In Sunday School, I had noticed, everyone had noticed, that the  commandments, precepts, and rules that were taught there were often  disregarded, not only by scoundrels and criminals in the news, but by  some of the very people whose job it was to teach us these morals. 

Upon detecting hypocrisy in the messenger, my impulse had been to  throw out the message. But I couldn’t quite shake the golden rule. Its  symmetry gave expression to an intuition that ran deep: that I shouldn’t  expect to be well-treated by those whom I treated poorly; that I should  afford others the dignity I sought for myself.

My take-away questions from Sunday School were:
 

1. Why are moral precepts—even those that everyone accepts—widely ignored?
2. Why has “peace on Earth, goodwill toward Men” not been realized?
    

I wondered about this gap between the ideal and the reality as World  War II raged, as the Holocaust was revealed, and as Japan surrendered to  American atom bombs. It seemed to me then, as it does now, that  religion’s most serious short-coming was not that it harbored “deniers”  of well-established science models, but that it had not found a way to  realize its own aspirational goals.
 
For example, the golden rule was suspended when it came to so-called  “Negroes” (they were not allowed to own homes in my town), the mentally  handicapped (a boy with Down Syndrome hung around my school’s perimeter,  but was barred from school property), homosexuals (a boy we thought  “queer” was humiliated), and poor, overweight, unstylish, or “dumb” kids  were often subjected to ridicule.
 
At college, when I argued that life might someday be created in a test  tube, I was mocked as a “heathen” and a ridiculed as a “mechanist.” When  I responded with insults of my own, the result was a shouting match.
 
Later, I wondered if “getting even” gave me a pass when it came to  obeying the golden rule. After all, they had hurled the first insult.  But then hadn’t I upped the ante? The logician in me noticed that the  golden rule, like the best rules in physics, allows for no exceptions.  It didn’t say anything about who went first. Did that mean that  retaliating in kind was wrong?
 
Finding an answer to this question took decades, and I’ll come back to  it after addressing an even more fundamental, methodological question, a  question that no discussion of religion and science can ignore.
 
  Are There Really Two Kinds of Knowledge?
 
In the mid-1960s, stirred by the passions of the civil rights movement, I  left physics to play a part in the reform of higher education then  sweeping the country. Overnight, my life took an activist turn toward  issues of equity and justice. Though exposure to the golden rule had  predisposed me to sympathize with those demanding equal rights, I did  not trace my political ideals to religion.
 
I’d spent most of my time since Sunday School in pursuit of scientific  truth, where evidence is king. During that time, my skepticism toward  the faith-based claims of religion had grown stronger. But in my  political work, I couldn’t help but notice that the reformers I worked  with often invoked religious teachings to good effect in support of the  goals we shared.
 
By the mid-seventies, the transformational energy of the sixties was  spent and, seeing no chance for further reforms, at age thirty-seven, I  left academia. The bitter academic politics of that period had left me  bruised and burnt out. In search of a less contentious way to bring  change, I wondered if the world’s holy books contained anything that  might have helped me be a better leader. In particular, Eastern  religions, like Buddhism and Vedanta, were drawing attention from  Western seekers, and the word was that they offered a more tranquil,  enlightened path to personal and social change.
 
Before I could take in anything positive from religion, Eastern or  Western, I had to deal with the negative. Yes, some churches had  provided a home for leaders of the civil rights movement, but it seemed  to me that if institutional religion practiced what it preached, it  could have done a lot more to oppose racism and done it sooner. What  more obvious violation of the golden rule could there be than a  segregated America?
 
My old questions about religion’s ineffectiveness were joined by new  ones concerning its exceptionalism. What if religion defended its  teachings in the same way science does—by marshaling evidence, making  predictions, and testing them against outcomes? What if religion applied  its teachings to its own practices? What if seemingly utopian  prophecies like “peace on Earth, goodwill toward men” were regarded not  as naive pieties but rather as testable predictions of a state of social equilibrium toward which humankind was muddling?
 
 It seemed to me that, with a few changes, religion could stand up to  the criticisms of non-believers, regain the respect of its critics, and  be the transformational force its founders and prophets had envisioned.  In this re-visioning, the parts of religion that are counterfactual or  unproven could either be dropped—as science jettisons theories that  don’t hold up to scrutiny—or retained as speculation, metaphor, or  personal preference. After all, anyone is free to believe anything, and  most of us, including scientists, discreetly exercise that right in one  area or another.
 
Fast forward thirty years. The twenty-first century has brought an  avalanche of evidence, and official admissions, of religion’s moral  lapses. Extreme ideologues and fanatical true believers continue to  tarnish the religious brand. When religion aligns itself with  discredited science, its losing streak is unbroken, and where  educational levels are on the rise, religion is in decline. This  wouldn’t matter if religion had succeeded in imparting its most  important teachings, but the golden rule is still widely flouted, and  “peace on Earth, goodwill toward men” remains a distant dream.
 
Sometimes, when you can’t get from A to B, it’s for lack of a  steppingstone. In that spirit, it seemed possible to me that for  religion to realize its vision of peace on Earth, it may first need to  make peace with science. The goal in these posts is to show that  religion and science can indeed co-occupy that steppingstone of peace,  and from it, deliver on their complementary promises.
 
Although grievances leap to mind when we consider making peace with an  old foe, ultimate success depends on identifying not where each side is  wrong, but where each is right.
 
Current attacks on religion are ignoring the fact that it got some very  big things right. However, religion must take responsibility for much of  the criticism directed its way because its spokesmen have repeatedly  failed to distinguish between its great discoveries and its mistakes.  Not only have some religious leaders ignored compelling evidence, but  they, like the leaders of secular institutions, have often failed to  live up to the standards of behavior they espouse. Nothing undermines  authority like hypocrisy.
 
Paradoxically, science makes even more mistakes than religion; but it  saves itself by being quicker to recognize and correct them. Niels Bohr,  the father of atomic physics, ascribed his breakthroughs to “making my  mistakes faster than others.”
 
The difference between science and religion is not that one has “babies”  in its bath water and the other doesn’t. The difference is that science  drains its dirty bath water faster, leaving its gleaming babies for all  to admire. As the American scientific statesman, James B. Conant, said:
 
The stumbling way in which even the ablest scientists  in every generation have had to fight through thickets of erroneous  observations, misleading generalizations, inadequate formulations, and  unconscious prejudice is rarely appreciated by those who obtain their  scientific knowledge from textbooks.
 
In what follows, I’ll try to give both religion and science their due  without soft-peddling their differences. Signing onto a new deal will  require adjustments from both of these venerable antagonists.