Religion and Science. One of the greatest challenges that humanity has faced is finding a balance between religious faith and science. Learned men and women of the ancient civilizations of China, the Middle East, and Africa all asked if those things that everyone experiences (such as life, death, natural phenomena, and disease) could be explained by religious beliefs or by scientific study and exploration. In the Western tradition ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle asked the same question, and people continue to do so today. The so-called Age of Reason or Age of Enlightenment in seventeenth-century Europe laid the foundation for the modern dependence on science to explain the world; but earlier scholars did not see science as separate from religion. Scholars within the Islamic and Judeo-Christian traditions often believed that their attempt to explain the world around them, even through scientific observation and study, was a religious...