essays about religion

Essays About Religion: Top 5 Examples and 7 Writing Prompts

Essays about religion include delicate issues and tricky subtopics. See our top essay examples and prompts to guide you in your essay writing.

With over 4,000 religions worldwide, it’s no wonder religion influences everything. It involves faith, lessons on humanity, spirituality, and moral values that span thousands of years. For some, it’s both a belief and a cultural system. As it often clashes with science, laws, and modern philosophies, it’s also a hot debate topic. Religion is a broad subject encompassing various elements of life, so you may find it a challenging topic to write an essay about it.

1. Wisdom and Longing in Islam’s Religion by Anonymous on Ivypanda.com

2. consequences of following religion blindly essay by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 3. religion: christians’ belief in god by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 4. mecca’s influence on today’s religion essay by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 5. religion: how buddhism views the world by anonymous on ivypanda.com , 1. the importance of religion, 2. pros and cons of having a religion, 3. religions across the world, 4. religion and its influence on laws, 5. religion: then and now, 6. religion vs. science, 7. my religion.

“Portraying Muslims as radical religious fanatics who deny other religions and violently fight dissent has nothing to do with true Islamic ideology. The knowledge that is presented in Islam and used by Muslims to build their worldview system is exploited in a misinterpreted form. This is transforming the perception of Islam around the world as a radical religious system that supports intolerance and conflicts.”

The author discusses their opinion on how Islam becomes involved with violence or terrorism in the Islamic states. Throughout the essay, the writer mentions the massive difference between Islam’s central teachings and the terrorist groups’ dogma. The piece also includes a list of groups, their disobediences, and punishments.

This essay looks at how these brutalities have nothing to do with Islam’s fundamental ideologies. However, the context of Islam’s creeds is distorted by rebel groups like The Afghan mujahideen, Jihadis, and Al-Qa’ida. Furthermore, their activities push dangerous narratives that others use to make generalized assumptions about the entire religion. These misleading generalizations lead to misunderstandings amongst other communities, particularly in the western world. However, the truth is that these terrorist groups are violating Islamic doctrine.

“Following religion blindly can hinder one’s self-actualization and interfere with self-development due to numerous constraints and restrictions… Blind adherence to religion is a factor that does not allow receiving flexible education and adapting knowledge to different areas.”

The author discusses the effects of blindly following a religion and mentions that it can lead to difficulties in self-development and the inability to live independently. These limitations affect a person’s opportunity to grow and discover oneself.  Movies like “ The Da Vinci Code ” show how fanatical devotion influences perception and creates constant doubt. 

“…there are many religions through which various cultures attain their spiritual and moral bearings to bring themselves closer to a higher power (deity). Different religions are differentiated in terms of beliefs, customs, and purpose and are similar in one way or the other.”

The author discusses how religion affects its followers’ spiritual and moral values and mentions how deities work in mysterious ways. The essay includes situations that show how these supreme beings test their followers’ faith through various life challenges. Overall, the writer believes that when people fully believe in God, they can be stronger and more capable of coping with the difficulties they may encounter.

“Mecca represents a holy ground that the majority of the Muslims visit; and is only supposed to be visited by Muslims. The popularity of Mecca has increased the scope of its effects, showing that it has an influence on tourism, the financial aspects of the region and lastly religion today.”

The essay delves into Mecca’s contributions to Saudi Arabia’s tourism and religion. It mentions tourism rates peaking during Hajj, a 5-day Muslim pilgrimage, and visitors’ sense of spiritual relief and peace after the voyage. Aside from its tremendous touristic benefits, it also brings people together to worship Allah. You can also check out these essays about values and articles about beliefs .

“Buddhism is seen as one of the most popular and widespread religions on the earth the reason of its pragmatic and attractive philosophies which are so appealing for people of the most diversified backgrounds and ways of thinking .”

To help readers understand the topic, the author explains Buddhism’s worldviews and how Siddhatta Gotama established the religion that’s now one of the most recognized on Earth. It includes teachings about the gift of life, novel thinking, and philosophies based on his observations. Conclusively, the author believes that Buddhism deals with the world as Gotama sees it.

Check out our guide packed full of transition words for essays .

7 Prompts on Essays About Religion

Religion’s importance is embedded in an individual or group’s interpretation of it. They hold on to their faith for various reasons, such as having an idea of the real meaning of life and offering them a purpose to exist. Use this prompt to identify and explain what makes religion a necessity. Make your essay interesting by adding real-life stories of how faith changed someone’s life.

Although religion offers benefits such as positivity and a sense of structure, there are also disadvantages that come with it. Discuss what’s considered healthy and destructive when people follow their religion’s gospels and why. You can also connect it to current issues. Include any personal experience you have.

Religion’s prevalence exhibits how it can significantly affect one’s daily living. Use this prompt to discuss how religions across the world differ from one another when it comes to beliefs and if traditions or customs influence them. It’s essential to use relevant statistical data or surveys in this prompt to support your claims and encourage your readers to trust your piece.

There are various ways religion affects countries’ laws as they adhere to moral and often humanitarian values. Identify each and discuss how faith takes part in a nation’s decision-making regarding pressing matters. You can focus on one religion in a specific location to let the readers concentrate on the case. A good example is the latest abortion issue in the US, the overturning of “Wade vs. Roe.” Include people’s mixed reactions to this subject and their justifications.

In this essay, talk about how the most widespread religions’ principles or rituals changed over time. Then, expound on what inspired these changes.  Add the religion’s history, its current situation in the country, and its old and new beliefs. Elaborate on how its members clash over these old and new principles. Conclude by sharing your opinion on whether the changes are beneficial or not.

There’s a never-ending debate between religion and science. List the most controversial arguments in your essay and add which side you support and why. Then, open discourse about how these groups can avoid quarreling. You can also discuss instances when religion and science agreed or worked together to achieve great results. 

Use this prompt if you’re a part of a particular religion. Even if you don’t believe in faith, you can still take this prompt and pick a church you’ll consider joining. Share your personal experiences about your religion. Add how you became a follower, the beliefs that helped you through tough times, and why you’re staying as an active member in it. You can also speak about miraculous events that strengthen your faith. Or you can include teachings that you disagree with and think needs to be changed or updated.

For help with your essay, check out our top essay writing tips !

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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Three Essays on Religion

Author:  King, Martin Luther, Jr.

Date:  September 1, 1948 to May 31, 1951 ?

Location:  Chester, Pa. ?

Genre:  Essay

Topic:  Martin Luther King, Jr. - Education

In the following three essays, King wrestles with the role of religion in modern society. In the first assignment, he calls science and religion “different though converging truths” that both “spring from the same seeds of vital human needs.” King emphasizes an awareness of God’s presence in the second document, noting that religion’s purpose “is not to perpetuate a dogma or a theology; but to produce living witnesses and testimonies to the power of God in human experience.” In the final handwritten essay King acknowledges the life-affirming nature of Christianity, observing that its adherents have consistently “looked forward for a time to come when the law of love becomes the law of life.”

"Science and Religion"

There is widespread belief in the minds of many that there is a conflict between science and religion. But there is no fundamental issue between the two. While the conflict has been waged long and furiously, it has been on issues utterly unrelated either to religion or to science. The conflict has been largely one of trespassing, and as soon as religion and science discover their legitimate spheres the conflict ceases.

Religion, of course, has been very slow and loath to surrender its claim to sovereignty in all departments of human life; and science overjoyed with recent victories, has been quick to lay claim to a similar sovereignty. Hence the conflict.

But there was never a conflict between religion and science as such. There cannot be. Their respective worlds are different. Their methods are dissimilar and their immediate objectives are not the same. The method of science is observation, that of religion contemplation. Science investigates. Religion interprets. One seeks causes, the other ends. Science thinks in terms of history, religion in terms of teleology. One is a survey, the other an outlook.

The conflict was always between superstition disguised as religion and materialism disguised as science, between pseudo-science and pseudo-religion.

Religion and science are two hemispheres of human thought. They are different though converging truths. Both science and religion spring from the same seeds of vital human needs.

Science is the response to the human need of knowledge and power. Religion is the response to the human need for hope and certitude. One is an outreaching for mastery, the other for perfection. Both are man-made, and like man himself, are hedged about with limitations. Neither science nor religion, by itself, is sufficient for man. Science is not civilization. Science is organized knowledge; but civilization which is the art of noble and progressive communal living requires much more than knowledge. It needs beauty which is art, and faith and moral aspiration which are religion. It needs artistic and spiritual values along with the intellectual.

Man cannot live by facts alone. What we know is little enough. What we are likely to know will always be little in comparison with what there is to know. But man has a wish-life which must build inverted pyramids upon the apexes of known facts. This is not logical. It is, however, psychological.

Science and religion are not rivals. It is only when one attempts to be the oracle at the others shrine that confusion arises. Whan the scientist from his laboratory, on the basis of alleged scientific knowledge presumes to issue pronouncements on God, on the origin and destiny of life, and on man's place in the scheme of things he is [ passing? ] out worthless checks. When the religionist delivers ultimatums to the scientist on the basis of certain cosomologies embedded in the sacred text then he is a sorry spectacle indeed.

When religion, however, on the strength of its own postulates, speaks to men of God and the moral order of the universe, when it utters its prophetic burden of justice and love and holiness and peace, then its voice is the voice of the eternal spiritual truth, irrefutable and invincible.,

"The Purpose of Religion"

What is the purpose of religion? 1  Is it to perpetuate an idea about God? Is it totally dependent upon revelation? What part does psychological experience play? Is religion synonymous with theology?

Harry Emerson Fosdick says that the most hopeful thing about any system of theology is that it will not last. 2  This statement will shock some. But is the purpose of religion the perpetuation of theological ideas? Religion is not validated by ideas, but by experience.

This automatically raises the question of salvation. Is the basis for salvation in creeds and dogmas or in experience. Catholics would have us believe the former. For them, the church, its creeds, its popes and bishops have recited the essence of religion and that is all there is to it. On the other hand we say that each soul must make its own reconciliation to God; that no creed can take the place of that personal experience. This was expressed by Paul Tillich when he said, “There is natural religion which belongs to man by nature. But there is also a revealed religion which man receives from a supernatural reality.” 3 Relevant religion therefore, comes through revelation from God, on the one hand; and through repentance and acceptance of salvation on the other hand. 4  Dogma as an agent in salvation has no essential place.

This is the secret of our religion. This is what makes the saints move on in spite of problems and perplexities of life that they must face. This religion of experience by which man is aware of God seeking him and saving him helps him to see the hands of God moving through history.

Religion has to be interpreted for each age; stated in terms that that age can understand. But the essential purpose of religion remains the same. It is not to perpetuate a dogma or theology; but to produce living witnesses and testimonies to the power of God in human experience.

[ signed ] M. L. King Jr. 5

"The Philosophy of Life Undergirding Christianity and the Christian Ministry"

Basically Christianity is a value philosophy. It insists that there are eternal values of intrinsic, self-evidencing validity and worth, embracing the true and the beautiful and consummated in the Good. This value content is embodied in the life of Christ. So that Christian philosophy is first and foremost Christocentric. It begins and ends with the assumption that Christ is the revelation of God. 6

We might ask what are some of the specific values that Christianity seeks to conserve? First Christianity speaks of the value of the world. In its conception of the world, it is not negative; it stands over against the asceticisms, world denials, and world flights, for example, of the religions of India, and is world-affirming, life affirming, life creating. Gautama bids us flee from the world, but Jesus would have us use it, because God has made it for our sustenance, our discipline, and our happiness. 7  So that the Christian view of the world can be summed up by saying that it is a place in which God is fitting men and women for the Kingdom of God.

Christianity also insists on the value of persons. All human personality is supremely worthful. This is something of what Schweitzer has called “reverence for life.” 8  Hunan being must always be used as ends; never as means. I realize that there have been times that Christianity has short at this point. There have been periods in Christians history that persons have been dealt with as if they were means rather than ends. But Christianity at its highest and best has always insisted that persons are intrinsically valuable. And so it is the job of the Christian to love every man because God love love. We must not love men merely because of their social or economic position or because of their cultural contribution, but we are to love them because  God  they are of value to God.

Christianity is also concerned about the value of life itself. Christianity is concerned about the good life for every  child,  man,  and  woman and child. This concern for the good life and the value of life is no where better expressed than in the words of Jesus in the gospel of John: “I came that you might have life and that you might have it more abundantly.” 9  This emphasis has run throughout the Christian tradition. Christianity has always had a concern for the elimination of disease and pestilence. This is seen in the great interest that it has taken in the hospital movement.

Christianity is concerned about increasing value. The whole concept of the kingdom of God on earth expressing a concern for increasing value. We need not go into a dicussion of the nature and meaning of the Kingdom of God, only to say that Christians throughout the ages have held tenaciouly to this concept. They have looked forward for a time to come when the law of love becomes the law of life.

In the light of all that we have said about Christianity as a value philosophy, where does the ministry come into the picture? 10

1.  King may have also considered the purpose of religion in a Morehouse paper that is no longer extant, as he began a third Morehouse paper, “Last week we attempted to discuss the purpose of religion” (King, “The Purpose of Education,” September 1946-February 1947, in  Papers  1:122).

2.  “Harry Emerson Fosdick” in  American Spiritual Autobiographies: Fifteen Self-Portraits,  ed. Louis Finkelstein (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), p. 114: “The theology of any generation cannot be understood, apart from the conditioning social matrix in which it is formulated. All systems of theology are as transient as the cultures they are patterned from.”

3.  King further developed this theme in his dissertation: “[Tillich] finds a basis for God's transcendence in the conception of God as abyss. There is a basic inconsistency in Tillich's thought at this point. On the one hand he speaks as a religious naturalist making God wholly immanent in nature. On the other hand he speaks as an extreme supernaturalist making God almost comparable to the Barthian ‘wholly other’” (King, “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman,” 15 April 1955, in  Papers  2:535).

4.  Commas were added after the words “religion” and “salvation.”

5.  King folded this assignment lengthwise and signed his name on the verso of the last page.

6.  King also penned a brief outline with this title (King, “The Philosophy of Life Undergirding Christianity and the Christian Ministry,” Outline, September 1948-May 1951). In the outline, King included the reference “see Enc. Of Religion p. 162.” This entry in  An Encyclopedia of Religion,  ed. Vergilius Ferm (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946) contains a definition of Christianity as “Christo-centric” and as consisting “of eternal values of intrinsic, self-evidencing validity and worth, embracing the true and the beautiful and consummated in the Good.” King kept this book in his personal library.

7.  Siddhartha Gautama (ca. 563-ca. 483 BCE) was the historical Buddha.

8.  For an example of Schweitzer's use of the phrase “reverence for life,” see Albert Schweitzer, “The Ethics of Reverence for Life,”  Christendom  1 (1936): 225-239.

9.  John 10:10.

10.  In his outline for this paper, King elaborated: “The Ministry provides leadership in helping men to recognize and accept the eternal values in the Xty religion. a. The necessity of a call b. The necessity for disinterested love c. The [ necessity ] for moral uprightness” (King, “Philosophy of Life,” Outline, September 1948-May 1951).

Source:  CSKC-INP, Coretta Scott King Collection, In Private Hands, Sermon file.

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Religion in the Modern World Analytical Essay

Introduction, the relevance of religion in the modern world, perception towards religion and modernity, works cited.

Religion is a set of cultural and belief system and practices that relate humanity to spirituality and are relative to sacred things (Heilman 25). It is a common term used to elect all concepts regarding the belief in the so called the god(s) or goddess as well as other divine beings concerns.

Religion has everything to do with the faith. Tony Blair speaking at a faith foundation said “It is impossible to understand the modern world unless you understand the importance of the religious faith. That faith motivates, galvanizes, organizes and integrates millions upon millions of people”

There are so many religions in the world and here we discuss only but a few who have the most following which include but not limited to Christianity, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism and Judaism (Heilman 30). Each of these religions has a set of practices and beliefs which their faith is based, most of the beliefs are aimed to answer fundamental questions about the nature of a supernatural power and how it relates to the humanity.

In ancient times, most religions served to answer mysteries of the universe, such as the question of creation, existence of the sun and the moon, meaning of life, and myriad other phenomena that could not be explained. There has been prolonged conflict between science and religion, in which science has come out strongly to oppose the authority of the various kinds of religions in the world.

It has opposed the sanctity of the creeds and the authority of the religious institutions. This was recognized after the industrial revolution and the publication of the Darwin’s Theory of evolution. The creeds and the religious dogmas were greatly challanged. People today have a feeling that the old religion would die and the only religion of science would dominate their life.

The simplistic view of religion is that it is no longer needed in the modern world because science now explains all these mysteries. For this reason, it has become very easy for us to dismiss most religions of the past as mere myths that served a purpose for the ancient days (Harris 40). “There were monumental losses in science. The Christians in some churches went ahead to burn books. “This led to a repression in the intellectual pursuit. This had set humanity to become outdated for over two millennia in the study of understanding scientific works”. This was said by Helen Ellerbe.

“Science is a discipline that is always ready to abandoning a given thought for a better one, this is its essence. On the other hand, the essence of theology is in the fact that it holds its truths in eternal and immutable manner” as said by H. L. Mencken. He also added that “For one to be sure, theology is unique in the sense that it will always yield a little to the development of knowledge.

One of the most striking ideas he gave on religion was on preaching part. He said that “The only preaching that would be captivating is of the Holy Roller on the mountains of Tennessee”. He related the preaching to popes thirteen century preaching’s

Yet a few religions have dominated the globe, and they are still revered as the ultimate truth for possibly the majority of the world population (Harris 45).

Why is religion still relevant in the lives of modern people when there are far more logical and provable explanation for the mysteries of the universe? In fact, a scholar of religion understands that the role of religion in society involves far more than just belief in a deity or sacred texts. Those religions that have endured provide social and psychological benefits that people find indispensable even in a civilized society.

One rather cynical explanation for the popularity of religion is that the great majority of human population simply does not understand science and refuses to learn it. It is far easier for the average person to attribute all difficult issues to a deity rather than to try to learn the subtleties of evolution, genetics, or laws of physics. In the infamous OJ Simpson murder trial of the 90’s, for example, a jury of twelve average citizens needed a rudimentary biology lecture on DNA and genetics just to understand the validity of forensic DNA evidence.

In the United States, fundamentalist Christian groups are still trying to include the theory of Intelligent Design in science classes as a legitimate alternative to the theory of evolution. It is simply easier for these people to assign an ultimate creator by default than to pursue intellectual evidence. In effect, these people are intellectually as primitive as the people of Biblical times or the many “uncivilized” populations who worshipped the sun, moon, the trees, or the moons.

Yet, as abhorrent as it may seem intellectually, we must also recognize that such irrational and unfounded faith still serves an important social value. When we consider the History of Yacub, for example, the notion of an evil scientist’s breeding a wicked race of light-skinned humans over many centuries sounds as far-fetched and fantastic as Athena springing to life from Zeus’s head. Yet thousands of modern Americans took faith in the story because it relieved their psychological yearning for answers to their condition.

Humans simply need to fill this emotional void in their lives even if it means to lend legitimacy to unfounded beliefs. Black Elk’s faith in his childhood vision reveals how this type of faith can guide a person’s life at the personal level (Neihardt 207-210). These visions or narratives are not explicit directives; more often they serve as additional sources for psychologically legitimizing the existing social concerns of the interpreter.

