RELIGION CAN FOSTER SCIENCE AND VICE VERSA The 18th Century botanist, Carl Linnaeus, gave us the detailed taxonomy of plants that is still used today. He said his belief in God propelled his scientific quest. Isaac Newton was a believing Christian with a special interest in Biblical prophecy, yet this mathematician gave us the Law of Gravity. Today, Fr Jacques Arnoud, a prolific writer on science and religion, is advisor to the National Space Science Centre in Paris. He told me that the prospect of life elsewhere in the Universe deepens his faith.

One of the great Australian scientists and theologians, Charles Birch, has expressed this relationship thus: "The key ideas of modern science were wrought in the imagination of men who battled in thought with what at first they only dimly saw, though firmly felt." Birch believes his Christian faith is similar, "It is...a sense of being grasped by something of tremendous importance that calls forth from a man all his powers of imaginative thought and of feeling and of action." [Nature and God: 92] Hence, the openness of Birch's faith to the unfolding history of the natural world, with its ever more complex discoveries from genetics to the outer galaxies.
Science has also fostered religious reform and renewal as well as dubious forays into spiritual technology.
COME TO THE BRISBANE WRITERS FESTIVAL Sunday 16 Sept, 4:40pm to hear me talk about CURIOUS OBSESSIONS in the History of Science and Spirituality (ABC Books)