Godeath's letter Science, religion inimical to one another erroneously universalises medieval Europe's bitter experience in the conflict between religion and science at the threshold of the scientific revolution.

That experience, particular to European Christendom, has led to the elevation of modern science as a totalising, absolutist worldview on the nature of reality in competition with religion. Thus giving birth to secular positivism and the idea of the inevitability of human progress.

It is little wonder that the theory of evolution is preached as the theological dogma of this new religion of scientism, quite often by non-scientists or those whose fields of sub-specialisation are not in the biological sciences.

But cutting through the halo built around it, science is nothing more than the systematic, empirical study of the material world whose instrument is man's faculty of reason.

The vastness of what can be knowable of the material world - ie, the hard sciences - is such that one can only be truly learned in a very narrow, highly sub-specialised field.

Cognisant of this limitation, the honest scientist today, whether religious or otherwise, would not be so foolish as to make grand claims about modern science in the manner of 19th century secular priests of scientism.

In the authentic spiritual traditions, nature or the material world is the 'other' revelation, an open book whose study is praiseworthy.

Notwithstanding the vastness of what is knowable through empirical study, the material world is but one level of reality. Science as a way of understanding this reality through reason is but part of the religious worldview, which recognises a higher reality beyond the material world.

Reason together with revelation and the intellect (defined by traditionalists as a faculty for spiritual understanding) sets man in his exalted position as a priori, and not as something to 'evolve' into with all the capriciousness and uncertainties that such an evolutionary process entails.

In summary, yes, traditional religion is inimical to scientism as a secular positivist ideology. But science as a way of knowing the material world as one level of reality it is in harmony with it.

Had Bacon and Dscartes foreseen the threat to man's continuing existence on this planet today, they would have tempered their pronouncements on science with a healthy dose of humility.