There are other, more legitimate, reasons for the perpetual dependence on religion. One is the sense of community and identity that is created by sharing a faith. For example, in the anatomy of the sacred the phenomenological issue of a supernatural existence is discussed, the writer Livingston puts across a phenomenon that creates questionable actions like he says the question people should ask themselves is “How is God present in human consciousness” rather than “Is God really existing?”

In addition he say people should also ask themselves the following question as I quote “What form of characteristics does God exhibit?” This would help them learn more about the supernatural existence (200). Through ritualistic behavior, such at church attendance, ceremonies, and prayer, the people of the same faith feel a psychological connection to others.

It is a bond of loyalty and commitment to each other that may be just a bit weaker than the bond of a family, but still stronger than the typical loyalties to country or local community (Neihardt 215). The Hasidic Jews reveal their commitment to God and their community by creating an anachronistic microcosm. Their appearance and lifestyle announces to the world that they are one unique group, to be distinguished from all others no matter where they reside.

On a bigger scale, the Christians and Muslims have extended their membership globally by uniting people under the same ritual behavior (Livingstone 295-300). When a Christian drinks the wine at communion service, or when a Muslim prays toward Mecca at the designated time, they each feel a psychological and emotional connection to all others who are sharing the same experience. There is emotional comfort in knowing that a community exist that shares one’s same values.

Also common to many of the popular religion is the promise of an afterlife. For millions of people around the world, this promise of a better afterlife makes the present conditions more bearable. Historically, Europeans have used the Bible to convince the conquered natives that their enslavement was justified in the eyes of God. Those who accepted the new faith took comfort in believing that God still favors them as He did the Jews enslaved in Egypt during the time of Moses (Livingstone 300-312).

Black Elk also believed in supernatural power on earth, this is depicted when he said that “Great spirit, once more behold me on earth and lean to hear my feeble voice” This shows that he believed in some spirits that took care of him on earth. The dominant religions of the world now preach to the common people, and offer them hope of a better life after death.

For the economically disadvantaged commoners of capitalistic nations or third world countries, the promise of the better future is more realistic in the afterlife than in the current one. This is a source of psychological coping mechanism that probably cannot be found in other sources.

The better future, however, is only rewarded for living an exemplary life in this world. This is the crucial incentive for conformity that political leaders seemed to have appreciated. For the political conservatives in power, conformity of the people means stability of the status quo. This is made possible because people believe that religion is necessary to serve as a source of moral guidance.

God has set a guideline for people to follow, and this guideline becomes the moral code by which the followers must live their lives. Most Americans believe firmly that the society would crumble if they stopped adhering to the Ten Commandments. Atheism is thought of as living without any moral codes. Just like children, adults also need simple guiding principles to behave properly. Religion provides the ultimate principles since they are the mandates of their God.

“In the mid-1800’s there were reports that indicated that about 225,000 slaves that were owned by Baptists, about 80,000 slaves owned by Presbyterians and about 250,000 by Methodists. At the outbreak of the civil war it was noted that Anglican church owned the greatest number of slaves. This was about 4 million slaves who were majorly blacks that were held in the United States.” Anne Gaylor

While we can appreciate all these significant social impact that religions have on the modern world, the need for religion is still debatable because so much of the benefits are counterbalanced by evils committed in the name of religion (Haley 50). Religion has been the root of countless atrocities in history in the form of wars, genocides, and terrorism. As much as religion unifies a group, it is also a divisive force in the bigger community.

Even in current news, we see stability being hampered by religious differences and intolerance in transitional governments like Iraq, Egypt, and Syria. Yet it is impossible to dismiss religion simply as an evil because of the subtle and unnoticed benefits it bestows on humanity.

Religion clearly is relevant in the modern society as it has been throughout history, and it is unlikely that people will abandon religion unless modern philosophy and science invents suitable substitutes for all the social, psychological, and emotional benefits of religion (Haley 58).

Religious principles have been relevant in the various areas that concern human today, and includes the elimination of discrimination for example, Black Elk said “And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being”.

We find that modernity has been built with factors that that encompass rationalism. Some people have defined it to be “The people’s opium”. There are opinions on the reality of God existing which is very complicated. Some philosophers have settled on the fact that the world does not exist and the only thing that is real is in the issue of inverted illusion that “The heaven and the god’s are real”. Faith is the most important aspect to go by.

There has been series of revolution day by day. This can be depicted in the different forms of translation of the key book, the bible. Some of the translations are Good News, King James, New King James and so many more. One can be right if he argues that the essence of the “Word” which is God’s word has been distorted. The ancient written bible was very categorical on the words used. Although these words can be found to mean the same in grammar, they should not be changed at any given instance.

The words in many religious literatures has very significant and should be retained as they are. For instance, the Muslim brethren argue that Christians will not enter heaven due to the fact that their Christian literature which is the bible has undergone tremendous changes since time immemorial. This could be both true and not true. One will find out that at times translations have been embraced due to versatility in dialects.

At times no one should be blamed because in the event of translating a book back to the most common universal language, English, there occurs nullification and addition of different wordings. This can be described by use of Syntax in grammar. As a Christian there are fundamental issues that are agreed on universally.

Protestants who are a very radical group of people believe in God and His son Jesus Christ. Other groups do not believe in this. By default when one is born in a particular belief he or she will defend that belief because that is what he or she knows. As one grows old, a little bit of soul searching can help shed more light on the issue of belief.

Modernity gives various hues on the definition of religion from different perspectives. The issue of truth is always nullified in the event of discussing modernity. Due to changes over time, people have come to invent new way some groups emerging as cults and occults. A very interesting observation is in the issue of how different regions observe other religion and perspective. Every group believes that there is the best and the other groups are cults or occults.

It is okay to do this but one evident thing is that any bad thing is identified by its fruits. When the fruits are negative then, it is not right. Psychologically we can affect what we believe in. Therefore it is very important to be sober in understanding what path we take. One thing I know is that faith is great and seeking divine power from the highest power, that is God’s power.

This can give answers to all questions that we have. One should always remain sound in the search of truth. This is very important as it act as a guide. We can hear all things but there is that specific part for us which are very uplifting.

In summary it is evident that religion is still found the most relevant in the modern world today. Religion is relevantly important to different people in the world. That is the reason why as much as religion faces so much criticism from disciplines like science and theories as evolution it will stand the test of time. Religion deals with the bigger criticism but some people have proved to stand the tests.

Haley, Alex. Malcolm X Autobiography. Secaucus: Chartwell Books Inc., 1992.

Harris, Lis. Holy Days: World Hasidic Family. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Heilman, Samuel. Defenders of Faith: In Ultraorthodox Jewry. London: University of California Press, 2000.

Livingstone, James. Anatomy of the Sacred: Introduction to Religion. New York: Prentice Hall, 2004.

Neihardt, John. Black Elk Speaks: The Life Story of a Holy Man of the Ogola Sioux. University of Nebraska Press, 2000.

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Bibliography

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Religion - Free Essay Examples And Topic Ideas

A research on religion.

On the surface, the book of Ruth appears to be the story of a young girl who thought she had it all, and then one day, had nothing, but then once again, is saved by Prince Charming. Every girl's dream right? But when we dig a little deeper, it becomes evident that this book is more than just a love story between a man and a woman, but a picture of redemption. Ruth the Moabite marries, loses her husband, and […]

My Personal Attitude to Religion

Growing up in a family who saw religion as not only priority, but a way of life is something I will always cherish. Ever since I can remember, my family and I had the same routine Sunday, after Sunday, after Sunday. Even though my parents were constantly busy with their jobs, I was always running around to attend my different sporting events while my brother and sister were vigorously training to improve their sound on the instruments they played in […]

Biblical Interpretation Paper

For my biblical interpretation paper, I chose to focus on the story of Jesus and the women at the well (John 4:7). In this story, Jesus finds himself passing through the town of Sychar. Jesus had been travelling long and far and stopped at some land that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob had a well on this land, and Jesus, tired from his long journey, sat down by the well. A Samaritan woman came to the well […]

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Representation of Religion in Asian Buddha Statues

Artistic concepts are broad. Art may be interpreted either literally or symbolically depending on a person's insights. It goes a long way in the depiction of reality or imaginary insinuation, be it a person or a place. However, the study of artistic features gives more profound meaning and relates each work of art to the subjects under study for example religion. Eliade Mircea once said that the Buddha's iconography had been changed to spiritual existence from human nature[1]. Considering the […]

Existence in the Buddhist Religion

Existence consists of three characteristics: suffering, impermanence, and the concept of no-self. Ideas of these three characteristics make up much of the Buddhist religion. The three characteristics of existence constitute much of the Buddhist world view, from views toward pain to ideas about rebirth. Suffering, or dukkha, is a central focus in the Dhammapada. Suffering can be caused by physical pain, from pleasure changing to pain, or from the perpetual state of change that all things exist in. The Buddha […]

The Bible and the Power of the Mind

The Bible often talks about the power of the mind and the thoughts that come from it. Moses, Paul and Samuel talk about the powerfulness of the mind; Solomon, Matthew and Moses talk about how it can be deceived really easily; and David, Luke and Paul talk about God's blessings that come with opening your minds to Christ. Minds and thoughts are powerful and worthy of protection; one's thoughts are able to change their reality and the circumstances they live […]

The Religion of Buddhism

Siddhartha Gautama was numerous things. He was a ruler, an educator, the Buddha and later a divine being. He showed the religion of Buddhism. Moreover, he even affected Indian history until the end of time. Buddhism has spread to numerous nations including Thailand and Mongolia. The Buddha was conceived in sixth Century BCE. He was fundamentally secured up a castle for a large portion of his initial life in light of the fact that a prescience told that his family […]

Humanity Religions

Introduction Christianity is one of the widely practised religion in the world, and one of the oldest religious practices. The religious groups that practice Christianity under strict guidelines from the bible are known as Christians. Coming in at number one as the current world statistics show is Islam. Another world-renowned religion is Islam and is considered the most widely practised religion in the world. These old practices were considered part of humanity because they gave guidelines on morals on how […]

The Different Types of Punishments that were Used in the Bible

The death penalty has been, and continues to be an ongoing, controversial debate in today's society. In fact, capital punishment was extremely prevalent, especially during the time of Christ. In the Bible, mainly the Old Testament, capital punishment was ultimately the primary consequence to any crime that was committed. This may come as a surprise for some when in today's world, God is commonly known to be all powerful and forgiving. "For if you forgive other people when they sin […]

The Relationship between Religion and Politics in the United States

The relationship between religion and politics continues to be an important topic in modern American society. In a radical act, the Constitution not only guaranteed religious freedom; it also stated that the United States would not have a national church and would not have religious tests for national office[1]. However, in American political life, some factors enhance the role of religion in a way that is not observed in other developed countries. In the article "How Politics Affects Religion: Partisanship, […]

Role of Religion in Marco Polo’s Travels

"The state and foundations of western civilization were breaking at the seams during the 13th century. The primary indicator of this was the destruction of Constantinople by crusaders because of its orthodox roots in 1204. In addition, western culture was facing its own obstacles since the Great Schism wreaked havoc on the power struggle between church and state. Through his travel memoir, Marco Polo highlighted the Mongol’s model of religious unity that was lacking in affluent western societies, and gave […]

Extroversion Vs Introversions Within the Bible

McCrae and Costa's model presents five factors of personality. When inspecting this model of personality, it is very fascinating to line up some of the characters within the Bible and how they fit into one of the factors. Looking at the component of extroversion the individual that fits best in scripture is the Apostle Paul, and the person who I would consider to be the opposite is Moses. It is very interesting how these two can be so distinct on […]

Religion Impact on Many Civilizations

Throughout the course of human history, many civilizations have risen to prominence as well as having collapsed into nothingness. One commonality that each civilization has had, regardless of the respective outcome, was the impact that religion had on them. Democracies such as Greece, empires and kingdoms like Rome and Egypt, and even the many great dynasties of China all had religious beliefs in some form or another that greatly impacted their ways of life. Religion played an essential role in […]

Religion in the Scarlet Letter

Everyone has sinned at some point in their lives and it has ruined relationships. Sinning however can be redeemable but it takes hard work and dedication in order to achieve that goal. In the novel, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne we follow Hester Prynne our female protagonist and her journey along the aftermath of sin and the change it brings in each character along the way. In seventeenth century Boston, the protagonist Hester Prynne does a horrible thing and […]

The Difference between a Cult and Religion

Images of strange symbols, massacres, and dark woods may come to mind when you hear the word “cult” - a term that has grown to have a lot of negative connotations in our society. It would be strange to even try to compare what we know as a cult to mainstream religions, a conventional part of our everyday lives. But in reality, the two terms are polysemous, there are many possible meanings and depending on the way they are being […]

Homosexuality in Religion

When considering religion, you'd never come to assume that any faith is okay with homosexuality. homosexuality is something that is not a preferred topic that is talked about in church. Some churches can perhaps come upon that topic very briefly however can never have a full series like they do with a series concerning family, your walk with Christ, prayer,etc.. homosexuality is a great topic because the percentage of the LGBQT population rises within the U.S. in this essay you […]

Mind According to Bible

The word,"mind" is used in a variety of ways throughout the Bible. God tells believers and unbelievers alike what to do with their minds. These are some of the things God says to do with their minds. God calls everyone to listen to and remember what He says. One example of this is in Deuteronomy 11:18, New International Version, "Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on […]

Religion’s Role in Gender Equality

In today’s society and looking back, gender equality is something that the human race, in general, has struggled with since the beginning of our existence. Modern society likes to blame certain groups more for the gender inequalities we are facing than others. More often than not the finger pointing ends up turning to religion. In the Western World individuals often accuse Muslims of oppressing women, when Christianity, historically speaking has not been leading the way in gender equality. That being […]

Religion and the Renaissance

Religion is not easy to define. Many people have their own definitions of religion based on how they perform their religious beliefs. Religion can be a specific underlying set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or faith community. In the dictionaries religion is defined as “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.” The Florence Cathedral depicts religion through the artifacts inside that have a religious […]

Religion as a Means to Bring People Together

Throughout the book, we see various religions, working for the good and bad of several empires and peoples. While often serving as a means of unification or an arm of government, it also has a tendency to marginalize other people groups living within a region. When state mandated, religion can cause social and political unrest from the hierarchy of certain religious positions such as bishops. Religion can often cause divisions even within itself, resulting in all the more fragmentation. In […]

The Love/Hate Relationship between Religion and the LBGTQIA Community

Abstract This research will analyze the ever complicated relationship between members who identify as Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, Transsexual, Queer, Intersex and Asexual and various religious groups. The LGBTQIA acceptance movement is quite new to say the least, and there are still many barriers keeping them from reaching total acceptance. It is highly doubtable that any demographic will ever be completely accepted by another, however the lengths that many religious groups go to shun those who identify as anything other than […]

Religious Discrimination Throughout Cultures and the Workplace

Religious discrimination refers to the treating of an individual unfairly because of his or her religious beliefs (Kerner). P. Smith (2017) defines religious discrimination as the adverse treatment of an individual who is either an employee or any other person considering the religious beliefs of the person rather than the merit of the employee. Additionally, religious discrimination can refer to the unjust, or the prejudicial treatment of a group of people or just an individual because of his or chosen […]

Sexuality and Gender Within the Religions of Judaism and Christianity

In my term paper, I will be writing about sexuality and gender within the religions of Judaism and Christianity. I chose this topic because in recent years, it has become a topic of controversy. Christianity is largest religion; therefore, many people believe they know what Christians advocate on such topics. As for Judaism, I never really had knowledge of gender/sexuality in this religion because of ignorance. There was never really an interest for other religions on my part, but after […]

Mexican Culture – Religion, Family, Language, and Mexican Arts

"In this article, everything is important to the Mexican culture such as religion, family, language, and Mexican arts. Most of Mexico is dependent on church. About 82% of Mexicans consider themselves as catholic. Unlike other countries, parents are treated with respect. The largest event that a Mexican family celebrate is the quinceanera. A quinceanera is the celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday and is followed by a party. Mexican arts usually consist of clay pottery and colorful baskets. The style […]

Religion in Renaissance and Elizabethan Age

"The Renaissance also known as the age of “Rebirth” began in the 14th century. As the Renaissance occurred so did the Elizabethan era, also known as the Golden Age in English history, which began in the 16th century. The highly advanced drama during the time lead to dramas inspiring other and proposing several different readings such as the Holy Scriptures, pamphlets, and literary criticism to some of the first English novels. The sudden darkening change of literature connected to the […]

Feminism and Islam Religion

Throughout the Muslim world, a popular front of feminist belief is growing among women who are looking forward to reclaim Islam and the Quran for themselves. For ten years, many women trusted that they had to choose between their Muslim personality, their identity, and also their belief in gender egalitarianism. It was beyond the bounds of possibility of their choice that, the person that involved betraying either their faith or their feminist knowledge. About few years ago, a global movement […]

Importance of Bible

The mind should be very important to everyone, for it is the gateway for either good or bad to enter through. What enters the mind lurks in the mind. God wants what is paramount for everyone, and for believers to stay true. God wants what is paramount for everyone. Luke 21:14 says, "But make up your mind not to worry beforehand how you will defend yourselves." (Luke 21:14 NIV) This passage means do not worry what one will say to […]

All Religion View LGBTQ Life Styles Negatively

The Relationship between religion and LGBTQ community is different from time and place, and different religions. Countless religions in the world view LGBTQ negatively. This Negativity can range from explicitly forbidding to discouraging same sex sexual practices, and sexual reassignment, but liberals and progressive voices actively push social acceptance of the LGBTQ Identities. Most of the LGBTQ have been raised in many different organized religions many cherish their community’s faith but many are being forced to leave those communities’ behind […]

Comparative Religion Life of Buddha

Buddha which means enlightened one or the awakened is the titled conferred to Siddhartha Gautama. It is believed that he lived in Nepal between the sixth and fourth centuries. During that time, he tried different teachings but could not find any that was acceptable to him. One night while in meditation, he found the answers he was seeking thereby achieving awareness. This is what made him become Buddha. His life serves as the foundation of the Buddhist religion. Enlightenment, personal […]

Reformation was Mostly about Religion

I would say that the Reformation was mostly about religion. The majority of the documents shown to us pertained to the religious problems with the Church officials. Document 7 is a painting that depicts the bad things the church officials are doing. They are shown indulging in wealth and glory. Some men are also depicted with concubines and illegitimate children. In document 11, John Calvin writes “Nothing therefore can be more absurd than the fiction, that the power of judging […]

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• Religion Essays

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What Is a Religion Essay

Let’s begin with a proper definition of religion essay. Such texts talk about the basics of faith, churches, and believer communities’ traditions or inspect religions from historical, cultural, or philosophical perspectives. Depending on a general subject, you might talk about your belief or discuss other ones you are familiar with within your essay.

When describing such kind of topic (be it your own one or some others you wish to talk about), you should typically provide the following information:

• Its core beliefs (is it mono- or polytheistic and so on).
• Its main traditions.
• Problems it faces (or has faced in the past) and how they are solved, etc.

Religion Essay for School

In this article, we’ll provide some guidelines for writing about religion in schools essays. First of all, keep in mind that your paper must be informative and objective. Describing your own belief or discussing other ones, you need to avoid uninformed assumptions and prejudice. In order to engage in such discussions, one should learn about some basic principles at least:

• What is it in general?
• What are the main religions in the world or in your country?
• Main differences between religions or churches, etc.

