Many contemporary religious leaders do not make this mistake, although those who do get a disproportionate amount of attention. Religious leaders who cheerfully cede the business of modeling nature to science are no longer rare. Neither they nor the scientists who study these matters, many of whom are themselves people of faith, see any contradiction between the perennial wisdom embodied in the world's religions and, say, Darwin's theory of evolution, the geological theory of plate tectonics, or the Big Bang theory of the cosmos.

It may surprise some that the father of modern cosmology, George Lemaitre, was a priest. When asked how he reconciled his faith and his science, he wrote:

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