Zócalo Public Square

Margaret Wertheim, “Space Versus Spirit: Why the Battle Between Science and Religion Is Driving Us Crazy” Science and religion are often viewed as two competing and utterly opposed worldviews–one based on faith, the other on reason. Yet both are systems that attempt to make sense of the world and of humanity’s place within a wider cosmological scheme. Religions usually posit that the material realm is just one part of a larger whole that also includes an immaterial spiritual domain, while modern science speaks only of a physical realm. But at the birth of modern science in the seventeenth century no one imagined that science was articulating the whole of reality. Los Angeles-based science writer Margaret Wertheim will trace the history of how any notion of a spiritual realm was written out of Western science. She will examine the social, psychological, and cultural effects of this transformation and urge us to acknowledge the intellectual gifts we derive from both sides of this maddening divide.