More detailed tips for essay about religion in schools will be provided below. Besides, we’ve got many such examples posted here for free. Go ahead and check them. Maybe you’ll find some helpful ideas there to borrow for your own work. Start with civil disobedience essay or discrimination essay at StudyBounty .

Religion College Essays Example

Looking for a sample of college essays about religion? We’ve got one for you! Feel free to check out its structure and style and reuse it in your own essay.

College students are expected to address more complicated problems in their papers. But you need to stay respectful while writing about religion in college essays. This is quite an important and sensitive aspect of modern life so better make sure you’re not offending anyone. Be objective and use valid sources to back up your narrative. Avoid informal vocabulary and make sure all parts of your text are logically connected with each other.

Religious college essays aren’t very easy to compose. That’s why it would be useful to have some real completed works as your reference materials. Scroll down to access our college essay examples .

Religion Essay Examples That Will Help You in Writing

Searching for a good religion example to help you with your writer’s block? You’ve come to the right place. We have many different examples for various kinds of essays on this subject.

Is your task to write a college essay on religion? This level requires proper analysis and some time spent on research. You are likely to address complex or even controversial problems. So, make sure to use good argumentation and at the same time avoid radically judging other people’s views.

There are two main essay types for this topic:

• Argumentative
• Persuasive.

Each subtype has its own peculiarities and limitations. It is better to learn more about each one before choosing your topic. Let’s examine both these essay types in detail.

Religion Argumentative Essay

Writing an argumentative essay on religion requires presenting some claim and defending it before your audience. You should build a set of reasons showing that you’re right which requires conducting some preliminary research. 

So, these are necessary steps when working on an argumentative essay about religion:

• Formulate a strong claim in your thesis statement. Be cautious with that since you’re dealing with a sensitive subject.
• Brainstorm ideas and collect sources.
• Build your argumentation taking potential counterarguments into account.

Religion argumentative essay topics are controversial by definition which is why it might be complicated to deal with them. Feel free to check out argumentative essay examples or samples below – maybe you’ll find its argumentation structure useful for your own work.

Religion Persuasive Essay

Interested in persuasive essay topics on religion? We’ve got you covered! A real religion essay sample of this type is provided below. Feel free to use it as inspiration or reference material while writing your task.

Here are also some tips for persuading others to use in your writing:

• Choose a familiar topic. It would be hard to convince others when discussing questions you aren’t too well versed in.
• Use different types of reasoning. Appeal to your experience, emotions, rhetoric, etc.
• Maintain a respectful tone because you’re dealing with some quite sensitive questions. For example, if you’re presenting ‘My religion essay”, don’t offend any other religions or their representatives.

Do not forget to browse various persuasive essay examples by StudyBounty . It is crucial for your essay writing.

Religion Essay Outline

Let’s talk about an outline of essay on religion. This step is very serious because composing an excellent outline would help make huge progress with your essay. Presenting its logical structure in shortened but comprehensive format allows you to correct all grave mistakes before writing the full text.

Let's look at our sample. Suppose your general topic is ‘Cultural role of religion’.

Outline example for religion essay

Introduction: draft an introduction providing your thesis statement.

• Introduce your topic and write a thesis statement – a full sentence. E.g. debate that your belief is a key element of your national culture.
• Add a few words about this problem’s context, explaining the history of this question in your country.

Main body: the body should contain at least three paragraphs, sketched but concise. 

• Think your argumentation through and perform the necessary research.
• When defending the cultural role of your religion, place each of your major arguments in a new paragraph.
• Reserve the last paragraph to review possible counterarguments and refute them.

Conclusion: write a shortened conclusion.

• Summarize your arguments and refutations.
• Restate your claim and check whether it sounds convincing. Fill in any logical gaps if needed.

Bonus: Do not know how many pages your essay should be? Try our words per page tool and get an instant result!

Religion Essay Introduction

Making an introduction to religion essay informative enough requires some preparation and analysis. First, read how to write an informative essay . And here are the recommended steps:

• Provide your thesis statement making it clear, concise, and well formulated. We’ll discuss this part in another section below.
• Add enough context to make your audience familiar with the selected problem. It should explain why this problem is important and/or interesting for others. Otherwise, you would risk losing your audience’s attention.
• Make sure to keep it brief nevertheless. Don’t disclose any vital information that is to be provided in the main part later.

Our sample is available for you here. Feel free to choose and if necessary copy this structure and these techniques to use in your paper.

Introduction of religion essay example

During the ancient era, both power and religion had a connection to the aspect of kingship. Power was defined as the authority to influence other people's behavior. On the other hand, religion at times espoused the belief that the divinity in human beings was expressed in the center of leadership, in this case, the kingship. The fields of religious studies and anthropology, as well as a number of conferences, have considered kingship with respect to its relationship to religion. Going back to the early civilizations, the aspect of power and religion worked similarly as well as differently in both Aegean Crete and in Mesopotamia. This paper aims at discussing how the two aspects operated in the two regions.

Religion Essay Thesis Statement Examples

When brainstorming a thesis statement on religion, better focus on the aspects you are well familiar with. It would be difficult to prove the point if you don’t know enough about the problem.

Are you writing an argumentative or persuasive essay? In both cases, you should make some controversial claims so that you would have enough materials for discussion.

Here is a thesis statement about religion that you could use when discussing its cultural role:

Despite many controversies about the current role of our church, religion has shaped the unique culture of our society.

Here you quote an opposite opinion on your problem and refute it in the same sentence. Such construction makes your thesis sound more interesting.

Religion Essay Body Paragraph

The classic format of 5 paragraph essay about religion foresees using 3 out of 5 paragraphs for the main body part. The remaining 2 paragraphs are left for the introduction and the conclusion respectively.

Here is what your main part should include:

• All the information with necessary explanations and argumentation. Make sure to prepare valid data or evidence for your claims and assumptions.
• Each paragraph in your essay should contain a certain major argument. Leave the last one for reviewing the main counterarguments against your position and refuting them.
• Remember that all paragraphs should be logically connected with each other.

You can see how it is done in a sample available below.

Religion essay body paragraph example 

Ancient leaders, more particularly Kings, used architecture and art to show their true dominance vividly. In this context, various structures conferred different messages. It's evident that every structure portrayed a specific message as far as kingship was concerned. A much more critical component, in any case, is the central role performed by organized religion within Mesopotamian in regards to issues of state (Finegan 2015). More certainly during the Sumerian times, the city and its monetary association were the duty of the sanctuary, with its progressive brotherhood in which was vested a power practically equivalent to that of the ruler and his admonitory committee of elders. As needs were at the beginning of Sumeria and Babylonia, consideration was paid essentially to the design of religious structures, and all sculptures that had a religious significance filled. The elaboration and enhancement of castles were an advancement of the Assyrian times.

Religion Essay Conclusion

Finally, let’s talk about a conclusion on religion essay. Here are several tips on writing a good one:

• Summarize the important information you’ve provided in your essay, but don’t repeat it. Make sure you address the opposing point of view – this will make an essay more objective.
• Don't put any reference material in this section – place all of that in the previous part.
• Make it brief but comprehensive. Try adding some captivating comments about the subject. They could leave a lasting impression on readers.

A good sample is available below. It could be useful for you as extra reference material. Feel free to borrow some ideas from it!

Example of conclusion for religion essay

Evidently, as the paper highlights, in the ancient world, kingship was complemented both by power and by religion. The highest-ranking officials in government used architecture and artworks to show their dominance and authority. For instance, a stone relief and the Akkadian statue in Mesopotamia and the tallest buildings in Aegean Crete such as the Knossos Palace. These artworks showed that the kingship position was for universal well-being. The artwork was symbolic. It showed power vested upon the ruler and not the ruler themselves.

How to Write a Religion Essay

Are you stuck at the beginning? Here’s how to write an essay about religion – step by step:

• Choose your topic carefully. Brainstorm ideas and conduct some research. Make sure you know well what you are writing about.
• Present it to your audience properly. This includes preparing a strong thesis statement. But at the same time remain respectful to other people, including your opponents. Review your thesis carefully before proceeding.
• Write a short outline. At this stage, it will be much easier to evaluate how concise your work would be. Serious misjudgments, errors, or gaps can be quickly spotted and corrected. Just make sure to review your completed outline at least twice.
• Conduct serious research about your topic. Collect all necessary reference material. Use only valid sources and make sure all the citations aren’t offensive.
• Write the full essay. Format it carefully, use proper vocabulary, and don't forget about grammar.
• Review it at least once. Minor issues are left unnoticed quite often. Try asking someone else to check it out.

Still not sure how to write an essay on religion? You can contact us! We have experienced academic writers who are happy to help students.

List of Popular Religion Paper Topics

Need some good topics for religion papers ? Or not sure how to choose from various religion topics to write about? We’ve got your back! Here are the 12 best religion topics for essays of various levels and types:

• The historical role of religion in education. (Look at the education system essay from our library.)
• Comparison and contrast of Islam and Christianity.
•  Start with Importance of religious community in our society.
• How do churches in maintain international peace?
• Benefits of polygamy/monogamy from the religious aspect.
• Ideas of reincarnation and their basis.
• Dangers of religious radicalism.
• Are religious people more moral? Why or why not?
• What justifies changing your belief? 
• Why the church should/should not be separated from the state.
• Polytheism vs monotheism.
• Why religions will/will not disappear eventually.

FAQ About Essays on Religion

Sure, we’ve got totally free essays religion for you, at no charge at all. Feel free to browse through them, read or download them as pdf. As long as you avoid direct copying, you can reuse their style or structure in your own original work or borrow their sources if they match your own topic.

Always start your religious essays with strong thesis statements. It is recommended to address complex and even controversial problems. Such claims provide enough material for discussion and engage your reader. Don’t forget to give enough context about your thesis. Otherwise, people who read it might lose focus at the beginning.

No! These religion papers available here aren’t unique. They have already been published online and are visible to all other people. Submitting someone else’s text for your school assignment qualifies as plagiarism, even if you’ve copied only a part of it. Be sure that your professor can easily detect that.

Because of the importance of studying religion essay is a popular assignment in various colleges. This kind of paper allows students to demonstrate their ability to address different complex and very sensitive problems. In addition to their writing skills, they show their capabilities of performing analysis and maintaining respectful dialogue.

Many essay titles about religion are helpful for engaging your reader. A strong title should be captivating (e.g. using unexpected logical constructions); controversial and inviting for a debate; correct and completely corresponding to your thesis statement but not copying it completely; relevant for different types of societies and avoid a narrow focus.

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Essay Samples on Religion

Composing your student essay about religion, it’s essential to research your subject first and avoid controversial subjects. The trick is to provide a clear structure that will focus on theological aspects of things. When you strive to compare different religions, do not write in a biased tone and work on your compare-and-contrast essay. The body parts of your religion essay must start with a good topic sentence as you address a particular concept or the roots of some religious notions. It’s always good if you can find reliable sources to support the facts. If you are not sure about some source or an idea that must be explored, you can either talk to an academic advisor or focus on a good religion essay example that we have prepared for you. These will help you get a basic idea of how such essays must be written. See the introduction part in every essay sample provided and don’t forget to stay respectful as you work on the differences and similarities. Check your grading rubric requirements twice. Regarding a good thesis statement, religious essays should only pose assumptions or compose specific claims that are supported with another sentence to avoid misreading or confusion.

Why Is Freedom of Religion Important

Freedom of religion stands as one of the fundamental pillars of a democratic and pluralistic society. It safeguards an individual's right to practice their chosen faith without fear of discrimination or persecution. This essay delves into the resons why freedom of religion is important, exploring...

• Religious Tolerance

Who is God in Your Life: Personal Beliefs and Spiritual Connections

The concept of God holds profound significance across cultures and belief systems, shaping individuals' values, perspectives, and sense of purpose. So who is God in your life? This essay delves into the diverse ways people perceive God in their lives, whether through religious traditions, personal...

• Religious Beliefs

Should Religion Be Taught in Schools

Should religion be taught in schools? This question is a topic that evokes discussions about cultural diversity, freedom of religion, and the role of education in shaping students' worldviews. Advocates argue that including religion in the curriculum can foster understanding, promote tolerance, and provide students...

How Does Religion Affect Your Life

How does religion affect your life? Religion is a deeply personal and influential aspect of human experience, shaping beliefs, values, behaviors, and perspectives. The impact of religion extends beyond mere rituals; it permeates various dimensions of life. This essay explores the intricate ways in which...

How Are Religion and Culture Connected in Various Ways

The intricate relationship between religion and culture is a subject of immense significance, shaping the values, behaviors, and traditions of societies worldwide. While religion and culture are distinct concepts, they are profoundly interconnected, often influencing and informing one another. This essay delves into how religion...

• Culture and Communication

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Buddhism and Hinduism: Exploring Similarities and Differences

Buddhism and Hinduism, two of the world's most ancient and complex religions, share both commonalities and distinctions that have shaped the spiritual and cultural landscapes of Asia. This essay delves into Buddhism and Hinduism and the core similarities and differences between these two belief systems,...

Death is a Passage Beyond Life

Introduction In virtually every culture and religion around the world, death is not regarded as an end, but as a passage to a different form of existence. This belief, deeply rooted in human history and psyche, has shaped rituals, philosophies, and the way we perceive...

Why Should We Respect Our Parents: Exploring Islamic Arguments

What islam says about why should we respect our parents? In this essay I want to emphasize that Allah is telling us to treat our parents kindly and to make effort in pleasing them. He says that our mother most deserves our respect and service,...

• Parent-Child Relationship

Respect Your Parents and Take Care of Your Children: Ephesians 6:1-9

I chose the following passage Ephesians 6:1-9. The main reason that I chose this passage was because the other passages had already been taken. Now after researching this passage I discovered that there was more than meets the eye and I want to learn how...

The Importance of Respect and Obedience to Our Parents in Islam

DedicationI dedicate this research to God Almighty my creator, my strong pillar, my source of inspiration, wisdom, knowledge and understanding. He has been the source of my strength throughout this research and on His wings only have I soared. I also dedicate this work to...

Respect for Life: the Issue of Death Penalty in Catholic Teachings

An essential principle of a human rights is that each and every human being has an innate dignity that must be respected. Respect for one's human dignity is the original human right from which other human being had as a gift from our almighty God....

• Catholic Church
• Death Penalty

What Does Respect Mean to You: Christian Explanation

A few days ago a friend of mine asked 'what does respect mean to you?' Later this question inspired me to write this essay about the meaning of respect from christian believer's point of view.   Paradise is something that many people think they can...

• Biblical Worldview
• Christian Worldview

Implementing the Four Noble Truths in Everyday Life

Introduction One of the fundamental doctrines of Buddhism set forth by Buddha himself are the Four Noble Truths. These contain the very essence of the Buddha's pragmatic teachings. The Buddha is known to attain enlightenment only after the realization of these four truths during his...

Euthanasia and the Catholic Church in Australia

An ethical issue is a problem or dilemma that involves a person having to decide whether or not it is morally right or wrong. Euthanasia is a clear example of an ethical issue currently present in Australia. Euthanasia is a process whereby a person who...

• Assisted Suicide

Islamic Traditions and Practices: A Focus on Asian Muslims

Asia is home to one of the largest Muslim populations in the world. Muslim population accounts for approximately 62% of the total population of Asia. Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Bangladesh are Muslim-majority countries of Asia. As Muslims have different cultures, values, and histories, their...

The Divine Love: Understanding God's Love for Humanity

There is a multitude of attributes of God, what He is and that any human being can also become. Among these countless attributes or characteristics, we have love. A 'simple' characteristic present in some way in the life of all humanity, from the rich to...

• Image of God

Comparison of Islamic Religious Texts: the Quran and Hadith

The Quran is the most important text in the Islamic faith, believed to be the word of God communicated to the prophet Muhammad who spoke to his followers, and what he said was written down in the Quran years after his death. The Hadith is...

• Religious texts

The Virtue and Significance of the Quran: Exploring its Divine Revelation, Recitation, and Impact on the Muslim Community

The Quran is defined as the miraculous word of God, devoted to its recitation, the house of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) by revelation by Jibril, peace be upon him, and transmitted to us in frequency. It should be noted that the Quran came down in...

Human Experience of Illness and the Key Role of the Environment

The key goal of the healthcare facility is to offer a environment where the sick will be at ease and to enable their body to regenerate. There are three principles for a healthy environment: seen, unseen, and storied environments. These ideas give us a deeper...

The Trustworthiness of the Bible: Exploration of Its Foundations

The Bible, a collection of sacred texts revered by millions around the world, has endured for centuries as a source of moral guidance, spiritual enlightenment, and historical insight. Its trustworthiness stems from a multifaceted examination of its historical, literary, and spiritual foundations, which collectively affirm...

• Personal Experience

Exploring of the Five Meanings of Science of the Quran

Sciences of the Quran are each science that is intended to serve the Holy Quran and attempt to investigate its privileged insights and uncover its puzzles, for example, the exploration in the Quranic disclosure and Quranic contents, the gathering and grouping of the Quran, the...

Exploring Invaluable Role of Jesus Christ for the World

Jesus Christ is one of the most well known historical figures that could be considered heroic and relatively important to the development of Western Civilization. The existence of Jesus and the eternal legacy he left after he sacrificed himself was one that dramatically influenced the...

• Historical Figures
• Influence of Christianity
• Jesus Christ

Is Jesus a Myth: One of the World’s Most Controversial Figures

It would be hard to find a person in history that has been met with so much controversy than Jesus of Nazareth. According to those who wrote the New Testament, Jesus is God, who was born of a virgin, who lived a sinless life, was...

• World History

Why Jesus Is a Hero: an Example of Love and Forgiveness

Is Jesus a hero or not? The meaning of a hero is someone who shows bravery, courage, determination, justice and more. A hero doesn’t need to save the world for people to say that is what a hero is, like Jesus, he reached out to...

• Influential Person

The Life and Achievemnts of Muhammad - a Founder of Islam

I chose Muhammad because he did a lot from the day he was born till the day he died. One of the many things that Muhammad did was when Muhammad founded Islam and made it the way it is now. Muhammad was born in Mecca,...

Unveiling Jesus as the Heroic Figure of True Faith and Love

A hero is someone who gives themselves, often putting their own life at great risk, for the greater good of others . A hero shows courage and is determined and dedicated to helping others in need by showing selflessness and sacrifice for the good of...

Jesus as the Greatest Hero: Being Gifted With Godlike DNA

A hero is a person who is admired for their courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities. Jesus shown these quality’s in different bible readings. Jesus was not only a hero that did miracles to heal people, he was a hero that sacrificed his own life...

Personal Reflections: Three Lessons I Have Learnt From Hosea's Story

David was chosen to be king at a young age when he was only a shepherd, but wasn’t the king until he was 30 years old, David had been working for king Saul and throughout that time he had been taken to court by king...

The Menace of Terrorism Around the World: Emerging Threats and Issues

The menace of terrorism has been increasing over the years though there have been several efforts to counter it. The evils of terrorism have become widespread, and the world has become too familiar to them. There has been a lot of debate on the definition...

• Religious Conflict
• Social Problems

Understanding Islam: Beliefs, Practices, and History

What is Islam? What do they believe in? Who are they? Well continue reading and you will find out a lot about this religion. Islam is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion teaching that there is only one God and that Muhammad is the messenger of God....

