 So if it's not the case that science and religion are in principle in conflict or in principle can't conflict the conclusion we're left with is that science and religion are potentially conflicting. That is, there are some cases where science can make a certain affirmations that contradict claims that people believe on the basis of religious revelation or religious experience and vice versa. So how do we address apparent tensions between science and religion in those cases? And the answer is we just have to look at them on a case-by-case basis. We have to balance the strength of the evidence in favor of certain scientific beliefs against the strength of the evidence in favor of a conflicting religious belief, whether that belief emerges from a purported religious experience or from a revelation. So when you're in the process of doing, engaging in this sort of balancing act, a religious believer when there is tension with a certain scientific claim really faces four options, to reject their religious belief, to reject their interpretation of the religious data, to reinterpret how they understand an experience or a text, to reject the evidence of their senses, or to reject an interpretation of the sense data and reject the claim that science has understood the data correctly. And you might wonder, well, is there one right answer to that question? Is there some default that we should hold as a religious believer? Should you always default to the science or should you always default to the religious revelation and actually, some people think yes, but it looks like the best answer is probably no. That is, in each case, what we've got is a body of data that we're interpreting in certain ways, and we always have to ask ourselves, where is the strongest evidence? Is it, is the strongest evidence my interpretation of the text is clearly correct? And if I have reason to think the text is correct, that gives me reason to reject the scientific belief. And if I think the evidence in favor of a certain scientific claim is just undeniable, based on the sense data, that will lead me to affirm that claim, perhaps in contrast to my interpretation of the religious text. So, on this view, science and religion potentially conflict. Now, the interesting question is, do they actually conflict? And there are many purported cases of actual conflict between science and religion as well. So perhaps the one about which we hear the most is claims about human origins or cosmological origins, but there are many others. In many religious traditions, it's believed that the human mind is in some sense immaterial and capable of surviving bodily death. That view is not held in very high esteem by those in neuroscience and psychology, for example. So that's another case where we have to ask, how do we reconcile these two different sorts of beliefs? Of course, the classic example, as I mentioned, is one that concerns origins for Muslims, Christians, and many others. The claim that the universe is very old, the claim that human beings are not separately created, but descended from common ancestors, this assumes certain things. It assumes that the revelation that they appeal to is accurate, and it also assumes that their interpretation of the text is accurate. But when you see that, you see also that provides us with a recipe for resolving these sorts of challenges. And in order to resolve it, we first have to look at how these questions about origins are understood more specifically. And to do that, I'll turn to a taxonomy that was provided by the philosopher Alvin Plantinga. And Plantinga describes this potential conflict in terms of five distinct theses. And they are the ancient earth thesis. The thesis of the universe and the earth are billions of years old, which is a claim that has apparently, or according to some, contradicted by certain religious texts. The progress thesis that life has moved from simple unicellular organisms to complex multicellular organisms over time, the common ancestry thesis that all terrestrial life shares a common ancestor, what Plantinga calls the Darwinist thesis, according to which the mechanisms that account for the diversity and complexity of life are those identified by evolutionary scientists, variation in selection, genetic drift, and so on. And fifth, the naturalistic origins of life thesis, the idea that life on earth arose through purely naturalistic processes as opposed to a divine action or divine miracle. So, critics of the evolutionary scheme of origins take issue with one or in some cases with all of these theses. And these critics argue that the scientists have just misunderstood the data or mishandled it, or perhaps that there's an agenda behind their interpretation of the data that lead them to endorse those five theses. And as a result, they've fallen into error. But these critics have to also acknowledge that in the same way that our scientists have to interpret empirical data, they have to interpret the evidence of revelation in order to come to their religious convictions and perhaps those interpretations are wrong. So again, in the same way, scientists are charged with the task of interpreting empirical data to come to conclusions, religious believers are charged with the task of interpreting a text. And the question then is, well, are there ever cases where the evidence shifts and we have some reason to believe that we should give more credence to one side or the other? And the answer is, yes, on both sides. As religious believers engage in this balancing act, they need to realize that the evidence can change on both sides, so that over time we can come to have a greater degree of confidence in a certain scientific claim. If you look at that list of five theses, you'll see that probably going from bottom to top, we have more evidence. So the evidence in favor of the claim that life arose by purely naturalistic means, it would actually be difficult to come up with evidence to show that. And we certainly don't have evidence of that now. So should the religious believer, if they think that their religious text teaches that life arose by some sort of non-natural process, should they give that up in the face of the scientific evidence? At this point, maybe not. But when it comes to the claim that the universe is six or 10,000 years old, in that case, it looks like the scientific evidence is really very strong. And that should encourage religious believers to go back to the text and see if perhaps there's an alternative reading that's still consistent with what the text is trying to affirm. And that's, in fact, what's happened in recent years. Biblical scholars have returned to the biblical text and ask, can, in fact, we understand this text differently? And many think that, in fact, if we understand ancient Near Eastern literature and the creation myth that were present at the time, then, in fact, it should not be understood in a literal way that perhaps it has in the past. So when we understand that science and religion are in potential conflict, it puts us in this place of having to balance the evidence of one against the other, and our conclusions about which we ought to take most seriously at any given time is likely to change.