I have been listening to a relatively new podcast called, "The Catholic Laboratory", which explores the friendship between Roman Catholicism and science. It is very orthodox, and is also very good science. The podcaster is a devout Catholic and a physicist.
Google "The Catholic Laboratory podcast" or go to http://www.catholiclab.net/TheCatholicLaboratory/Podcast/Podcast.html
The podcast includes short biographies of Catholic scientists and their contributions over the centuries, explorations of physics, cosmology and evolution from the perspective of Catholic theology, and a joke of the week!
NOVA Science Now podcast has an excellent discussion of science and religion that is respectful of both areas of human research into our understanding of our place in the Universe.
These NOVA Science Now episodes do an excellent job in clarifying how science and religion cover separate spheres of rationale inquiry. Science explores the physical world using human reason, and cannot answer questions such as "why are we here?" or "what is our purpose?". Religion explores the transcendent, that which is beyond the physical world; religion uses human reason paired with faith, and its job is to explore questions such as "why are we here?" and "what is our purpose?" and to probe the nature of God. There is no inherent conflict between the two, no battle that need be fought.
As an example of the harmony between science and religion, I have observed that well over half of the scientists and engineers that I work with at a high tech R&D lab are active in their church, synagogue or temple.
The question is not Science vs. Religion. The question is whether any one person accepts the gift of faith, or rejects it. If they reject faith, then they tend to use human knowledge to support that position. If they accept faith, then they delight in any scientific discovery as glorifying God. "The heavens are telling the glory of God," is a favorite Bible quote for one astronomer who is also a Christian.
NOVA Science Podcast from PBS
Link to the various podcasts from NOVA: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/rss/podcasting.html
Link to the RSS feed itself: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/rss/nsn-podcast-pb.xml
Episodes:
Defining Science: The Power of Science
Defining Science: Science is Not Dogmatic
Defining Science: Science vs. Religion
Defining Science: Only a Theory?
Judging Intelligent Design
Sorry that I could not put in links to the individual episodes, but if you subscribe with iTunes or Juice or other podcatching software, you can see the list of episodes and listen to these. They are about 17 episodes back from today.
Science can only ask the question: "How does nature function?"
Religion focuses on the question: "Why are we here?"
Christian writer, C. S. Lewis, and scientist, S. J. Gould, both explain the lack of contention between science and religion very clearly:
C.S. Lewis:
Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, "I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 A.M. on January 15th and saw so-and-so," or, "I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so." Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is. And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science - and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes - something of a different kind - this is not a scientific question. If there is "Something Behind," then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make. And real scientists do not usually make them. It is usually the journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of half-baked science from textbooks who go in for them. After all, it is really a matter of common sense. Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, "Why is there a universe?" "Why does it go on as it does?" "Has it any meaning?" would remain just as they were?
---CS Lewis, "Mere Christianity", Chapter 4, Paragraph 3 (http://lib.ru/LEWISCL/mere_engl.txt).
Scientist and evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould:
"To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time: Science simply cannot by its legitimate methods adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists. If some of our crowd have made untoward statements claiming that Darwinism disproves God, then I will find Mrs. McInerney (Gould's third-grade teacher) and have their knuckles rapped for it . . . Science can work only with naturalistic explanations; it can neither affirm nor deny other types of actors (like God) in other spheres (the moral realm, for example). Forget philosophy for a moment; the simple empirics of the past hundred years should suffice. Darwin himself was agnostic (having lost his religious beliefs upon the tragic death of his favorite daughter), but the great American botanist Asa Gray, who favored natural selection and wrote a book entitled "Darwiniana", was a devout Christian. Move forward 50 years: Charles D. Walcott, discoverer of the Burgess Shale Fossils, was a convinced Darwinian and an equally firm Christian, who believed that God had ordained natural selection to construct the history of life according to His plans and purposes. Move on another 50 years to the two greatest evolutionists of our generation: G. G. Simpson was a humanistic agnostic, Theodosius Dobzhansky, a believing Russian Orthodox. Either half of my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs -- and equally compatible with atheism."
-- S. J. Gould, "Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge" (review of Phillip Johnson's "Darwin on Trial", Scientific American 267 (1992):118-21.
