November 15, 2002

Reconciling Religion and Science to Save the Earth

By PETER MONAGHAN

To save the earth we must get over the idea that science and religion are incompatible, argues Alister McGrath in The Reenchantment of Nature: The Denial of Religion and the Ecological Crisis (Doubleday).

Mr. McGrath, a professor of theology at the University of Oxford who holds doctorates in both divinity and molecular biology, is a Bible historian and editor. He writes that social forces -- above all, the 18th-century Enlightenment's championing of reason and science