 All right, there are two parts to this question, so let me take them one at a time. My view of the relation between religion and science, big question. But I do think I may have a novel view on that relationship, which makes time much more centrally important than it is in many other discussions of science and religion. And in fact, it's sort of ironic because it's science itself that generates the view on time that I'm referring to. It's deep time, the scientific time, geological time, where the periods that we have to try to get our heads around are so much greater than anything that we encounter in human time scales. I mean, in human time scales, we're thinking about minutes, hours, years, centuries already start to tax our imagination, millennium, you know, that's, but that's just dropping the bucket when it comes to scientific time, where we have to get familiar with thinking about millions of years and even billions of years, and we really don't do a very good job of that. Nonetheless, that's what science has given us. One of the results of scientific investigation is deep time, kind of. I tend to think that the metaphor deep must have come from somebody thinking, looking into a bottomless well. It's something like that when you think about the deep past, you know, billions of years, or when you look forward, as we too rarely do, into the deep future. So time, now how does that change how we should think about religion and science? Well, then we have to sort of find our place in time. And here we are at a very early stage, given scientific time scales, at a very early stage of the life of science and of religion, just a few thousand years. Now you might say, you know, science has made considerable headway in those few thousand years. I suppose that's true. Science has developed very sophisticated methodologies for pursuing its goals. And you might even say, I'd be prepared to say that as far as its ability to do its thing as concerned, science has done better so far than religion, okay? So suppose we agree that religion is behind in terms of doing its own thing and doing it conspicuously well, okay? Science does its thing, the investigation of nature, putting it broadly, conspicuously well. It's so obvious that that's the case for religion. We have disagreement about even the most fundamental matters in religion, whereas it's not the case in science. It's one example of a relevant difference, okay? So science is ahead, but this is a relative difference. And when you think about it within the context of deep time, who knows where things are going to go from here? We can start to notice within the context of deep time, the gift of science. We can start to notice that we're still at an extremely early stage. It would be remarkable indeed if we had exhausted the study of nature. Could be that in order to really get even a full scientific understanding, we're going to need to continue scientific inquiry for an enormously long period of time, periods of time that would tax our imagination. Suppose that that's at least possible. I think you can make it at least possible. In that case, we have to say, we don't know where things are going to go in the future. Now, science is ahead of religion. Who knows where religion is going to be in the future? Perhaps religion right now is something like science, what, 1,000, 1,500 years ago? Science has made a lot of progress. So what stage are we at? So when we think about things temporally in this way, we can think about stages of development. So my view on science and religion incorporates that sort of thinking, that sort of temporarily inflected thinking. Stages of development, science is ahead of religion, but who knows where things are going to go in the future. It could be that religion is going to make a lot more progress, is going to be able to provide much more persuasive evidence that there is more to reality than just the sort of thing that science can deal with. So we end up with a view, perhaps, which incorporates elements both from science and from religion. At least it's a possibility. Like any good philosopher, I want to ask, scientific worldview can mean different things. If by scientific worldview you mean a naturalistic worldview, and here I mean the view that metaphysical naturalism is true, that nature is all there is, putting it roughly. That nature is, you know, there's just one single system that constitutes reality. It's a natural system, the kind of thing that science can explore. Suppose you hold that view, the view that nature is all there is. And suppose that that's what you mean when you speak of a scientific worldview. I think a lot of people do that. They conflate a scientific worldview and naturalism. Well, you know, that's what you mean. And of course you're rationally obligated to be an atheist because atheism follows deductively from naturalism, right? Because if nature is all there is, well, then there's no God, just follows deductively. So in that sense, we'd have to say yes, but I don't think that's the sense of the term scientific worldview that we should be working with. We need something that we could plausibly use when saying that everyone should have a scientific worldview. And I don't think it's clear at all that everyone should be a naturalist. So what does it mean then? What might it mean instead? It could mean something like this, that your worldview is one that is sensitive to and respectful of the best results of science. Maybe incorporates the best results of science, okay? Maybe that's enough to account as having a scientific worldview. And so if you're inclined to believe something, it turns out that it's contradicted by some of the best results of science. Well, that would be a conclusive reason for you not to believe it, okay? Maybe that would be an implication. All right, so suppose we take scientific worldview in that sense. Then I would say no, you're not rationally committed by virtue of having a scientific worldview alone to be an atheist or an agnostic. Because we can imagine, for example, somebody who accepts the existence of God on philosophical grounds. They have a very philosophically sophisticated theism. And the kind of theism that they've developed is one that involves the claim that God, the being they hold to exist as a theist, has created is at least the source in some sense of the very world that science investigates and is gradually exposing to us. So it's an evolutionary world, fine. The understanding of God they have is quite compatible with that. I don't see why that's not a possibility. I think that there could be, probably are, people like that. People who have that sort of a theism and I think they could very well be people who have a scientific worldview in the sense in which we're now considering.