• Five Pillars of Islam

The Unique World of Buddhism: Its Origins, Beliefs, and Practices

The World is today is unique, religion being a huge part of that uniqueness. The religions shaped many of the well- known religions today. There are a lot of well-known religions today adapted some of practices of many older religions that today depending on the...

Submission to Allah: The Core Concept of Islam

The concept at the core of Islam is the intention that a Muslim follows the will of Allah as closely as possible in hopes that each moment of each day is to be lived in an attitude of complete submission to Him. Allah’s greatest revelation,...

The Increased Violence in New Terrorism: What Is Going On

The 1990s recalls a series of extremist acts that ushered a new and more violent form of terrorism. Propelled by religious motivations, decentralized organization, and technological advancement, the new terrorism distinguished itself from old terrorism with its inclination to indiscriminate killing and mass casualties. Rapoport’s...

The Sacred Mystery of Plants in Eastern Religion Cultures

Sacred plants are specific plants those are usually devoted to gods and goddess. The human relation with sacred plant stands basically on religion which is considered with Hindu, Buddhist and Jain culture. During the ancient period, the worship of sacred plants is most of the...

Understanding Islam: The Complete Submission to the Will of God

Religion is often a fundamental part of one’s identity. The word religion originates from a Latin word meaning “to tie or bind together.” As new and modern religions continue to develop, religion defines as “an organized system of beliefs and rituals centring on a spiritual...

Difference Between Islam and Christianity: Perspectives on Racism

Islam and Christianity are two of the largest religions in the world, with billions of followers combined. While there are significant difference between islam and christianity in this essay we will also analyse similarities between islam and christianity. For this paper we have interviewed several...

Postulates and Principles of Islamic Moral Economic System

In this paper we will take a short review of main principles and postulates, its subsequent objectives of the Islamic moral economic system.  Tawhid or the Unity of God is the fundamental principle of IME. It refers to the human beings being equal before the...

• Economic systems

Muhammad and the Birth of Islam: Unraveling the History and Teachings

Chapter 10 of Islam of “Living Religions” by Mary Fisher talks about how Islam is viewed by society and how Islam came about. Reading this chapter from the point of view of the author who is not Muslim made me feel like she was with...

• History of Islam

The Journey to Nirvana: The Teachings and Beliefs of Buddhism

Buddhism is among the world's biggest religions, with origins in India dating back 2,500 years. Buddhists think that human existence is full of misery, believing the way to obtain happiness, or nirvana, is via meditation, spiritual and physical effort, and moral behavior. Buddhists believe life...

Gautama and the Middle Way: The Birth of Buddhism

Although we think of Buddhism as being created by Buddha, Gautama a young prince, was the creator and he is now referred to as Buddha, also known as the enlightened one. Since Gautama was a prince that meant that his father was a king and...

The Intersection of Religion and Abortion: A Comparative Analysis

Abortion has been a hot topic for several years. People are very opinionated about the case and there's an ethical side to the subject. The abortion debate asks whether it may be morally right to terminate a pregnancy before normal childbirth. Some people believe that...

• Abortion Debate

Buddhism in Asia: A Cultural and Historical Perspective

The story of the life of Gautama Buddha According to the legend the person now commonly known as the Buddha was a prince named Siddhartha Gautama. His father, Suddhodana Gautama, was the ruler of the Shakya clan. Siddhartha’s birth was attended by many unusual events....

• Zen Buddhism

From India to China: The Spread of Buddhism along the Silk Road

Introduction The silk road spread religions, philosophies, education, goods, and people. The people who embarked for a journey on the silk road were monks from India. India, during the iron age, between the fourth and sixth centuries, began urbanization and in this process, the influence...

Exploring Buddhism at a Traditional Mon Buddhist Dharma Session

Introduction Sunday, February 16th at two-thirty, I visited the Mon Buddhist Monastery Community in Akron Ohio. This was a traditional Mon Buddhist Dharma session. I was very pleased by the turnout of the session and was able to grasp a better understanding of the Buddhism...

The Rise and Spread of Islam: History and Impact

Introduction Islam is probably the most youthful religion and has the biggest followers in the world and is predominant in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia (Hopfe and Woodward 330). Islam is a significant religion in the world and has in excess of billion followers...

The Dichotomy of Annihilationism and Non-Annihilationism in Buddhism

Introduction Buddhism can be split into two distinct schools of thought: annihilationism and eternal rebirth. The argument that the state of nirvana is achieved through the blowing out of what fuels one’s self is the one generally accepted by most Buddhists and scholars. The minority...

Islam: The Role of Gender, Storytelling, and Conflict

Introduction: The emergence of the Muslim minority in Western nations has spurred discussion over which Muslim behaviors should be accepted, with many people considering certain customs a rejection. In Western countries, societies based on the Islamic belief system have wrestled with gender roles, the importance...

The Ethical Code of Islam: A Comprehensive Overview

Introduction: In Islam, there is a strict ethical code that must be followed in order to abide by Allah. This code is highlighted in the Koran and is practiced through traditions, actions, clothing, and food consumption. Furthermore, every Muslim is expected to adhere to the...

Religion and Abortion: Understanding the Pro-Life Movement

Introduction  Death sentences, guns, religion, and abortion are among the top debated subjects in conversations. These topics are discussed frequently, especially if it’s a hot topic for a political debate. There are supporters and opponents on these subjects due to their strong points of view....

Organ Donation and Brain Death from Buddhist's Perspectives 

Modern scientific and technological developments have contributed to mass production. There have arisen many issues which affect human health both physical and mental are related, regarding to ethical criteria in physical medicine. This paper will discuss brain death and organ transplantation from Buddhists perspectives. There...

• Organ Donation
• Organ Transplant

Hinduism and Buddhism as Most Popular Religions in India

Located in northern India that flows from the Himalayan Mountains to the Bay of Bengal lies the Ganges River. Known as a sacred entity, many Hindus bathe in its waters to cleanse past sins and to facilitate Moksha, liberation of reincarnation; thus, many faithful customs,...

Faith and Reason Are Compatible: Suspension of Disbelief 

Art is a platform that dares reality. It stretches the limits of reality and tends to over step these boundaries all to serve the purpose of the piece of art. This is where the suspension of disbelief comes in. One must set aside their typical...

The Baptism Experience: Passing God's Love Through Baptism

One simple act creates an endless ripple where people passes it on and pays it forward. This is due to the interconnected nature of human beings – when we are happy, we influence the people around us to have a positive outlook in life. And...

The Idea That Faith and Reason Are Compatible in Religious Texts

There are four fundamental claims of the Catholic intellectual tradition and the one I choose is, the dignity of the human being inviolable and the commitment to justice for the common good is necessary. These four fundamental claims are very important in the catholic religion...

The Baptism Experience in the Life of Children in the Medieval Ages

Of all the misconceptions of the Medieval Ages, some of the most prevalent include the life of a child during this era. During this time it is believed that many children were shown no recognition and they were treated as though they were adults as...

• Middle Ages

Hinduism and Buddhism: The Values and Purposes of Both Religions

Today there are many different religions in the world. In Asia, Buddhism and Hinduism are popular beliefs in general. Hinduism is the religion of Antigua known and very rich in literally hundreds of divinities, rituals and symbolic beliefs. Believes is that was founded around 1500...

Nacirema Culture and Buddhism Religious Practices

Religion is a topic that provokes or brings about different thoughts and ideas between people. We all have our own beliefs and traditions that make each one of our religions stand out. It is what makes us who we are. Myths and rituals are a...

The Freedom Of Religion And Why Is The First Amendment Important

First Amendment “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of...

• American Constitution
• First Amendment

Belief In God: Relationships Between Science and Religion

The conflict between science and spirituality (religion) usually refers to an assumed conflict between science and belief in God. For the purpose of this talk “religion” refers to the monotheistic religion which is the belief in the existence of a good, personal and transcendent creator....

• Science Vs. Religion
• Spirituality

Why Do You Believe In God

Well, God can do all of these and even more. Sometimes, situations can make anyone forget or doubt God's abilities irrespective of how strong you have been in faith. Remember, no one is ever ready for hard situations to hit them, it just happens, but...

• Kingdom of God

Peter`s The Great Reforms: A Knot Between Church And State

Christians all over the world have been persecuted for their religious beliefs. Although the situation became better with time, it was still not ideal in the 18th century. Peter the Great, the first emperor of Russia, introduced the Most Holy Synod, and it changed the...

• Russian Empire

The Nature Of Confucianism and Daoism, And The Gender Roles

The story of Cui Ying Ying was composed during the late Tang dynasty and is regarded as famous romantic prose. The story explores cultural dynamics during the Tang period and displays the contrasting views of Chinese philosophy in the era. To truly comprehend the symbolism...

• Confucianism
• Gender Roles

"Paradise Lost" By John Milton: Book Review

In this review, I hope to put forward two different approaches to interpreting Milton’s Paradise Lost. I will be exploring Archie Burnett’s article ‘Sense Variously Drawn Own’ published in 2003 which examines the relation between Lineation, syntax, and meaning in Milton’s Paradise Lost. I will...

• Adam and Eve
• Paradise Lost

"Does Science Threaten Religion?" By Gerber and Macionis: A Review

The article “Controversy and Debate: Does Science Threaten Religion?” has demonstrated the changing relationship between science and religion, from apparent contradictions in the past to recognizing and accepting each other in the present (Gerber & Macionis, 2018, pp. 553). The author has incorporated a structural-functional...

The History Of The Emergence And Spread Of Christianity And Islam

Christianity is one of the most spread religions in the world. It centers its belief in the public life of Jesus Christ. The term Christianity is a derivation of the followers of Christ. Therefore, Jesus is the pioneer of this faith. Christians base their teaching...

• Spread of Christianity

The Second Coming By Yeats: Powerful Warning To Society

In a world full of hostility and loss of faith surrounded by war and technological developments, the modernist era of literature developments, the modernists era of literature arose. The sinking of the Titanic symbolized the falling of the Great Britain empire and newly invented standardized...

• The Second Coming
• William Butler Yeats

Acceptance Concepts Through the Bible Topics

I believe that God creates all of us to be good genuinely and kindhearted. God believes that we are most beautiful & unique the way he created us. So, bullies should stop their intimidating behaviors towards others, they don’t need to be so, they should...

Humble, Mainwairing and Pompous Pride

This is probably something that none of you know about me and that is I am a massive Dads Army fan, I have all the available episodes and movies on DVD. It’s been great to watch the lost episodes on Gold this week, now I...

Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and Picture of Human Nature

This essay will explore Apuleius’ Metamorphoses with special regard to what picture of human nature and society it presents and whether or not the gods offer the prospect of salvation. Dealing with the tale of Lucius whose overly curious nature results in him being turned...

• Human Nature
• Metamorphoses

The Shinto Religion and the Root of Japanese Culture

Shintōism is frequently portrayed in art from all over the world, especially in Japan. The Shintō religion is at the root of Japanese culture and history and therefore has a profound impact on its popular culture today, from manga and anime to film to video...

• Personal Beliefs

Biblical Archaeology: How the Study of God Is Look Like

Archaeology is defined as the scientific study of historic or prehistoric peoples and their cultures by analysis of their artifacts, inscriptions, monuments, and other such remains, especially those that have been excavated. (Dictionary, Archaeology) Archaeology is used throughout history and in many ways. Biblical Archaeology...

• Archaeology

The Development of Islamic Art

Islamic art is created not only for the Muslim faith, but it consists of artworks such as textiles, architecture, paintings and drawings that were produced in the regions that were once ruled by Muslim empires. Artists from various disciplines take part in collaborative projects and...

• Islamic Art

Unforgiveness Steals Away Your Joy, Peace, and Happiness

Forgiveness is one of the topics most Christians don't like to talk about especially if they were truly hurt by someone close to their heart. Sometimes, we feel it is better to carry the burden of hatred rather than forgive those that have wronged us....

• Forgiveness

Role of Cultural and Religious Pluralism

Cultural pluralism is a term used when smaller groups within a larger society maintain their own unique cultural identities. Migration is a key process that makes significant contribution to the growth of urbanism. Often immigrants belonging to particular region, language, religion ,tribe etc tend to...

• Art and Religion
• Religious Pluralism

Political Correctness and Occidental International Law

The uniformity of European political thought canon as asserted by postcolonialists has created a ‘residual sense that the Christian faith is an expression of white Western privilege ’. This deficit in postcolonial theory, to account for Grotius and theorists who argued for the separation of...

• Political Correctness

The Portrayal of the Culture of Death and Afterlife in Art

Throughout history, different cultures dealt with the concept of death and afterlife according to their beliefs, and developed different perspectives about what happens after the body dies. These ideas were often reflected in their art, literature, and their lifestyle as well. Most cultures produce art...

The Tattoo of Cherry Blossom Bracelets in China

The armband tattoos were a popular excitement 10 to 15 years ago. Today, however, it is gradually becoming a hot trend again. These types of tattoos are appealing because they are easy to show and can be quickly hidden in the sleeve. What do bracelet...

• Chinese Culture
• Christianity

Amazon's Upload is All About the Digital Afterlife

Take Black Mirror's dystopian tech analysis, The Good Place's thoughtful investigation of the afterlife, and the workplace pranks of The Office, squeeze them together, and you have Amazon’s Upload. It takes place in a world that could simply be 10 years from now. You can...

Hagia Sophia and Eastern Roman Empire

Hagia Sophia is the great rich remain and an important monument for the Eastern Roman Empire commonly known as the Byzantine Empire. It remain the Centre for Orthodox Church for nearly a thousand years. The current version was built in the year 532. This iconic...

• Ancient Rome
• Byzantine Empire
• Hagia Sophia

Life After Death for the One Whose Heart Is Light

Built in the 27th century BC for the burial of Pharaoh Djoser by his vizier; architect and later known as the God of Medicine, Imhotep. Pyramids were built for religious purposes and the Egyptian civilization were one of the first to believe in an afterlife....

Insurance Regarding the Existence of an Individual’s Afterlife

Under the rational choice model, decisions individuals make are based on perfect information. This implies that people do not undergo any risks or uncertainties when making a choice. However, religious choices of individuals cannot be based on perfect information, for there are no verified sources...

Johann Christoph Blumhardt and Christology

Johann Christoph Blumhardt (1805-1880) was a Lutheran pastor in Württemberg. He was known among the Lutheran Pietists who built the relation between Southwest Germany [then] with the Basel University of Switzerland mission Society. Certain authors consider this relationship as fostering the trans-Atlantic faith healing movement....

• Christology
• Martin Luther King

Finding What Is The Biblical Purpose Of Govenrment

One day a man was walking down the streets of his city, headed to the capitol, and then he saw a car wreck right in front of him. His first instinct is to go help, so he rushes over and sees the scene. Now with...

• Role of Government

The Creation Myth And Human Evolution: The Everlasting Debate

Every generation of people, young and old as well, come to ask questions about the origin of the universe: Where did it come from? When did it start? or How did it come into existence? Scientists, philosophers or religious believers have all tried to explain...

• Creation Myth
• Human Evolution

Considering Religious Beliefs And Freedom Of Expression

Whether you believe in something or not, the idea of religion has probably crossed your mind. Some people see it as a way to make sense of the world around us and some see it as way of life. the idea that a higher power,...

The Foundational Beliefs Of The Biblical Worldview

To build a biblical framework, or foundational beliefs about God, His character, His world, and His plan one must go to Scripture, for these are His words. Here answers are found to life’s questions; why are we here, good and evil, our purpose, and where...

The Truths About Real Life In The Biblical Worldview

Introduction Every person has a worldview that is either biblical or secular (humanistic). A person’s worldview is the lens through which they view the world. It dictates the decisions they make, the way they treat themselves and others, and their ideas of life after death....

The Perception Of The World In The Christian Worldview

A worldview, this is easy to say its self-explanatory, but it’s much more than that. A worldview can be defined as, “a particular philosophy of life or conception of the world” (Google Dictionary). Another idea is, how a Christian worldview is defined. A Christian Worldview...

The Correlation Between Christian Worldview And Criminal Justice System

Abstract This criminal justice research paper will discuss how people in law enforcement have demonstrated and or expressed their integration of Christen Worldviews into the field of criminal justice. It will show how their Christian beliefs are the driving force behind their ethical and moral...

The Age Of The Earth: Creation Vs. Evolution

There are four great questions of life that everyone asks. The questions are; Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? And where am I going when I die? These questions are answered completely different depending on if you are an...

The Impact Of Religion On Defining What Is Value Of Life

What might most people on this earth value? You guessed it right, it’s Life! Life brings a lot of meaning and purpose that is I feel is an ideal answer to the society and lets just face it, what could someone value other than life?...

• Meaning of Life

Exploration Of Buddhism And Hinduism: Similarities And Differences

Nearly, all people chose at least one religion which is suitable for their thoughts and believes. Due to that fact, people of the same religion come together usually. For instance, there are islamic countries in one community which is called Muslim countries or Ummah. Moreover,...

Buddhism And Hinduism: The Similarities And Differences Of Views

There are three ways to achieve moksha which is when a person’s atman (individual soul) is released from the eternal cycle of reincarnation. Reincarnation is a core idea of Hinduism as according to Upanishad (the third and final Vedic scripture) literature the atman would go...

The Similarities And Differences Between Worldviews Of Hinduism And Buddhism

I will start with the greeting of each religion since it gives a good first impression about you if you greet them in their own way. “Namaste” is the common greeting or salutation in Hinduism, it is usually said with body gestures where they bend...

A Biblical Worldview: The Values Of A Devoted Christian

There comes a point in everyone's life that they must start making decisions on their own, it is at this point they choose what lenses they will use to drive their decisions. For Christians that lense is the Bible and the Holy Spirit is the...

Christian Worldview: Faith And Forgiveness As A Basis

Throughout history, different point of views arose and changed the way people looked at the past of the world. One specific viewpoint is the Christian’s worldview. Christians sin just like everyone else and they recognize that, just like how they recognize the faith of God....

The Biblical Worldview On The Human Trafficking

Choices to commit a crime, fight against crime, or generate justice for criminal acts are all motivated by our worldview. Incorporating a Christian worldview into the Criminal Justice approach allows you to view behavior and response through the lens of God's expectations. This perspective creates...

• Human Trafficking

The Christian Worldview: Philosophy And Values

Today's culture has multiple worldviews. Many individuals prefer to select various religions views but mostly keep to one central worldview. A worldview is the gathering of values that form our everyday work and define our overall vision of existence. Looking seriously at my beliefs, my...

The Effect Of Prophet Muhammad On The Quick Spread Of Islam

This paper will deeply investigate the following interesting question on Islam and it’s spread. What effect did the spread of Islam by Prophet Muhammad in Mecca have on the already religious Saudi Arabian society? In order to compose this paper with reliable facts, mostly primary...

Understanding the Power of a Biblical Worldview in Psychology

A biblical worldview is a transformative lens through which we view the world, based on the teachings of the Bible. It impacts our perspectives on various situations, facts, and aspects of life. This worldview has profound implications for psychology, influencing even the smallest details, such...

