Science and Religion: Moving Without a Map (Short Paper)
Ainsley Brigham; Rob Thompson; Philosophy and The Sciences; 7 December 2025
Science and Religion: Moving Without a Map
We move through the world without a complete map, heading toward destinations we do not yet fully understand. Science helps us navigate what lies ahead, and religion helps us live with the direction we choose. We keep moving anyway.
Debates about science and religion are often framed as a dramatic standoff. Science is expected to deliver solid facts about reality, while religion is treated as something that belongs where certainty collapses. In the Crash Course episode “Are Science and Religion Compatible?” this framing appears in the conflict thesis—the idea that science and religion are as incompatible as Batman and the Joker, locked in inevitable opposition. In this picture, both claim authority over how the world really is, and science appears destined to win. The power of this view lies in how effective science has proven itself to be. Yet this framing assumes that certainty is what science actually delivers—and that authority is what religion primarily seeks.
Scientific claims feel solid, reliable, and objective in a way religious claims often do not. Airplanes fly, medicines work, and predictions succeed often enough to earn trust. Thomas Kuhn’s analysis of scientific practice complicates this sense of finality. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn argues that science always operates within paradigms—shared frameworks that shape what counts as evidence, explanation, and legitimate research (Kuhn). During periods of “normal science,” these frameworks work so smoothly that they disappear from view. Scientific facts then look like direct readings of reality rather than the product of interpretive structure.
Kuhn does not claim that science is unreliable. Paradigms exist because they work. They enable scientists to detect patterns, make predictions, and intervene in the world with remarkable success. At the same time, paradigms impose limits. They organize uncertainty rather than eliminate it. Scientific knowledge is dependable enough to act on, but never complete enough to eliminate risk or revision. What science offers is not certainty, but a disciplined way of moving forward without it. Here, uncertainty refers not only to incomplete or provisional knowledge, but also to the fact that empirical descriptions alone underdetermine decisions about how one ought to act.
This helps explain why scientific explanations are so powerful without being all-encompassing. DeWitt clarifies this point through the idea of methodological naturalism. Science restricts itself to natural causes not because it has demonstrated that reality is exclusively natural, but because shared methodological limits make inquiry possible. Experiments can be replicated, errors corrected, and disagreements resolved only within a common framework. As DeWitt emphasizes, the success of this method does not justify turning it into a metaphysical claim about what ultimately exists. When that happens, science stops functioning as a tool for inquiry and begins to operate as a total worldview.
The attraction of that move is understandable. When explanations work consistently, it is tempting to treat them as exhaustive. Yet even the most detailed scientific account of an object does not determine how that object should be treated. Knowing how something works does not answer whether it should be used, altered, or restrained. Scientific knowledge makes action possible, but it does not decide which actions are justified.
Religion is not the only human response to this gap between capability and justification, but it has historically been one of the most influential ways societies have made sense of the responsibilities created by knowledge. Religion enters at this point—not as a rival explanation of physical reality, but as a response to the ethical pressure created by successful explanation. Religious traditions do not primarily exist to explain natural phenomena that science has failed to explain. Instead, they offer ways of thinking about what knowledge demands of human beings. Claims about sacredness, taboo, or moral boundaries respond to the fact that acting on knowledge always involves risk and irreversible consequence. Religion does not fill explanatory gaps; it takes seriously the responsibilities created when explanations succeed.
Matthews sharpens this distinction by focusing on normativity. Science can describe outcomes with increasing precision, but it cannot, by itself, generate obligations. Knowing what will happen if a certain action is taken does not determine whether that action ought to be taken. Attempts to derive moral authority directly from empirical facts rely on additional philosophical assumptions or dissolve moral judgment altogether. The value of science lies in explanation, not evaluation, and ethical reasoning remains necessary wherever knowledge outruns certainty.
Seen through Kuhn’s framework, the tension between science and religion becomes more intelligible. Scientific paradigms grant expanding control over aspects of the world, and control can easily be mistaken for mastery. Yet uncertainty persists. Religion can be understood as a cultural and philosophical response to what scientific success does not remove—the need for humility, restraint, and limits in the face of increasing power.
This perspective reshapes how each domain might regard the other. Scientists should challenge religious claims that directly contradict strong empirical evidence, but they should also recognize that religious traditions often articulate concerns about responsibility that fall outside scientific method. Theology, in turn, should treat science as the most reliable guide to the natural world while resisting the temptation to use God as an explanatory placeholder. As Matthews notes, “God-of-the-gaps” reasoning confuses ignorance with meaning and ultimately weakens theology itself.
The relationship between science and religion is not best understood as a contest between certainty and belief. Science produces reliable but provisional knowledge within paradigms. Methodological success does not entail metaphysical finality. Ethical and religious reflection remains necessary wherever action exceeds certainty. Science tells us what the world is like well enough to use it. Religion asks how we ought to live with that knowledge. Both confront the same human condition: the need to act without ever knowing everything.
Works Cited
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 50th-Anniversary ed., University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Matthews, Michael R., editor. The Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy: Selected Readings. 1st ed., Routledge.
DeWitt, Richard. Worldviews: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science. 3rd ed.
“Are Science and Religion Compatible? — Crash Course Religions #19.” YouTube, uploaded by CrashCourse, 28 January 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z38LrPadz3Y.