How Science and Religion Got Separated

In cultures throughout the world, the healing arts of antiquity were closely allied with religion.  The same is true for the beginnings of science as an approach to discover truth.  Early scientists did not function in an atheistic vacuum.  In their research, their relationship with God was never far from their consciousness.

When asked what motivated his life-long devotion to science and mathematics, Albert Einstein replied, “I want to know God’s thoughts”.  Hippocrates, Pythagoras, Copernicus, Galileo, Da Vinci, Newton, Boyle, Pascal, Pasteur, Kepler, Carver, Burbank, Bose, Maxwell, Plank, Achroedinger, Bohr…the list goes on and on of spiritual men with great minds who pioneered the precepts that form the foundations of modern science – great minds that also recognized an eternal, omnipresent God whose thoughts are the objects of scientific research.

In a 1930 issue of the New York Times Magazine, Einstein stated, “I maintain that a cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research…In this materialistic age of ours, serious scientific workers are among the only profoundly religious people.”

Einstein was not talking here about scientists whose motivation for research is principally for practical or commercial results.  According to Einstein, pragmatic science, which is necessary to bring theory into practice to the benefit of humankind, can also lead to a “completely false notion” of reality and what true science is really all about.  To Einstein and the other great scientists of history, true scientific endeavor must lead one to a greater understanding of and reverence for God.  True science must always bring us closer to our creator.

When Einstein referred to true scientists as “profoundly religious people,” he wasn’t referring to religion as a formal sect or denomination or adherence to any dogma or particular set of scriptures.  He was talking about a direct, personal relationship with God, independent of membership in any church, temple, synagogue, or mosque, or the social participation in organized religion of any kind.  He was talking about the real thing, the common denominator of all religions – a one-on-one, ongoing relationship between a person and God, as a child relates to his or her earthly father.

True science and true religion should never be in conflict.  They both seek the same end:  the delineation of and the alliance with truth.  There was a time in history when scientists seeking truth had to separate themselves from the institutions that controlled public religious practice.  Centuries ago, when sincerely devout, God-loving men began, in their honesty, to discover aspects of the universe contrary to prevailing religious dogma, the ecclesiastical authorities who benefited from maintaining those dogmas declared them heretics.

Some early researchers, perceived to be in conflict with the church, were imprisoned.  Others were tortured or killed in the name of God.  Thus, to save their own lives, scientists who hungered for a more complete understanding of creation that was offered by formal religion had to seek means to develop science in a way that did not offend church leaders.

What developed was a philosophy of separation between church and science.  So long as the church kept itself to “spiritual” matters only, and science kept strictly to “material” matters, then there would be no conflict.  Religion was for the sanctuary and science was for the laboratory.  The two were not to mix.  As a result, today we have materialistic science and secular medicine, both of which claim no relationship to God in their practice.  At the same time, we have religion that does not know how to incorporate science into its theology and has lost its healing ministry.

But the “separation” of science from religion is a false dichotomy.  To deny God as the source of healing makes medicine impotent, ineffective, and incapable of true healing.  To deny the spiritual as an integral part of the material makes science incapable of discerning the true nature of the universe.  Both science and medicine have confined themselves inside a materialistic container where the ultimate answers they seek are all on the outside.

The separatist dogmas of formal religion have done the same as separatist science.  Theologians have created boxes in which they restrict themselves to find God when, in truth, the complete revelation of God is to be found outside of their boxes, as well as inside.  God’s omnipresence includes the atoms and molecules of the material world, as well as those aspects we designate as spiritual.

Reference:  The Chemistry of Essential Oils Made Simple: God’s Love Manifest in Molecules by David Stewart, Ph.D., D.N.M. Registered Aromatherapist.