Best topics on Religion

1. Why Is Freedom of Religion Important

2. Who is God in Your Life: Personal Beliefs and Spiritual Connections

3. Should Religion Be Taught in Schools

4. How Does Religion Affect Your Life

5. How Are Religion and Culture Connected in Various Ways

6. Buddhism and Hinduism: Exploring Similarities and Differences

7. Death is a Passage Beyond Life

8. Why Should We Respect Our Parents: Exploring Islamic Arguments

9. Respect Your Parents and Take Care of Your Children: Ephesians 6:1-9

10. The Importance of Respect and Obedience to Our Parents in Islam

11. Respect for Life: the Issue of Death Penalty in Catholic Teachings

12. What Does Respect Mean to You: Christian Explanation

13. Implementing the Four Noble Truths in Everyday Life

14. Euthanasia and the Catholic Church in Australia

15. Islamic Traditions and Practices: A Focus on Asian Muslims

• Seven Deadly Sins

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Three Essays on Religion

John Stuart Mill, Three Essays on Religion , Louis J. Matz (ed.), Broadview Press, 2009, 302pp., $18.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781551117683.

Reviewed by Julie C. Van Camp, California State University

This splendid volume brings together three intriguing essays on religion by John Stuart Mill, “Nature”, “Utility of Religion”, and “Theism”. First published by his stepdaughter Helen Taylor in 1874, the year after his death, they will be as surprising to many readers as they reportedly were to his contemporaries. His earlier works had led many to conclude that he was dismissive of religion, while the essays here confound those presumptions.

The three essays have been available in print for many years in other editions. The special value of this collection for both scholarship and teaching comes from the extensive supplementary material so helpful in carefully interpreting the essays today. This material includes sixteen earlier statements by Mill in other writings, both published essays and letters. Excerpts from three contemporary reviews of the three essays sharpen the issues. The volume also includes excerpts from Jeremy Bentham and Mill’s father, James Mill, who apparently exerted early influence on Mill on these matters. There are also excerpts from Charles Darwin and T. H. Huxley that address related issues in religion and science.

A detailed bibliography with suggestions for further reading enhances the volume, as does the chronology of Mill’s life, and numerous portraits of Mill, his wife Harriet Taylor, and other influential persons in his life. Although, regrettably, it has no index, this is an unusually comprehensive, worthwhile, and usable volume.

The volume’s editor, Louis J. Matz, argues convincingly in his invaluable introduction that the posthumous essays are at least consistent with views in Mill’s published and unpublished writings. The best known of those views is Mill’s observation that he did not need theistic beliefs, since he was brought up imbued with the importance of morality.

Matz also hints at a variety of motivations for Mill to keep quiet about his religious views during his lifetime. As a member of Parliament, he did not want people to be able to use his religious views, regardless of what they were, against him in his bid for election (p. 36). Private correspondence hints that Mill was also concerned that an appearance of sympathy for religion might interfere with his public reputation as a reformer based on moral principles independent of religion. Mill’s apparent conflicts between his public profile and private morality anticipates dilemmas of progressive politicians today. It is inconceivable that a politician who is openly atheist or even agnostic could get elected to high public office, at least in the U.S., but excessive commitment to a rigid theology can be equally damning in some quarters.

Mill lived in an era when rapidly developing scientific explanations for natural phenomena were increasingly challenging traditional religious explanations. Matz suspects Mill judged that religion might still be useful for promoting morality, even if the intellectual underpinnings of theism were increasingly implausible, a dilemma shared in heightened relief today, given the advancement of scientific explanation.

In the essay “Nature”, Mill meticulously presents detailed arguments against Natural Law as the basis for ethics. He concludes that either of the two main senses of “nature” (“the entire system of things” or “things as they would be, apart from human intervention”) result in models for action that are “irrational and immoral” (p. 103). He distinguishes religion in the traditional supernatural sense of theism from what he calls a Religion of Humanity (p. 130). The latter idealizes goods in this world, specifically, the promotion of happiness for all beings, consistently with his utilitarianism and also with what we might today call secular humanism.

In the second essay, “Utility of Religion”, Mill acknowledges one advantage of supernatural religion over his proposed Religion of Humanity, namely, the hope of “a life after death” (p. 135). Nevertheless Mill is suspicious of “legislators and moralists” exploiting this quest for an afterlife to coerce people to do certain things in this life. He hopes that as the quality of life in the here and now improves, this dream of an afterlife will become less important. As the editor points out, a contemporary critic of this essay anticipates William James’ “Will to Believe” (p. 46), arguing that religious experience can open up “new realities”, much as Mill’s ideas of personal love can open up such realities.

In “Theism”, Mill considers a range of arguments for the existence of God, using a methodology consistent with his lifelong insistence on evidence. He believes it to be “indispensable” that

religion should from time to time be reviewed as a strictly scientific question, and that its evidences should be tested by the same scientific methods, and on the same principles as those of any of the speculative conclusions drawn by physical science (p. 141).

Given that evidentiary emphasis, he concludes that monotheism is superior to polytheism, as the latter cannot be reconciled to any theory of governance of the universe, although this alone hardly proves the truth of monotheism (p. 143).

Mill acknowledges that he cannot disprove the existence of a sovereign will, and proceeds to examine a variety of arguments, both a priori and a posteriori , for such an existence. The argument for a first cause, he concludes, would be of no value for the proof of theism (p. 154). He then considers the argument “from the general consent of mankind”, viz ., that as all persons have recognized some form of god, there must be a god. Mill argues that the diverse conceptions of such a god and the universal need to address unknowns in life account for this universality, not necessarily the existence of any actual god. He also rejects arguments from consciousness and pure reason, appealing to Kant’s distinctions between speculative reason and a corresponding reality outside the mind (pp. 158-161).

Mill finds the argument from design far more significant, in part because it lends itself to testing by the scientific method he holds paramount (p. 161). Surprisingly perhaps, given his rejection of so many other claimed proofs of the existence of god, he admits that “the adaptations in Nature afford a large balance of probability in favour of creation of intelligence” (p. 166). Lest any contemporary proponents of Intelligent Design rush to cite Mill for support, however, note that he qualifies this conclusion by pointing to the limits of “the present state of our knowledge”. In other words, although he was familiar with Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859), Mill acknowledged that, in the mid-nineteenth century, we did not yet know enough about the natural world to account for all the then-current conditions of the species. Concluding that he could not rule out the argument from design is a far cry from concluding that it proved the existence of a deity. Further, his critics at the time thought he had not sufficiently understood the power of Darwin’s work (p. 49).

Even granting the possibility of an Intelligent Designer, Mill wonders what sort of god that would be. He questions why human beings were not designed “to last longer, and not to get so easily and frequently out of order” (p. 170). Here he anticipates recent challenges to the contemporary intelligent design movement. If god is omnipotent, could he not have come up with a better design for our aching backs and fragile knees? Mill also notes that there is no evidence in the world we inhabit of divine benevolence or divine justice (p. 177).

In this final essay, he again considers the promise of an afterlife (p. 179ff). Mill concludes that there is no way to prove or disprove its existence, but he concedes that it might be of comfort to many people. He also dismisses claims that revelation received by persons proves anything about the existence of god or anything else.

Free Religion Essay Examples

1596 samples of this type

Wondering how to write a paper on religion? Don’t know how to approach this controversial and debatable topic? We are here to help you! Here you’ll find religion essay topics, useful writing prompts, and a list of religion essay examples at the end of the article!

Religion Essay: What Is It about?

A religion essay is a paper that explores beliefs and traditions as well as their influence on cultures and nations. In a religion essay, you can also analyze the parallels and differences between various religious branches.

Religion studies are connected to philosophy and social science. That is why essays on the topic are often written in these disciplines.

Below are three primary approaches to compose the essay. You need to choose the one that stays in line with your assignment.

• Religion argumentative essay
• Religion persuasive essay
• Religion comparative essay

Make sure you state in your religion essay introduction that all religions are equal and have the right to exist. Now we may explore these types of papers in depth. Choose the one that applies to your task and write an excellent article with our tips!

Argumentative Essay on Religion

An argumentative essay on religion explores faith and its aspects. You prove right or claim wrong a specific concept you work on. You can discover the approaches of different schools of thought to some ideas. This is a reflection on questions that can be raised but cannot be answered.

These are the possible essays:

• Science and religion essay is on the relationship and contradictions between the two fields. Are they contested? Does creationism exclude evolution? At what point does religion become science and the other way round? Here you may explore the treatment of science among different religions. Compare traditions of the state where the research is approved and where it is not. There is a theory on atheism as a religion as well. Describe scientists’ views on this topic.
• Religion and morality essay is part of the debate on ethics and moral development. What is the difference between religion and morality? What is their connection to each other? What does a dignified life mean? You can argue on what is good and what is evil. Explain the roots of moral values. How have they developed out of religious traditions?
• Religion and politics essay puts questions on the role of religion in politics. Do these institutes have to be separated? How do religious states function? How has the bond of faith and state changed? Study the role religion played in various historical periods. You may try to defend the times when religion was the cause of wars. Or analyze the way religion has influenced the government’s programs.

Persuasive Essay on Religion

Religion persuasive essay sets a goal to reshape one’s mind on faith. There is no need to write about a wide-ranging concept or analyze a concrete notion. You aim to make others consider or even adopt the beliefs you promote. To achieve that, do not force your values, but use logic and strong arguments. Note pros and cons, so the reader knows your position from both sides.

The topics can be:

• Same-sex marriage persuasive essay on religion. It has to prove the need to legalize or prohibit this relationship. You are to give evidence about the benefits or drawbacks of such a law. Refer to the religious tradition of your culture and state. Explain the way morals change if you implement your beliefs.
• Persuasive essay: should religion be taught? In this paper, you need to define if there has to be a religious class or not. Do we have to explain to children world religions? American society is multicultural. So it is best to know more about the existing beliefs. Or are you sure that religion belongs to the past? Is there a place for it in the modern world?
• Freedom of religion essay is about one’s right to practice a religion or not. The first amendment to the US Constitution protects this right. Still, not everyone agrees with it. They believe religious unity is crucial to a society. You may try to adopt this point of view to prove these claims right or wrong.

Compare & Contrast Essay on Religion

Comparative essay on religion contrasts beliefs and traditions. What kind of relationships are among these faiths? What is their influence on each other? The goal is to define the similarities and contradictions. It is better to choose a concrete notion or practice. Then describe two or three religious scholars’ ideas on this topic. You may speculate on the future cooperation of this and that faith.

The titles are as follows:

• Compare and contrast: Buddhism and Christianity essay. Study the principle ideas and morals of these beliefs. Here you can describe the contacts of the Catholic Church with the Dalai Lama. Consider writing about Christ and Buddha’s teachings on the afterlife. What are their parallels? Do they have the same concept of the divine or not?
• Compare and contrast: Christianity and Islam essay. This paper can take as a topic the common roots of these faiths. How have they changed, and why are they so distinct? What are their principal similarities? Discuss the reasons for religious persecutions of the Middle Ages. You may explore Islam’s remains in the Iberian Peninsula.
• Compare and contrast: Hinduism and Buddhism essay. You may confuse these religions with one another, but they should not be mixed. They have many similar principles, but there are some distinctions as well. Compare Hinduism and Buddhism cosmology. How do these religions define karma and dharma? How do they represent gods and spirits?

How to Write an Essay about Religion?

These are some pieces of advice we recommend you to follow:

• Study your tutor’s instructions and ask him if something is unclear
• Think about an argumentative title
• Prepare a detailed outline
• Give a thesis in the introduction
• Make your arguments solid and valid
• Prove your evidence with reliable sources
• Do not make new points in the conclusion
• Place the best arguments at the beginning and at the end of a body part
• Reread the final essay and correct any incoherence
• Check the spelling and grammar mistakes

Hope our article is useful to you, and you will get an A+ essay. We also prepared some high-quality religion essay examples. Make sure to check them out!

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Womanist and Feminist on Holy Spirit

The Holy Spirit refers to God’s activity within followers. That is, if the Incarnation of God the Son in Jesus Christ can be spoken of as objective, then our appropriation of it is subjective. While God on the one hand does something for us, on the other hand, He does...

An Introduction to Christian Values and Decision-Making in Health Care

Introduction In terms of spirituality, human nature is a vast, complex, largely unknown world. The inner world of a person is shaky, as it is vulnerable to the influence of other people and circumstances. At the same time, it can become a support in difficult times and lead a person...

Jesus and Confucius Comparison

Christianity and Confucianism are well-known systems of belief, based on the number of adherents and their significance. There are three more than 2 billion Christians today, whereas there are approximately 7 million Confucianists only. While Christianity is expected to remain the world’s largest religion in the nearest 50 years, competing...

Richard Taylor’s Argument for God’s Existence

Introduction Richard Taylor’s cosmological argument for God’s existence is commonly listed among the most convincing justifications of the creationist outlook on the essence/origins of the surrounding physical reality. One of the reasons for this is that the argument’s initial assessment will reveal it being thoroughly exhaustive, in the logical sense...

Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament

Introduction A comparative study of the ancient Near Eastern cultures reveals that most of the traditions that the Israelites adhered to were similar to those of their neighbors. John Walton’s book is dedicated to an in-depth analysis of some of the important traditions, rituals, and beliefs that were held by...

The Difference between the Qur’an and Other Religious Texts

The Qur’an is a central divine book of Islam, written in the sacred language – Arabic. Many scholars believe that the message written within the passages of the Qur’an cannot be imitated since the Book is unique and contains universal knowledge. However, despite the initial beliefs, the Book can be...

Phenomenology Approach in Studying Religion

Introduction Many disciplines have attempted to define the field of religion to give it a substantive and universal grounding. However, some of these definitions have been found to be compartmentalized and narrow. The different methods used to define religion include phenomenology, comparative religion, historical approach, sociology of religion, and philosophy...

• Discrimination

The Biblical Creation Story

The Biblical account of the creation story portrays God as the creator of all matter who exists beyond time. The Christian understanding of the creation is that God as the master architect whose power is unfathomable. The Middle Eastern texts, however, propose the versions of the creation which appeal to...

Comparison of Utilitarianism and Christian Ethics

Introduction Human beings encounter diverse challenges and obstacles that could affect their goals and force them to change their philosophies of life. Metaethics has emerged as a powerful field that presents evidence-based concepts for examining moral issues and addressing them from an informed perspective. Depending on the existing situation and...

Message of the Prophets: Background and Interpretation

Introduction The Bible described many situations when people got to know God’s words from other people among them. Being chosen individually, prophets were expected to pass God’s message to others. These messages were aimed to communicate God’s will, while the predictions in them happened to be inevitable. Background and Interpretation...

Critical Introduction to the Book of Matthew

Introduction The book of Matthew is the first in the New Testament and was written by Saint Matthew, the evangelist. The book primarily discusses the accounts of the life and death of Jesus Christ. The gospel was initially written in Greek sometimes after 69 CE and depended on the earlier...

Symbols and Rituals in Religion

Introduction The word symbol is derived from a Greek word which is related to the word compare whereas rituals can be defined as actions which have a deeper implication than what we perceive at first instant. Rituals can be as simple as a blinking of an eye or as complex...

Christianity in Rome During the 1st to 5th Centuries

Introduction One of the most astounding developments in world history was that within five centuries after its inception, Christianity had won adherents throughout the Roman Empire, including the backing of the Roman state. Christianity started as an apparently unknown sect of Judaism. It survived persecution to become an important part...

“On the Soul and the Resurrection: St. Gregory of Nyssa” by Roth

Doctrine of Resurrection The text that is summarized is part of the book On the Soul and the Resurrection: St. Gregory of Nyssa by Roth (1993). The story is about the doctrine of St. Gregory of Nyssa, who considers human resurrection as one of the main divine gifts that allow...

Cross-Cultural Evangelism Strategies

Cross-cultural evangelism is the sharing of the gospel with people from other cultures. It involves getting to know people from other cultures, learning about their customs and beliefs, and then sharing the gospel with them in a culturally relevant way. An example of cross-cultural evangelism would be a missionary who...

The First Three Kings of Israel in the Bible

Introduction The history of the establishment of monarchy and the reign of the first Israeli kings is described in the books of Samuel and the books of Kings. The first king, Saul, was appointed due to the fact that people turned away from God’s will; even though his successor, David,...

Effective Leadership: The Biblical Perspective

Effective leadership from a biblical perspective is a God manifested character to influence and serve others through Christ’s interests to accomplish God’s purposes. In a Christian community, leaders should be guided by the Holy Spirit to collaborate and adopt good attributes to execute their duties without fear. Jesus demonstrated effective...

• Civilization
• Ancient Civilizations

Eternal Life in John’s Gospel: Theological Perspective

Every human, at least once in their life, thought about receiving the gift of eternal life. Such a desire is quite reasonable because any person is afraid of the unknown; they have no idea about what will happen when they die. This is a part of human nature; being scared...

Biblical Allusions in Of Plymouth Plantation

The Puritans have played an enormous role in American literature, and their ideas still influence moral judgment and some religious beliefs in the United States. Puritan writing has been used to glorify God and to relate God more directly to people’s world. Puritan literature was straightforward and focused on teaching...

Al-Ghazali’s Sufism in Contrast to Classical Sufism

Introduction Sufism has often been cited as a representation of Islamic faith and practice. Through it, knowledge and divine love’s truth is sought in God and Godly life. Sufism operates on the concept of mystical paths. The path is focused on enhancing the existence of wisdom knowledge and divine love...

Origin of the Universe and Life on the Earth

Introduction There exist diverse theories of the origin of the universe and life. This has been argued through scientific theory, creation theory, and myths theory. With these theories, people have different ideologies and views in accordance with what one believes in. This paper summarizes beliefs about the origin of the...

Christianity: History, Traditions, and Cultural Practices

Introduction Cultural diversity in society is an unavoidable and unique phenomenon that is central to human development. Unfortunately, several multicultural issues arise when individuals from different backgrounds interact because many people strongly hold onto their beliefs. Thus, it is critical to understand the backgrounds, history, and practices of different cultures...

The Image of Christ in Mark’s Gospel

The Gospel The Gospel is an irrefutable witness to the divine humanity of Christ. As a God-inspired book, however, it was written by living people, each describing events as he saw and perceived them or as he heard about them from eyewitnesses. The inspiration of the sacred books refers to...

Decline of Christianity in Europe

Christianity is the largest religion in the world, with more than two billion adherents. Christian faith includes numerous branches, the most popular of which are the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and Protestantism. Even though all the branches are diverse in terms of canons and rituals, all of them...

Religion in Candide: Theme Analysis

Introduction Candide is a satirical novella where the author employs satire as a weapon to unearth the corruption, hypocrisy, prejudices, and immorality that was prevalent in the organized Catholic Church. The strong criticism that Voltaire showers on the organized religion all throughout the entire story are to be understood in...

Abortion in Hanafi and Maliki Schools of Islamic Thought

Introduction It is a well-known fact that the Quran outlines the ethical and practical principles that were designed to be followed in 7th-century Arabia. At the same time, Islam as a global religion aims to translate a universally applicable worldview that, at least theoretically, should work in every situation and...

St. Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians

Historical Background of the text of 1 Corinthians The First Epistle to the Corinthians, or 1 Corinthians was written in Greek by St. Paul of Tarsus to the fledgling Christian Community of Corinth. In the Bible, It is the seventh book of the New Testament and the second of the...

• Ancient History
• Architecture
• Women's Rights

Bhagavad-Gita: The Consequences and Proofs of Alterations on the Hindu Society

Although Bhagavad-Gita has always acquired the titles such as “The divine Song of God” or “The word of God” etc, but still a common man cannot visualize the changes and the influences of such changes which has been occurred and preached since the origin of Gita throughout the decades. History...

