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Lecture XII[b], Nov. 10, 1955

We will finish today the discussion on religion and science. At the end of the Tuesday hour,  I tried to show that religious symbols can neither be refuted nor confirmed by scientific results. In earlier periods, 1500 years ago, the problem was that from the side of science, religion was attacked, and the idea was that scientific results refute religious symbols. Today the problem is almost the opposite, namely that one has to be careful not to use present-day scientific results in order to confirm joyfully the truth of religion. Both ways are equally wrong and equally dangerous – that is the thesis of this whole section on religion and science, and that I tried to carry through in such a way that I showed that the earlier conflicts never were conflicts between merely scientific results and religious statements, but between worldviews, philosophical or religious, behind the scientific results which came into conflict with traditional religious forms. And I criticized both science and religion for not understanding this situation, for confusing the inquiry into the finite relationships of realities with each other, with the dimension of ultimate meaning as symbolized by them. Science does this by identifying religious presuppositions it has, consciously or unconsciously, with the scientific results itself. Theology does it by making, in the name of religious symbols, factual statements about the movements of finite realities. In both cases, a boundaryline [sic.] is trespassed; in both cases, a fundamental confusion of dimensions has taken place.

I spoke then about Lamarck's^f metaphysics of mechanism, about the danger of using the law of entropy, of the death of warmth, in order to prove the idea of creation once upon a