Religion vs science: can the divide between God and rationality be reconciled?

''A clergyman in charge of education for the country's leading scientific organisation – it's a Monty Python sketch," pronounced Britain's top atheist, Richard Dawkins, recently. How the world turns. In the days of Galileo it was the church that went around persecuting scientists. Now the boot appears to be on the scientific foot. That is how it must feel, at any rate, to Professor Michael Reiss who last month was hounded out of his job as the Royal Society's director of education by a group of Nobel Prize winners who were outraged not by what he said but by what people might think he had said. The problem was that Reiss, as well as being an evolutionary biologist and population geneticist, is a non-stipendiary priest in the Church of England. When he said recently that science teachers should answer questions about... [read full story]