Whatever stand one takes on the acceptability of a religious understanding of the world and of human life, though, it is clear that at a deep level, science cannot be seen to conflict with religion, if each activity is properly conceived. The one looks at the world in an impersonal way, prescinding from fundamental questions of the meaning of the whole, while the other takes the whole as given and attempts to see it in terms of personal meaningfulness. Indeed, far from being in a state of mutual conflict, if anything I have just said is correct, science and religion could even be seen to be part of a mutually sustaining harmony. A religious attitude to the world can motivate the desire to understand God's creation better and more truthfully, and also to respect its integrity. Equally the sense of the objectivity and otherness of the world evinced in science can put us on our guard against those religions and ideologies which in effect, and as Barth warned us, idolize human subjectivity.
(Anthony O'Hear, "Science and Religion," The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44 [September 1993]: 505-16, at 514)
Note from KBJ: The job of a philosopher, as such, is not to determine whether the claims of science or of religion are true. It is to explain how it is possible for both sets of claims to be true.