Cherubim Angels: Attributes and Meaning

Introduction It is common knowledge that angelic beings play a significant role in mythology and religion across the world. They are particularly renowned in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) as the creatures who serve God and execute His will. However, researchers note that there is a tradition of...

Atheism and Its Religious Analysis

Introduction Atheism entails the belief that there are no deities or supreme beings. It is the opposite of theism which is the belief in the existence of at least one Supreme Being or deity. In simple terms, it can be said to be the belief that there is no God...

Is Jesus God? Critical Evaluation, Arguments for and Against

Introduction Diverse religious opinions arise whenever individuals hold different views about a certain spiritual issue. Most people respect the opinion of others about a certain topic. People appreciate that rational individuals can in differ in opinion. However, these sensible and tolerant attitudes lead to the formulation of two distinct lines...

Poverty from Christian Perspective

Introduction The gospel claims “The poor you will always have with you” in Mark 14:7. Christian circles have varying responses to poverty based on one’s decision to focus on the physical, emotional, spiritual, and economic aspects connected to being poor. Christianity emphasizes being rich in spirit. I believe one’s perception...

Global Challenges of The Muslims in the Modern Society

The presented research outlined and examined some of the issues facing Muslims in modern society, taking into account knowledge acquisition and global Muslim representation as the core aims in the study. One of the significant problems identified in the research faced by Muslims was the mass media misrepresentation and Western...

“The New Christian Counselor: A Fresh Biblical and Transformational Approach”

Introduction In their book The New Christian Counselor: A Fresh Biblical and Transformational Approach, Hawkins and Clinton seek to explain counseling from a Christian perspective. They consider what it means to be a new Christian counselor. Additionally, the book makes a distinction between old Christian counselors and new ones. In...

A Gift of Speaking in Tongues

Introduction The gift of tongues was divinely bestowed upon believers by God, making them able to speak in a human language that was not learned by the one speaking it. When believers use the gift of speaking in tongues, they are instructed to speak one at a time, and only...

Medical Indications vs. Christian Faith: The James’s Case

Medical Indications Beneficence and Nonmaleficence James experienced high blood pressure, fluid buildup, and glomerulonephritis due to a streptococcus infection. Beneficence: immediate dialysis would alleviate the patient’s high blood pressure and fluid buildup. The delay in dialysis due to the patient’s parents’ preferences resulted in complete kidney failure. James needs of...

Analysis of “Surah al-Ikhlas” in Qur’an

This paper targets to analyze Surah 112 of the Qur’an, which consists of 4 verses. It is relatively short, yet considered to be one of the most significant. It goes under the name “Surah al-Ikhlas,” which in translation from Arabic means “The Purification” or “The Unity”. It contains many fundamental...

• Colonialism
• Nationalism
• Biomedicine

Importance of Speaking in Tongues in Christianity

Introduction Speaking in tongues is a term that is common especially when referring to the Pentecostal churches. It is a supernatural language that is believed to be imparted to Christian believers when they have been baptized in the Holy Spirit. The issue of speaking in tongues has raised a lot...

Faith, Doubt, and Religious Vision in the ‘Uphill’ Poem

Introduction According to Christina Rossetti’s poem titled “uphill”, it is evident that she doubts if one time the faithfulness will have everlasting rest. Her way of thought in the first stanza shows the readers an indication of hope for the faithful, but a tough and long journey. In the end,...

Marks of Christian Maturity

Introduction One of the major features of the Christian faith is the teaching that the believer must never stop growing in knowledge, wisdom and character. This development can be summed up in one word – maturity. Therefore the goal of every true believer is to be mature, like Jesus Christ....

The Indwelling of the Holy Spirit

Introduction Holly Spirit is part of what the Bible calls the Holy trinity. It comprises of the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ the Son of God and God himself. The Bible says that the Holly trinity is one but they act in different forms because of the different activities they perform....

Theology: Virgin Mary as a Goddess

Goddesses have always been part of various pantheons during the various stages of human history. Their role is inseparable from the role of women in ancient, medieval, and modern societies, as religion was used as a blueprint for morality, proper behavior, and the establishment of societal and gender roles. Ancient...

Christianity as a Contemporary World Religion

Introduction Christianity remains one of the contemporary religions in the world today. Religion emerged during the first few decades of the Roman Empire. This was after several religious leaders began to get rid of various rituals and practices that characterized the Jewish way of worship. This means that the religion...

The Meaning of Human Existence

Meaning of Spirituality Spirituality refers to the sense of connection to a higher being or purpose that goes beyond normal human understanding. In that regard, it is the connection that humans have to the divine. Spirituality can also be defined as the connection humans have to concepts that are hard...

The Kingdom of God in Christianity

The Kingdom of God portrays the rightful society ruled by God, where each member dedicates to their moral and spiritual development, and the principle of righteousness and virtue is dominant. According to Christian beliefs, people fell from God’s grace thousands of years ago, being seduced to disobey His orders, after...

Jesus’s Teaching Methods and Messages

Introduction Jesus Christ is the most prominent figure in Christianity. The New Testament fully portrays his life, actions, teachings, and the legacy that remained. The teachings, specifically, have become a pillar of religious studies and illustrate the moral and ethical values Christians have nowadays in regard to having a righteous...

Islamic Culture, Politics and Religion

In the Arab world, the word ‘Islam’ means submission and peace. As a term, it refers to the messages revealed to Muhammad by Allah. Cultural practices and beliefs associated with the people who practice this religion give rise to Islamic culture. In the recent past, the religion has spread into...

• Communication
• Native American
• Social Work
• Women’s Role

“Psychology, Theology, and Spirituality in Christian Counseling” Book by McMinn

Summary Psychology, Theology, and Spirituality in Christian Counseling by Mark McMinn is a book that reflects the professional experience and the wisdom of the author as both a teacher and practitioner. Combining the Scripture with the context within which counseling takes place in a rather complicated assignment that requires a...

Reflection on the Book of Psalms

Introduction The Bible does not provide all the religious answers that believers may have; only the passages and translations open to interpretation. God’s figure is mysterious, fearsome, and impossible to fully understand; thus, some readers can feel confused or intimidated. However, the Bible touches on the Lord’s nature and provides...

Religion and Community: The Impact of Religion on Social Life

Introduction According to Kurtz (6), globalization of social life refers to the innumerable ways through which our global society has been integrated into one small village in the sense that anything that happens in one part of the world could potentially have a large effect or influence on other parts...

Mecca and Meccan Society Before Islam

Introduction Mecca has been a significant social, economic, and political hub in the Middle East since the ancient period. Before the rise of Islam, Mecca mainly served as a commercial and religious center in the Middle East. Mecca was strategically located along major trade routes that linked the Middles East,...

Ministry of the Prophets, Bible Prophets and Their Prophecies

Prophetic ministry at its core is the act of leading and guiding the church based on revelations from God and gift of the prophesy. The Scriptures present multiple examples of prophetic ministry. The Old Testament has a significant number of prophets. There are the central ones who directly communicated with...

The Crucifixion of Jesus in Old and New Testament

The Old Testament includes a range of themes and concepts later referenced and reinterpreted in the New Testament. For example, Luke’s descriptions of Jesus’ death are thoroughly connected to Zechariah’s prophecy presented in the Old Testament. Chapter 23 of the Gospel of Luke highlights the fulfillment of predictions about the...

Old Testament Lessons for National Security Council

Abstract The purpose of the paper is to offer a set of applicable recommendations regarding the National Security Council (NSC) membership and operations based on the examination of the Old Testament kings’ advisors. The Scripture offers a number of invaluable lessons related to political leadership and a ruler’s need for...

Exegesis of Job 23: 1-17, The Book of Job

Introduction The Book of Job can be considered as one of the most philosophical works of the Old Testament. The uniqueness of the Book of Job is in its “depth and thoroughness in dealing with the relationship of human suffering to divine justice” (Gaebelein, 1979-1992, 843). The commonly accepted notion...

Science and Religion: Historical Relationship

Introduction The historical relation between science and religion is long and has not been that cozy throughout history. The main area of contention is the view that both hold on the world whereby, as science tends to base all its explanations through empirical observations, religion on the other hand makes...

Theological Reasoning as a Basis for Faith

Theological reasoning strives to pose questions and answer them in terms of sacred theology. Such issues as meaning, essences, causes, distinctions, and so on compose the core of reason. For instance, questions about what grace is and what God reveals by it can be posed. This teaches how to consider...

• Human Nature
• International Relations

Making Friends With People of Different Religions

Being educated and respectful of other religions Education of other religions is undoubtedly one of the most crucial parts of a dialogue with a representative of a different faith. Ignorance in such a matter might lead to misunderstanding and unwanted conflict. Besides, respecting other beliefs should prove to be very...

Obedience in Faith in the Story of Abraham

Among the examples of steadiness and firmness in faith, few parts of the Holy Scripture are as impactful in this respect as the story of Abraham. The hardship he endured and the challenges he faced were colossal by any standard, yet his stalwart faith in God never wavered even in...

“Christian Theology” by Millard J. Erickson

In the chapters of his book, Erikson critically examines the nature of Jesus Christ through a discussion of the most prominent theological trends and opinions. At the center of the analysis is the recognition of the historical significance of Jesus as a teacher and a man who managed, nevertheless, to...

Hinduism Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Comparison

Introduction Religion is an integral part of the modern world. First, religious institutes carry out spiritual registration of believers which is shown in the human-God communication. Secondly, the religious organizations are engaged in religious and special secular education, charity, and philanthropy. Thirdly, representatives of religious institutes actively participate in public...

The Problem of Evil and Suffering

The nature of evil No matter what an optimist a person may be, the surrounding reality is not always the merriest place for living. No matter what religious beliefs an individual has, everyone during his life bears the burden of suffering and faces evil. It is useless to deny the...

Pastoral Ministry’s Goals Accomplishment

Introduction The work of a pastor, a shepherd for people in both trying and peaceful times, is noble but difficult. Some describe it as the highest of callings in life, while others add that it is very taxing (Tan, 2019). To provide for people in a God-honoring way, one must...

Critical Evaluation of Talal Asad’s Critique of Geertz’s Model

Introduction Religion is an integral part of the life of society, performing a number of important functions, one of which is cultural. Despite the fact that this area is ancient, there are still disputes among researchers about the significance of this institution for the individual and the state. Clifford Geertz...

Psychology and Theology: Worldview Issues, and Models of Integration

Psychology and theology are often viewed as two opposing forces with no common ground and the proponents of which deny the merits of each other’s disciplines. Nevertheless, the two fields of studies have a long-standing history, although the relationship between the two can be described as problematic. Many people who...

How I Apply the Principles from Anderson’s Gracism

Humility is at the heart of Christianity, and every person who has faith must strive to adhere to this virtue. Being humble means valuing diversity in all of its manifestations, and to do it, one can rely on the principles outlined by David A. Anderson in his book Gracism. The...

Leadership Development Plan Based on the Bible Principles

Introduction Leadership advancement is the practice of cultivating governance abilities and proficiencies through various undertakings. During the process, individuals are taught vital management competencies that enable them to lead, encourage and direct their teams to success properly. Training is essential to cultivate a culture of headship throughout an establishment appropriately....

• Social Justice
• African American
• Martin Luther King
• Moral Values

Christian Worldview: Ultimate Reality

Introduction Ultimate reality is an existing actuality that surpasses the physical and non-physical dimensions of the world. It is absolute power, a central connecting point, and the source of everything that prevails in the universe. In the Christian denomination, this phrase refers to a transcendent presence, a supreme being, or...

A Belief in Helping Strangers

The collision of the two vehicles startled me. I swerved to the side of the road to ensure that I did not become a victim. My husband jumped out of the car before it had even stopped and rushed towards one of the cars that had been involved in the...

“In His Steps” by Charles Sheldon

Since its publication in 1896, “In His Steps” by Charles Sheldon became widely popular in Christian circles. Part of the success of this religious fiction novel lies in its focus on timeless concepts of love and compassion and the responsibility we share to care for those in need. In his...

“The Young Atheist’s Handbook” by Alom Shaha

Introduction The Young Atheist’s Handbook is an exciting story of one man who decided to stop following the religious path that was dictated by society. The book is a deeply personal account of the author’s journey from religious to non-religious, which includes life experiences and thoughts that question the very...

Christian Doctrines of Humanity

The Christian doctrine of humanity teaches that a human was created in the image of God. The monistic view is that all humans are a unit of body and soul. There are three substances created by God according to the doctrine, which is the human body, mind, and soul. Monist...

Sermon on the Mount, Buddha’s Sermon at Benares, and Buddha’s Sermon on Abuse

Both Buddha and Christianity figures can be analyzed to determine their assertions compared to Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean. Ethics has been encouraged by many religions and philosophers to enable people to interact with ease. For example, Christians focus on the experiences of Jesus, where he taught his followers the...

Orientalism, Prejudice, and Discrimination

The people living in Middle East in countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE etc are known as Arabs. The word is somewhat ethnic in nature. As far as Muslims are concerned, Muslims are the people who submit their will to ALLAH (God) and they are the followers of the religion Islam....

The Tale of Kieu: The Value of Confucianism

Introduction The Tale of Kieu by Nguyen Du is one of the most prominent Vietnamese poems, depicting the life of a woman who had to save her family by sacrificing her own life. This poem presents the social and political challenges of the 18th century, when two dynasties, Nguyen and...

Christian Life in the “Everyman” Moral Play

Everyman represents all humanity and critical issues related to all the people, including Fellowship, Material Goods, and Knowledge. In the play, Everyman strives to answer an eternal question of what a person should do to achieve Christian salvation (Lester 107). Comparing my own life with time when Goods lays the...

“The Making of a Leader” by Dr. J. Robert Clinton

Abstract The Making of a Leader by Dr. J. Robert Clinton explores the complicated nature of spiritual dynamics. The book provides readers with numerous accounts of leadership stories that are meant to serve as guidance for emerging leaders. In the first chapter of the book, Dr. Clinton describes five main...

• Environment
• Functionalism

Perceiving “The Holy Grail” in Le Morte D’Arthur and Idylls of the King

Introduction In the history of Christianity, symbolism has been a significant aspect of religion, with various objects, animals, and features playing an essential role in symbolizing different things. One of the most common symbols in the Christian faith is the ‘Holy Grail,’ which generally represents the vessel that Jesus and...

The Gospel of John vs. Other Synoptic Gospels

The Gospel of John uniquely differs from the three Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke) in terms of its literary style, setting and time sequence, portrayal of Jesus, dualistic imagery, and theological concepts. A deviation is observed between John’s Gospel and the Synoptic Gospel because John takes readers back to Genesis...

The Life of Moses in the Context of God’s Story

Moses is undoubtedly an iconic figure in the Scriptures, who’s actions under the guidance of God essentially led to the establishment of the Judaic faith which had long-lasting impacts on humanity and Christianity down the line. Best known for leading the Jews out of slavery and oppression in Egypt and...

God’s and Elijah’s Formal and Informal Leadership

Introduction This paper will discuss formal and informal leadership represented by God and Elijah the Prophet, respectively. It will focus on Elijah’s going through illness and hopelessness and God’s assisting him in finding the path to salvation. According to Merida (2015), “We have read of Elijah’s mountaintop experience at Mount...

Christology: Development of Christology

Introduction In no doubt, one will never understand Theology, the idea about God, without mentioning the character of Jesus. Christology then comes in, as among the many branches of Christian theology that purely addresses the mystery behind Jesus Christ: his nature, actions, and person, as it appears in the New...

The Role of Women in Judaism

Judaism is thought to be founded almost 3,000 years ago. This religious idea is based on the Jewish ways of life. A lot of reverence is annotated from the account of Abraham and Moses in the Biblical writings. That is the covenant affiliation between the patriarchs and matriarchs and God...

Is Jesus Both Human and Divine?

Introduction The personality of Jesus Christ is one of the most interesting and a mystical one in Christian thought. The Old and New Testaments contain the evidence about divine nature of Jesus and his life as a human. The biblical facts suggest that Jesus was a man. He was a...

Phenomenological and Experiential Approaches to Religious Education

Introduction Religion is an integral part of most societies. In the history of humanity, religions have influenced major parts of the way of life of most societies. In many societies, passing religious beliefs to the other members of the society is taken as major duty for existence. In accordance with...

Comparison of Native American and African Religions

Pagan religions have more similarities than differences due to their indigenous character and philosophy. Their distinctions are determined by the geographical location and cultural peculiarities of the nation where they developed, but in most cases, the differences are in detail, not in general aspects. Native American and African religions are...

The Bible: Coherent and Unified Nature

Introduction The continuity of a book’s plot, characters, and the environment from the beginning to the finish of the book is a good indicator of how well the work holds together. Considering that a religious text is a work used to form a religious belief, it is vital to apply...

How To Write A Religion Essay: A Comprehensive Guide

You’ve come to the perfect site if you’re unsure how to compose a religious essay. An essay on various religions will demonstrate your knowledge of the topic and your application of your theoretical background to the assignment.

Religion essays are a common choice for discussing a variety of subjects since they combine various concepts into a single argument. Even with little experience in this field, this article’s information can be a reliable guide.

Here, you’ll discover the fundamental format for your essay about religion and the best approaches for handling the subject. Accordingly, reading the tips to write a religious essay should enable you to compose high-quality assignments, increasing your likelihood of academic success.

Compose the Introduction

Make your notes and an outline of the argument before drafting the introduction. In contrast to creative writing, the audience expects the facts up front in a religious essay. Accordingly, it’s advisable for theology learners to read more books and develop their perspectives. However, sometimes it might be beneficial to borrow previously written concepts. This approach makes your paper more engaging and demonstrates your familiarity with the topic. The reader should have a clear understanding of what to anticipate from the essay from the beginning. How can you create an outstanding essay introduction? An ideal introduction should have the following elements:

• Background information
• A statement of purpose
• Thesis statement

The introduction should also highlight a few significant concepts, such as the theme and focus of the paper. Along with the thesis, the introduction ought to provide background details and context for the problem. It should describe the essay’s structure, which you’ll also lay out in the conclusion. The lengthier the task is, the more vital its introduction becomes. Additionally, it would be best to include:

• Focus statement
• A run-down of the chosen information

Even though it could appear tedious, the introduction is an essential component of any paper. Creating an intriguing hook will entice readers to keep reading your essay. Besides, your thesis statement helps you introduce your argument, allowing your audience to recognize your aim for writing a religion essay.

In this section, you should avoid making a general statement since it’s ineffective in gaining the reader’s interest. Instead, explain why this subject is so crucial. This will make your essay’s argument clearer to the audience. Writing a succinct thesis statement that captures the essence of your essay would be best. Your paper’s remaining paragraphs will support your argument.

You can also think about using a few quotations from your study if your argument is compelling. Citations from your sources provide more detail and depth to your idea. Ensure that your point of view is clear and straightforward. Avoid employing terms that seem intellectual or incomprehensible.

Setting the tone for the rest of the essay is the major goal of the introduction. The paper will not be successful if it’s filled with mistakes. The quality of your introduction will impact whether readers decide to read your work further. It would also help to double-check that the mood is appropriate.

Write Your Religion Essay’s Main Body

Introduce the basic tenets and principles of the religion you’re addressing in your paper’s main body. Subsequently, you should investigate the crucial components of the tradition.

