Some Aspects of the Conflict between Science and Religion

Abstract

If my argument so far has been correct, the conflict between Science and Religion is ultimately a conflict between two opposed conceptions of human personality. Adherents of the religious outlook are committed to two assertions about human nature which scientifically-educated persons find utterly incredible. The first is that at least some human beings have cognitive capacities of a very peculiar sort, quite different from sense perception, introspection, memory and conceptual intelligence. The second is that human personality consists of at least two separable constituents, soul and body, and the soul continues to exist, in ‘other worlds’, after the disintegration of the body. In some versions of the religious outlook, both Eastern and Western, the soul is further distinguished into two constituents, spirit on the one hand and mind on the other; and in the Buddhist version of it, what continues after death is a series of mental events and not a soul-substance. But for our present purpose, these differences are relatively unimportant. What matters is the contention that human personality, however analysed, continues to exist after bodily death, the claim that personal identity is independent of the continuance of the physical organism.

From the Seventh Eddington Lecture (Cambridge University Press, 1953), pp. 30–54.