Einstein & The Rebbe

Ronald Pies sets up a dialogue between science and religion.

- Ronald Pies

“The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.”

– Galileo Galilei

“There is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle.”

– R.G. Ingersoll

When I was a resident in psychiatry, over thirty-five years ago, one of my mentors said something that forever changed the way I thought about my profession. “In psychiatry,” he said, “you can do biology in the morning and theology in the afternoon”. He was being a little facetious, but on a deeper level he meant what he said. I understood his message to be simply this: the problems of my patients could be understood and approached from both a ‘scientific’ and a ‘religious’ perspective without fear of contradiction or inconsistency. Yes, I know there are many critics of psychiatry who would challenge its scientific bona fides, but that’s a debate that would take me too far afield. Instead, I would like to use my teacher’s claim as a point of entry into a much broader question: namely, in what ways do science and religion differ, and in what sense do they have features in common?