What are its core ideals and principles? What role does it play in society? It would help to use textual evidence as you write a religious essay since it’s a powerful approach to grab your audience’s attention. Suppose you want to write a five-paragraph religion paper. If so, compose 3 body paragraphs, each concentrating on a different aspect of religion. Religion’s significant components are:

• A moral code
• Faith in a supernatural being

You should address the claim you made in your introduction throughout the body of your paper. Be sure to include additional evidence related to the primary argument of each paragraph in your assignment’s body. It would help to form a topic sentence that introduces your paragraph’s topic and conclude with a sentence that emphasizes the importance of the argument and connects it to the subsequent section. Ensure the topic sentence supports the essay’s central idea and the concluding sentence summarizes it. Body paragraphs are where you argue your point and back it up with evidence from secondary sources. Avoid including too many irrelevant details as you write a religious essay.

Hire an Expert for Help with Writing an Essay about Religion

Students may occasionally find it challenging to write religion essays. This circumstance makes seeking expert assistance desirable. CustomWritings offers a variety of essay writing services online, including religious academic papers. The essay service could be helpful if you want to collaborate with one of their top writers.

Your professional may provide a sample religion essay, discuss religious concepts and occurrences with you, and offer credible sources to support their arguments. Therefore, the subject matter specialists will go through how to create a unique essay that furthers your academic goals. Visit their website for more information on their cheap religious essay writing.

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Compose the Conclusion for Your Religion Essay

The conclusion of your essay about religion could involve contrasting or comparing various aspects of religion. Therefore, you may employ a comparative approach to establish the commonalities and distinctions between the behaviors and beliefs of many societies throughout history.

A strong conclusion will emphasize the distinctions and summarize the critical themes. It will also allow you to demonstrate to your audience how thoroughly you researched your topic.

The conclusion should provide readers with an understanding of the paper. It must also demonstrate the continued relevance and merit of your raised ideas.

Additionally, it should verify that the claims you make in the essay’s main body are supported by relevant evidence. Your conclusion will highlight the significance of your points and direct readers toward the best course of action in this manner. However, it’s crucial to keep in mind that your conclusion ought to be brief and informative.

In addition, your conclusion should connect the primary arguments of your paper. Ensure that your conclusion shows you’ve succeeded in your aim or offers the audience something to ponder. An excellent conclusion not only ties up any loose ends but also places the argument in its proper perspective.

This section presents your last chance to convince or amaze your reader. It influences your audience’s lasting perception of your essay. Your conclusion should provide your audience with a sense of satisfaction and closure.

As you write a religion paper, ensure you don’t end the discussion abruptly so it doesn’t seem incomplete. Depending on your essay’s length, you may consider composing a few concise sentences that encapsulate the key concepts.

Think of How the Steps to Write a Religion Essay Will Improve Your Work’s Quality

You’ll most likely compose a lot of essays throughout your academic life. Thus, after reading this article, you’ll produce them with greater effectiveness in the future. You don’t have to be an expert at composing a religious essay right away.

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Religion and Science

The relationship between religion and science is the subject of continued debate in philosophy and theology. To what extent are religion and science compatible? Are religious beliefs sometimes conducive to science, or do they inevitably pose obstacles to scientific inquiry? The interdisciplinary field of “science and religion”, also called “theology and science”, aims to answer these and other questions. It studies historical and contemporary interactions between these fields, and provides philosophical analyses of how they interrelate.

This entry provides an overview of the topics and discussions in science and religion. Section 1 outlines the scope of both fields, and how they are related. Section 2 looks at the relationship between science and religion in five religious traditions, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. Section 3 discusses contemporary topics of scientific inquiry in which science and religion intersect, focusing on divine action, creation, and human origins.

1.1 A brief history

1.2 what is science, and what is religion, 1.3 taxonomies of the interaction between science and religion, 1.4 the scientific study of religion, 2.1 christianity, 2.3 hinduism, 2.4 buddhism, 2.5 judaism, 3.1 divine action and creation, 3.2 human origins, works cited, other important works, other internet resources, related entries, 1. science, religion, and how they interrelate.

Since the 1960s, scholars in theology, philosophy, history, and the sciences have studied the relationship between science and religion. Science and religion is a recognized field of study with dedicated journals (e.g., Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science ), academic chairs (e.g., the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University), scholarly societies (e.g., the Science and Religion Forum), and recurring conferences (e.g., the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology’s biennial meetings). Most of its authors are theologians (e.g., John Haught, Sarah Coakley), philosophers with an interest in science (e.g., Nancey Murphy), or (former) scientists with long-standing interests in religion, some of whom are also ordained clergy (e.g., the physicist John Polkinghorne, the molecular biophysicist Alister McGrath, and the atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe). Recently, authors in science and religion also have degrees in that interdisciplinary field (e.g., Sarah Lane Ritchie).

The systematic study of science and religion started in the 1960s, with authors such as Ian Barbour (1966) and Thomas F. Torrance (1969) who challenged the prevailing view that science and religion were either at war or indifferent to each other. Barbour’s Issues in Science and Religion (1966) set out several enduring themes of the field, including a comparison of methodology and theory in both fields. Zygon, the first specialist journal on science and religion, was also founded in 1966. While the early study of science and religion focused on methodological issues, authors from the late 1980s to the 2000s developed contextual approaches, including detailed historical examinations of the relationship between science and religion (e.g., Brooke 1991). Peter Harrison (1998) challenged the warfare model by arguing that Protestant theological conceptions of nature and humanity helped to give rise to science in the seventeenth century. Peter Bowler (2001, 2009) drew attention to a broad movement of liberal Christians and evolutionists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who aimed to reconcile evolutionary theory with religious belief. In the 1990s, the Vatican Observatory (Castel Gandolfo, Italy) and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (Berkeley, California) co-sponsored a series of conferences on divine action and how it can be understood in the light of various contemporary sciences. This resulted in six edited volumes (see Russell, Murphy, & Stoeger 2008 for a book-length summary of the findings of this project).

The field has presently diversified so much that contemporary discussions on religion and science tend to focus on specific disciplines and questions. Rather than ask if religion and science (broadly speaking) are compatible, productive questions focus on specific topics. For example, Buddhist modernists (see section 2.4 ) have argued that Buddhist theories about the self (the no-self) and Buddhist practices, such as mindfulness meditation, are compatible and are corroborated by neuroscience.

In the contemporary public sphere, a prominent interaction between science and religion concerns evolutionary theory and creationism/Intelligent Design. The legal battles (e.g., the Kitzmiller versus Dover trial in 2005) and lobbying surrounding the teaching of evolution and creationism in American schools suggest there’s a conflict between religion and science. However, even if one were to focus on the reception of evolutionary theory, the relationship between religion and science is complex. For instance, in the United Kingdom, scientists, clergy, and popular writers (the so-called Modernists), sought to reconcile science and religion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, whereas the US saw the rise of a fundamentalist opposition to evolutionary thinking, exemplified by the Scopes trial in 1925 (Bowler 2001, 2009).

Another prominent offshoot of the discussion on science and religion is the New Atheist movement, with authors such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens. They argue that public life, including government, education, and policy should be guided by rational argument and scientific evidence, and that any form of supernaturalism (especially religion, but also, e.g., astrology) has no place in public life. They treat religious claims, such as the existence of God, as testable scientific hypotheses (see, e.g., Dawkins 2006).

In recent decades, the leaders of some Christian churches have issued conciliatory public statements on evolutionary theory. Pope John Paul II (1996) affirmed evolutionary theory in his message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, but rejected it for the human soul, which he saw as the result of a separate, special creation. The Church of England publicly endorsed evolutionary theory (e.g., C. M. Brown 2008), including an apology to Charles Darwin for its initial rejection of his theory.

This entry will focus on the relationship between religious and scientific ideas as rather abstract philosophical positions, rather than as practices. However, this relationship has a large practical impact on the lives of religious people and scientists (including those who are both scientists and religious believers). A rich sociological literature indicates the complexity of these interactions, among others, how religious scientists conceive of this relationship (for recent reviews, see Ecklund 2010, 2021; Ecklund & Scheitle 2007; Gross & Simmons 2009).

For the past fifty years, the discussion on science and religion has de facto been on Western science and Christianity: to what extent can the findings of Western sciences be reconciled with Christian beliefs? The field of science and religion has only recently turned to an examination of non-Christian traditions, providing a richer picture of interaction.

In order to understand the scope of science and religion and their interactions, we must at least get a rough sense of what science and religion are. After all, “science” and “religion” are not eternally unchanging terms with unambiguous meanings. Indeed, they are terms that were coined recently, with meanings that vary across contexts. Before the nineteenth century, the term “religion” was rarely used. For a medieval author such as Aquinas, the term religio meant piety or worship, and was not applied to religious systems outside of what he considered orthodoxy (Harrison 2015). The term “religion” obtained its considerably broader current meaning through the works of early anthropologists, such as E.B. Tylor (1871), who systematically used the term for religions across the world. As a result, “religion” became a comparative concept, referring to traits that could be compared and scientifically studied, such as rituals, dietary restrictions, and belief systems (Jonathan Smith 1998).

The term “science” as it is currently used also became common in the nineteenth century. Prior to this, what we call “science” fell under the terminology of “natural philosophy” or, if the experimental part was emphasized, “experimental philosophy”. William Whewell (1834) standardized the term “scientist” to refer to practitioners of diverse natural philosophies. Philosophers of science have attempted to demarcate science from other knowledge-seeking endeavors, in particular religion. For instance, Karl Popper (1959) claimed that scientific hypotheses (unlike religious and philosophical ones) are in principle falsifiable. Many authors (e.g., Taylor 1996) affirm a disparity between science and religion, even if the meanings of both terms are historically contingent. They disagree, however, on how to precisely (and across times and cultures) demarcate the two domains.

One way to distinguish between science and religion is the claim that science concerns the natural world, whereas religion concerns the supernatural world and its relationship to the natural. Scientific explanations do not appeal to supernatural entities such as gods or angels (fallen or not), or to non-natural forces (such as miracles, karma, or qi ). For example, neuroscientists typically explain our thoughts in terms of brain states, not by reference to an immaterial soul or spirit, and legal scholars do not invoke karmic load when discussing why people commit crimes.

Naturalists draw a distinction between methodological naturalism , an epistemological principle that limits scientific inquiry to natural entities and laws, and ontological or philosophical naturalism , a metaphysical principle that rejects the supernatural (Forrest 2000). Since methodological naturalism is concerned with the practice of science (in particular, with the kinds of entities and processes that are invoked), it does not make any statements about whether or not supernatural entities exist. They might exist, but lie outside of the scope of scientific investigation. Some authors (e.g., Rosenberg 2014) hold that taking the results of science seriously entails negative answers to such persistent questions into the existence of free will or moral knowledge. However, these stronger conclusions are controversial.

The view that science can be demarcated from religion in its methodological naturalism is more commonly accepted. For instance, in the Kitzmiller versus Dover trial, the philosopher of science Robert Pennock was called to testify by the plaintiffs on whether Intelligent Design was a form of creationism, and therefore religion. If it were, the Dover school board policy would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Building on earlier work (e.g., Pennock 1998), Pennock argued that Intelligent Design, in its appeal to supernatural mechanisms, was not methodologically naturalistic, and that methodological naturalism is an essential component of science.

Methodological naturalism is a recent development in the history of science, though we can see precursors of it in medieval authors such as Aquinas who attempted to draw a theological distinction between miracles, such as the working of relics, and unusual natural phenomena, such as magnetism and the tides (see Perry & Ritchie 2018). Natural and experimental philosophers such as Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Robert Hooke, and Robert Boyle regularly appealed to supernatural agents in their natural philosophy (which we now call “science”). Still, overall there was a tendency to favor naturalistic explanations in natural philosophy. The X-club was a lobby group for the professionalization of science founded in 1864 by Thomas Huxley and friends. While the X-club may have been in part motivated by the desire to remove competition by amateur-clergymen scientists in the field of science, and thus to open up the field to full-time professionals, its explicit aim was to promote a science that would be free from religious dogma (Garwood 2008, Barton 2018). This preference for naturalistic causes may have been encouraged by past successes of naturalistic explanations, leading authors such as Paul Draper (2005) to argue that the success of methodological naturalism could be evidence for ontological naturalism.

Several typologies probe the interaction between science and religion. For example, Mikael Stenmark (2004) distinguishes between three views: the independence view (no overlap between science and religion), the contact view (some overlap between the fields), and a union of the domains of science and religion; within these views he recognizes further subdivisions, e.g., contact can be in the form of conflict or harmony. The most influential taxonomy of the relationship between science and religion remains Barbour’s (2000): conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration. Subsequent authors, as well as Barbour himself, have refined and amended this taxonomy. However, others (e.g., Cantor & Kenny 2001) have argued that this taxonomy is not useful to understand past interactions between both fields. Nevertheless, because of its enduring influence, it is still worthwhile to discuss it in detail.

The conflict model holds that science and religion are in perpetual and principal conflict. It relies heavily on two historical narratives: the trial of Galileo (see Dawes 2016) and the reception of Darwinism (see Bowler 2001). Contrary to common conception, the conflict model did not originate in two seminal publications, namely John Draper’s (1874) History of the Conflict between Religion and Science and Andrew Dickson White’s (1896) two-volume opus A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom . Rather, as James Ungureanu (2019) argues, the project of these early architects of the conflict thesis needs to be contextualized in a liberal Protestant tradition of attempting to separate religion from theology, and thus salvage religion. Their work was later appropriated by skeptics and atheists who used their arguments about the incompatibility of traditional theological views with science to argue for secularization, something Draper and White did not envisage.

The vast majority of authors in the science and religion field is critical of the conflict model and believes it is based on a shallow and partisan reading of the historical record. While the conflict model is at present a minority position, some have used philosophical argumentation (e.g., Philipse 2012) or have carefully re-examined historical evidence such as the Galileo trial (e.g., Dawes 2016) to argue for this model. Alvin Plantinga (2011) has argued that the conflict is not between science and religion, but between science and naturalism. In his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (first formulated in 1993), Plantinga argues that naturalism is epistemically self-defeating: if both naturalism and evolution are true, then it’s unlikely we would have reliable cognitive faculties.

The independence model holds that science and religion explore separate domains that ask distinct questions. Stephen Jay Gould developed an influential independence model with his NOMA principle (“Non-Overlapping Magisteria”):

The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise. (2001: 739)

He identified science’s areas of expertise as empirical questions about the constitution of the universe, and religion’s domain of expertise as ethical values and spiritual meaning. NOMA is both descriptive and normative: religious leaders should refrain from making factual claims about, for instance, evolutionary theory, just as scientists should not claim insight on moral matters. Gould held that there might be interactions at the borders of each magisterium, such as our responsibility toward other living things. One obvious problem with the independence model is that if religion were barred from making any statement of fact, it would be difficult to justify its claims of value and ethics. For example, one could not argue that one should love one’s neighbor because it pleases the creator (Worrall 2004). Moreover, religions do seem to make empirical claims, for example, that Jesus appeared after his death or that the early Hebrews passed through the parted waters of the Red Sea.

The dialogue model proposes a mutualistic relationship between religion and science. Unlike independence, it assumes a common ground between both fields, perhaps in their presuppositions, methods, and concepts. For example, the Christian doctrine of creation may have encouraged science by assuming that creation (being the product of a designer) is both intelligible and orderly, so one can expect there are laws that can be discovered. Creation, as a product of God’s free actions, is also contingent, so the laws of nature cannot be learned through a priori thinking which prompts the need for empirical investigation. According to Barbour (2000), both scientific and theological inquiry are theory-dependent, or at least model-dependent. For example, the doctrine of the Trinity colors how Christian theologians interpret the first chapters of Genesis. Next to this, both rely on metaphors and models. Both fields remain separate but they talk to each other, using common methods, concepts, and presuppositions. Wentzel van Huyssteen (1998) has argued for a dialogue position, proposing that science and religion can be in a graceful duet, based on their epistemological overlaps. The Partially Overlapping Magisteria (POMA) model defended by Alister McGrath (e.g., McGrath and Collicutt McGrath 2007) is also worth mentioning. According to McGrath, science and religion each draw on several different methodologies and approaches. These methods and approaches are different ways of knowing that have been shaped through historical factors. It is beneficial for scientists and theologians to be in dialogue with each other.

The integration model is more extensive in its unification of science and theology. Barbour (2000) identifies three forms of integration. First, natural theology, which formulates arguments for the existence and attributes of God. It uses interpretations of results from the natural sciences as premises in its arguments. For instance, the supposition that the universe has a temporal origin features in contemporary cosmological arguments for the existence of God. Likewise, the fact that the cosmological constants and laws of nature are life-permitting (whereas many other combinations of constants and laws would not permit life) is used in contemporary fine-tuning arguments (see the entry to fine-tuning arguments ). Second, theology of nature starts not from science but from a religious framework, and examines how this can enrich or even revise findings of the sciences. For example, McGrath (2016) developed a Christian theology of nature, examining how nature and scientific findings can be interpreted through a Christian lens. Thirdly, Barbour believed that Whitehead’s process philosophy was a promising way to integrate science and religion.

While integration seems attractive (especially to theologians), it is difficult to do justice to both the scientific and religious aspects of a given domain, especially given their complexities. For example, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1971), who was both knowledgeable in paleoanthropology and theology, ended up with an unconventional view of evolution as teleological (which put him at odds with the scientific establishment) and with an unorthodox theology (which denied original sin and led to a series of condemnations by the Roman Catholic Church). Theological heterodoxy, by itself, is no reason to doubt a model. However, it shows obstacles for the integration model to become a live option in the broader community of theologians and philosophers who want to remain affiliate to a specific religious community without transgressing its boundaries. Moreover, integration seems skewed towards theism: Barbour described arguments based on scientific results that support (but do not demonstrate) theism, but failed to discuss arguments based on scientific results that support (but do not demonstrate) the denial of theism. Hybrid positions like McGrath’s POMA indicate some difficulty for Barbour’s taxonomy: the scope of conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration is not clearly defined and they are not mutually exclusive. For example, if conflict is defined broadly then it is compatible with integration. Take the case of Frederick Tennant (1902), who sought to explain sin as the result of evolutionary pressures on human ancestors. This view led him to reject the Fall as a historical event, as it was not compatible with evolutionary biology. His view has conflict (as he saw Christian doctrine in conflict with evolutionary biology) but also integration (he sought to integrate the theological concept of sin in an evolutionary picture). It is clear that many positions defined by authors in the religion and science literature do not clearly fall within one of Barbour’s four domains.

Science and religion are closely interconnected in the scientific study of religion, which can be traced back to seventeenth-century natural histories of religion. Natural historians attempted to provide naturalistic explanations for human behavior and culture, including religion and morality. For example, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s De l’Origine des Fables (1724) offered a causal account of belief in the supernatural. People often assert supernatural explanations when they lack an understanding of the natural causes underlying extraordinary events: “To the extent that one is more ignorant, or one has less experience, one sees more miracles” (1724 [1824: 295], my translation). Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757) is perhaps the best-known philosophical example of a natural historical explanation of religious belief. It traces the origins of polytheism—which Hume thought was the earliest form of religious belief—to ignorance about natural causes combined with fear and apprehension about the environment. By deifying aspects of the environment, early humans tried to persuade or bribe the gods, thereby gaining a sense of control.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, authors from newly emerging scientific disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, and psychology examined the purported naturalistic roots of religious beliefs. They did so with a broad brush, trying to explain what unifies diverse religious beliefs across cultures. Auguste Comte (1841) proposed that all societies, in their attempts to make sense of the world, go through the same stages of development: the theological (religious) stage is the earliest phase, where religious explanations predominate, followed by the metaphysical stage (a non-intervening God), and culminating in the positive or scientific stage, marked by scientific explanations and empirical observations.

