Religion & Science: Can Competing Truth-Claims Be Reconciled?

This paper is an analysis of the conflict between religion and science through the lens of Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA). With recent court rulings on the education and public interactions of religion and science the relationship between these two competing spheres is of current importance. Gould tried to examine the issue by way of analyzing the practical institutions of religion. However in my approach I attempt to mediate the conflict by way of their competing truth-claims. With an analytical method my goal is to show like Gould that religion and science do not conflict. In my analysis I am able to show that these competing truth-claims are not necessarily in conflict. However this requires severe alterations of the religious beliefs that I had hoped to keep intact. In the end it seems that the NOMA thesis is impossible: religious statements that compete with science are either empirically false or meaningless.