How to Relate Science and Religion

Reviewer's Bookwatch, Feb, 2005 by John Taylor

How To Relate Science And Religion

Mikael Stenmark

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

255 Jefferson Avenue, S.E., Grand Rapids, MI 49503

080282823X $28.00 1-800-253-7521 www.eerdmans.com

How To Relate Science And Religion: A Multidimensional Model by Mikael Stenmark (Professor of Philosophy of Religion, Uppsala University, Sweden) introduces the reader to two disparate and seemingly opposing perspectives on the relationship of religion and science. The first is the view that there is no limit to the competency of science to explain ourselves and the world in which we exist. The second view is that religion has a prober role to play in shaping scientific inquiry and interpretation. Professor Stenmark accessibly presents the central issues of the on-going debate between these two views and offers a "multidimensional model" of science and religion that does not automatically give dominance or priority to either perspective. Thoughtful and thought provoking reading, How To Relate Science And Religion is especially recommended to the the attention of non-specialist general readers with an interest in a reconciliation between the two most influential approaches to discovering and explaining the world in terms of logic and of faith, of experimentation and revelation.