explanation that would be helpful to the lay person. On the positive side he has a large bibliography, so if a particular idea interests you, you can read more about it.