Pam conrad

Science and religion so often seem to be in conflict, with the chasm between them widening all the time.

For many, the grounding of their religion is in faith and belief in powers beyond our understanding.  For people of science, the grounding is in empirical facts and measurements that can be tested to help explain our world.

The conflicts between science and religion have been many,  perhaps most intensely on issues including evolution, how life on Earth began and how our universe came to be.

The era of pioneering scientists being punished or hounded by religious leaders — think of Galileo, astrobiologist-before-his-time Giordano Bruno, Charles Darwin — is largely in the past.  But so too is the era when the most prominent natural scientists were profoundly religious people, such as Sir Isaac Newton, James Maxwell (who correctly theorized the nature of electromagnetism) and one of the 19th century physicist and scientific titan, Lord Kelvin.

The field of astrobiology presents innumerable issues where a scientific and religious focus certainly could clash.  Astr

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