Whatever their differences, and they are many, science and religion share a common purpose. They elucidate. They make that which seemed previously unknowable knowable. Nonetheless, more often than not, like a quarreling couple, their conclusions are hopelessly disparate—which causes a great divide and leads to a broader conflict, as heels are dug in and allies join in. In all likelihood, the two sides will never reach an accord. They are too far apart. They will have to find a way to coexist. That may be difficult, as evidenced by this report from the New York Times:

A Free-for-All on Science and Religion

Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,� or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for “progress in spiritual discoveries� to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book “The God Delusion� is a national best-seller.

Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told. [full text]