In anthropology, this positivist idea influenced cultural evolutionism, a theoretical framework that sought to explain cultural change using universal patterns. The underlying supposition was that all cultures evolve and progress along the same trajectory. Cultures with differing religious views were explained as being in different stages of their development. For example, Tylor (1871) regarded animism as the earliest form of religious belief. James Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890) is somewhat unusual within this literature, as he saw commonalities between magic, religion, and science. Though he proposed a linear progression, he also argued that a proto-scientific mindset gave rise to magical practices, including the discovery of regularities in nature. Cultural evolutionist models dealt poorly with religious diversity and with the complex relationships between science and religion across cultures. Many authors proposed that religion was just a stage in human development, which would eventually be superseded. For example, social theorists such as Karl Marx and Max Weber proposed versions of the secularization thesis, the view that religion would decline in the face of modern technology, science, and culture.

Functionalism was another theoretical framework that sought to explain religion. Functionalists did not consider religion to be a stage in human cultural development that would eventually be overcome. They saw it as a set of social institutions that served important functions in the societies they were part of. For example, the sociologist Émile Durkheim (1912 [1915]) argued that religious beliefs are social glue that helps to keep societies together.

Sigmund Freud and other early psychologists aimed to explain religion as the result of cognitive dispositions. For example, Freud (1927) saw religious belief as an illusion, a childlike yearning for a fatherly figure. He also considered “oceanic feeling” (a feeling of limitlessness and of being connected with the world, a concept he derived from the French author Romain Rolland) as one of the origins of religious belief. He thought this feeling was a remnant of an infant’s experience of the self, prior to being weaned off the breast. William James (1902) was interested in the psychological roots and the phenomenology of religious experiences, which he believed were the ultimate source of all institutional religions.

From the 1920s onward, the scientific study of religion became less concerned with grand unifying narratives, and focused more on particular religious traditions and beliefs. Anthropologists such as Edward Evans-Pritchard (1937) and Bronisław Malinowski (1925) no longer relied exclusively on second-hand reports (usually of poor quality and from distorted sources), but engaged in serious fieldwork. Their ethnographies indicated that cultural evolutionism was a defective theoretical framework and that religious beliefs were more diverse than was previously assumed. They argued that religious beliefs were not the result of ignorance of naturalistic mechanisms. For instance, Evans-Pritchard (1937) noted that the Azande were well aware that houses could collapse because termites ate away at their foundations, but they still appealed to witchcraft to explain why a particular house collapsed at a particular time. More recently, Cristine Legare et al. (2012) found that people in various cultures straightforwardly combine supernatural and natural explanations, for instance, South Africans are aware AIDS is caused by the HIV virus, but some also believe that the viral infection is ultimately caused by a witch.

Psychologists and sociologists of religion also began to doubt that religious beliefs were rooted in irrationality, psychopathology, and other atypical psychological states, as James (1902) and other early psychologists had assumed. In the US, in the late 1930s through the 1960s, psychologists developed a renewed interest for religion, fueled by the observation that religion refused to decline and seemed to undergo a substantial revival, thus casting doubt on the secularization thesis (see Stark 1999 for an overview). Psychologists of religion have made increasingly fine-grained distinctions between types of religiosity, including extrinsic religiosity (being religious as means to an end, for instance, getting the benefits of being a member of a social group) and intrinsic religiosity (people who adhere to religions for the sake of their teachings) (Allport & Ross 1967). Psychologists and sociologists now commonly study religiosity as an independent variable, with an impact on, for instance, health, criminality, sexuality, socio-economic profile, and social networks.

A recent development in the scientific study of religion is the cognitive science of religion (CSR). This is a multidisciplinary field, with authors from, among others, developmental psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and cognitive psychology (see C. White 2021 for a comprehensive overview). It differs from other scientific approaches to religion in its presupposition that religion is not a purely cultural phenomenon. Rather, authors in CSR hold that religion is the result of ordinary, early developed, and universal human cognitive processes (e.g., Barrett 2004, Boyer 2002). Some authors regard religion as the byproduct of cognitive processes that are not evolved for religion. For example, according to Paul Bloom (2007), religion emerges as a byproduct of our intuitive distinction between minds and bodies: we can think of minds as continuing, even after the body dies (e.g., by attributing desires to a dead family member), which makes belief in an afterlife and in disembodied spirits natural and spontaneous. Another family of hypotheses regards religion as a biological or cultural adaptive response that helps humans solve cooperative problems (e.g., Bering 2011; Purzycki & Sosis 2022): through their belief in big, powerful gods that can punish, humans behave more cooperatively, which allowed human group sizes to expand beyond small hunter-gatherer communities. Groups with belief in big gods thus out-competed groups without such beliefs for resources during the Neolithic, which would explain the current success of belief in such gods (Norenzayan 2013). However, the question of which came first—big god beliefs or large-scale societies—is a continued matter of debate.

2. Science and religion in various religions

As noted, most studies on the relationship between science and religion have focused on science and Christianity, with only a small number of publications devoted to other religious traditions (e.g., Brooke & Numbers 2011; Lopez 2008). Since science makes universal claims, it is easy to assume that its encounter with other religious traditions would be similar to its interactions with Christianity. However, given different creedal tenets (e.g., in Hindu traditions God is usually not entirely distinct from creation, unlike in Christianity and Judaism), and because science has had distinct historical trajectories in other cultures, one can expect disanalogies in the relationship between science and religion in different religious traditions. To give a sense of this diversity, this section provides a bird’s eye view of science and religion in five major world religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism.

Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion, currently the religion with the most adherents. It developed in the first century CE out of Judaism. Christians adhere to asserted revelations described in a series of canonical texts, which include the Old Testament, which comprises texts inherited from Judaism, and the New Testament, which contains the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (narratives on the life and teachings of Jesus), as well as events and teachings of the early Christian churches (e.g., Acts of the Apostles, letters by Paul), and Revelation, a prophetic book on the end times.

Given the prominence of revealed texts in Christianity, a useful starting point to examine the relationship between Christianity and science is the two books metaphor (see Tanzella-Nitti 2005 for an overview): God revealed Godself through the “Book of Nature”, with its orderly laws, and the “Book of Scripture”, with its historical narratives and accounts of miracles. Augustine (354–430) argued that the book of nature was the more accessible of the two, since scripture requires literacy whereas illiterates and literates alike could read the book of nature. Maximus Confessor (c. 580–662), in his Ambigua (see Louth 1996 for a collection of and critical introduction to these texts) compared scripture and natural law to two clothes that envelop the Incarnated Logos: Jesus’ humanity is revealed by nature, whereas his divinity is revealed by the scriptures. During the Middle Ages, authors such as Hugh of St. Victor (ca. 1096–1141) and Bonaventure (1221–1274) began to realize that the book of nature was not at all straightforward to read. Given that original sin marred our reason and perception, what conclusions could humans legitimately draw about ultimate reality? Bonaventure used the metaphor of the books to the extent that “ liber naturae ” was a synonym for creation, the natural world. He argued that sin has clouded human reason so much that the book of nature has become unreadable, and that scripture is needed as an aid as it contains teachings about the world.

Christian authors in the field of science and religion continue to debate how these two books interrelate. Concordism is the attempt to interpret scripture in the light of modern science. It is a hermeneutical approach to Bible interpretation, where one expects that the Bible foretells scientific theories, such as the Big Bang theory or evolutionary theory. However, as Denis Lamoureux (2008: chapter 5) argues, many scientific-sounding statements in the Bible are false: the mustard seed is not the smallest seed, male reproductive seeds do not contain miniature persons, there is no firmament, and the earth is neither flat nor immovable. Thus, any plausible form of integrating the book of nature and scripture will require more nuance and sophistication. Theologians such as John Wesley (1703–1791) have proposed the addition of other sources of knowledge to scripture and science: the Wesleyan quadrilateral (a term not coined by Wesley himself) is the dynamic interaction of scripture, experience (including the empirical findings of the sciences), tradition, and reason (Outler 1985).

Several Christian authors have attempted to integrate science and religion (e.g., Haught 1995, Lamoureux 2008, Murphy 1995), making integration a highly popular view on the relationship between science and religion. These authors tend to interpret findings from the sciences, such as evolutionary theory or chaos theory, in a theological light, using established theological models such as classical theism or the doctrine of creation. John Haught (1995) argues that the theological view of kenosis (self-emptying of God in creation) anticipates scientific findings such as evolutionary theory: a self-emptying God (i.e., who limits Godself), who creates a distinct and autonomous world, makes a world with internal self-coherence, with a self-organizing universe as the result.

The dominant epistemological outlook in Christian science and religion has been critical realism, a position that applies both to theology (theological realism) and to science (scientific realism). Barbour (1966) introduced this view into the science and religion literature; it has been further developed by theologians such as Arthur Peacocke (1984) and Wentzel van Huyssteen (1999). Critical realism aims to offer a middle way between naïve realism (the world is as we perceive it) and instrumentalism (our perceptions and concepts are purely instrumental). It encourages critical reflection on perception and the world, hence “critical”. Critical realism has distinct flavors in the works of different authors, for instance, van Huyssteen (1998, 1999) develops a weak form of critical realism set within a postfoundationalist notion of rationality, where theological views are shaped by social, cultural, and evolved biological factors. Murphy (1995: 329–330) outlines doctrinal and scientific requirements for approaches in science and religion: ideally, an integrated approach should be broadly in line with Christian doctrine, especially core tenets such as the doctrine of creation, while at the same time it should be in line with empirical observations without undercutting scientific practices.

Several historians (e.g., Hooykaas 1972) have argued that Christianity was instrumental to the development of Western science. Peter Harrison (2007) maintains that the doctrine of original sin played a crucial role in this, arguing there was a widespread belief in the early modern period that Adam, prior to the Fall, had superior senses, intellect, and understanding. As a result of the Fall, human senses became duller, our ability to make correct inferences was diminished, and nature itself became less intelligible. Postlapsarian humans (i.e., humans after the Fall) are no longer able to exclusively rely on their a priori reasoning to understand nature. They must supplement their reasoning and senses with observation through specialized instruments, such as microscopes and telescopes. As the experimental philosopher Robert Hooke wrote in the introduction to his Micrographia :

every man, both from a deriv’d corruption, innate and born with him, and from his breeding and converse with men, is very subject to slip into all sorts of errors … These being the dangers in the process of humane Reason, the remedies of them all can only proceed from the real, the mechanical, the experimental Philosophy [experiment-based science]. (1665, cited in Harrison 2007: 5)

Another theological development that may have facilitated the rise of science was the Condemnation of Paris (1277), which forbade teaching and reading natural philosophical views that were considered heretical, such as Aristotle’s physical treatises. As a result, the Condemnation opened up intellectual space to think beyond ancient Greek natural philosophy. For example, medieval philosophers such as John Buridan (fl. 14th c) held the Aristotelian belief that there could be no vacuum in nature, but once the idea of a vacuum became plausible, natural philosophers such as Evangelista Torricelli (1608–1647) and Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) could experiment with air pressure and vacua (see Grant 1996, for discussion).

Some authors claim that Christianity was unique and instrumental in catalyzing the scientific revolution. For example, according to the sociologist of religion Rodney Stark (2004), the scientific revolution was in fact a slow, gradual development from medieval Christian theology. Claims such as Stark’s, however, fail to recognize the legitimate contributions of Islamic and Greek scholars to the development of modern science, and fail to do justice to the importance of practical technological innovations in map-making and star-charting in the emergence of modern science. In spite of these positive readings of the relationship between science and religion in Christianity, there are sources of enduring tension. For example, there is still vocal opposition to the theory of evolution among Christian fundamentalists. In the public sphere, the conflict view between Christianity and science prevails, in stark contrast to the scholarly literature. This is due to an important extent to the outsize influence of a vocal conservative Christian minority in the American public debate, which sidelines more moderate voices (Evans 2016).

Islam is a monotheistic religion that emerged in the seventh century, following a series of purported revelations to the prophet Muḥammad. The term “Islam” also denotes geo-political structures, such as caliphates and empires, which were founded by Muslim rulers from the seventh century onward, including the Umayyad, Abbasid, and Ottoman caliphates. Additionally, it refers to a culture which flourished within this political and religious context, with its own philosophical and scientific traditions (Dhanani 2002). The defining characteristic of Islam is belief in one God (Allāh), who communicates through prophets, including Adam, Abraham, and Muḥammad. Allāh‎’s revelations to Muḥammad are recorded in the Qurʾān, the central religious text for Islam. Next to the Qurʾān, an important source of jurisprudence and theology is the ḥadīth, an oral corpus of attested sayings, actions, and tacit approvals of the prophet Muḥammad. The two major branches of Islam, Sunni and Shia, are based on a dispute over the succession of Muḥammad. As the second largest religion in the world, Islam shows a wide variety of beliefs. Core creedal views include the oneness of God ( tawḥīd ), the view that there is only one undivided God who created and sustains the universe, prophetic revelation (in particular to Muḥammad), and an afterlife. Beyond this, Muslims disagree on a number of doctrinal issues.

The relationship between Islam and science is complex. Today, predominantly Muslim countries, such as the United Arabic Emirates, enjoy high urbanization and technological development, but they still underperform in common metrics of scientific research, such as publications in leading journals and number of citations per scientist, compared to other regions outside of the west such as India and China (see Edis 2007). Some Muslims hold a number of pseudoscientific ideas, some of which it shares with Christianity such as Old Earth creationism, whereas others are specific to Islam such as the recreation of human bodies from the tailbone on the day of resurrection, and the superiority of prayer in treating lower-back pain instead of conventional methods (Guessoum 2011: 4–5).

This contemporary lack of scientific prominence is remarkable given that the Islamic world far exceeded European cultures in the range and quality of its scientific knowledge between approximately the ninth and the fifteenth century, excelling in domains such as mathematics (algebra and geometry, trigonometry in particular), astronomy (seriously considering, but not adopting, heliocentrism), optics, and medicine. These domains of knowledge are commonly referred to as “Arabic science”, to distinguish them from the pursuits of science that arose in the west (Huff 2003). “Arabic science” is an imperfect term, as many of the practitioners were not speakers of Arabic, hence the term “science in the Islamic world” is more accurate. Many scientists in the Islamic world were polymaths, for example, Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, 980–1037) is commonly regarded as one of the most significant innovators, not only in philosophy, but also in medicine and astronomy. His Canon of Medicine , a medical encyclopedia, was a standard textbook in universities across Europe for many centuries after his death. Al-Fārābī (ca. 872–ca. 950), a political philosopher from Damascus, also investigated music theory, science, and mathematics. Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) achieved lasting fame in disparate domains such as poetry, astronomy, geography, and mineralogy. The Andalusian Ibn Rušd (Averroes, 1126–1198) wrote on medicine, physics, astronomy, psychology, jurisprudence, music, and geography, next to developing a Greek-inspired philosophical theology.

A major impetus for science in the Islamic world was the patronage of the Abbasid caliphate (758–1258), centered in Baghdad. Early Abbasid rulers, such as Harun al-Rashid (ruled 786–809) and his successor Abū Jaʿfar Abdullāh al-Ma’mūn (ruled 813–833), were significant patrons of science. The former founded the Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), which commissioned translations of major works by Aristotle, Galen, and many Persian and Indian scholars into Arabic. It was cosmopolitan in its outlook, employing astronomers, mathematicians, and physicians from abroad, including Indian mathematicians and Nestorian (Christian) astronomers. Throughout the Islamic world, public libraries attached to mosques provided access to a vast compendium of knowledge, which spread Islam, Greek philosophy, and science. The use of a common language (Arabic), as well as common religious and political institutions and flourishing trade relations encouraged the spread of scientific ideas throughout the Islamic world. Some of this transmission was informal, e.g., correspondence between like-minded people (see Dhanani 2002), some formal, e.g., in hospitals where students learned about medicine in a practical, master-apprentice setting, and in astronomical observatories and academies. The decline and fall of the Abbasid caliphate dealt a blow to science in the Islamic world, but it remains unclear why it ultimately stagnated, and why it did not experience something analogous to the scientific revolution in Western Europe. Note, the decline of science in the Islamic world should not be generalized to other fields, such as philosophy and philosophical theology, which continued to flourish after the Abbasid caliphate fell.

Some liberal Muslim authors, such as Fatima Mernissi (1992), argue that the rise of conservative forms of Islamic philosophical theology stifled more scientifically-minded natural philosophy. In the ninth to the twelfth century, the Mu’tazila (a philosophical theological school) helped the growth of science in the Islamic world thanks to their embrace of Greek natural philosophy. But eventually, the Mu’tazila and their intellectual descendants lost their influence to more conservative brands of theology. Al-Ghazālī’s influential eleventh-century work, The Incoherence of the Philosophers ( Tahāfut al-falāsifa ), was a scathing and sophisticated critique of Greek-inspired Muslim philosophy, arguing that their metaphysical assumptions could not be demonstrated. This book vindicated more orthodox Muslim religious views. As Muslim intellectual life became more orthodox, it became less open to non-Muslim philosophical ideas, which led to the decline of science in the Islamic world, according to this view.

The problem with this narrative is that orthodox worries about non-Islamic knowledge were already present before Al-Ghazālī and continued long after his death (Edis 2007: chapter 2). The study of law ( fiqh ) was more stifling for science in the Islamic world than developments in theology. The eleventh century saw changes in Islamic law that discouraged heterodox thought: lack of orthodoxy could now be regarded as apostasy from Islam ( zandaqa ) which is punishable by death, whereas before, a Muslim could only apostatize by an explicit declaration (Griffel 2009: 105). (Al-Ghazālī himself only regarded the violation of three core doctrines as zandaqa , namely statements that challenged monotheism, the prophecy of Muḥammad, and resurrection after death.) Given that heterodox thoughts could be interpreted as apostasy, this created a stifling climate for science. In the second half of the nineteenth century, as science and technology became firmly entrenched in Western society, Muslim empires were languishing or colonized. Scientific ideas, such as evolutionary theory, became equated with European colonialism, and thus met with distrust. The enduring association between western culture, colonialism, and science led to a more prominent conflict view of the relationship between science and religion in Muslim countries.

In spite of this negative association between science and Western modernity, there is an emerging literature on science and religion by Muslim scholars (mostly scientists). The physicist Nidhal Guessoum (2011) holds that science and religion are not only compatible, but in harmony. He rejects the idea of treating the Qurʾān as a scientific encyclopedia, something other Muslim authors in the debate on science and religion tend to do. Moreover, he adheres to the no-possible-conflict principle, outlined by Ibn Rušd: there can be no conflict between God’s word (properly understood) and God’s work (properly understood). If an apparent conflict arises, the Qurʾān may not have been interpreted correctly.

While the Qurʾān asserts a creation in six days (like the Hebrew Bible), “day” is often interpreted as a very long span of time, rather than a 24-hour period. As a result, Old Earth creationism is more influential in Islam than Young Earth creationism. Adnan Oktar’s Atlas of Creation (published in 2007 under the pseudonym Harun Yahya), a glossy coffee table book that draws heavily on Christian Old Earth creationism, has been distributed worldwide (Hameed 2008). Since the Qurʾān explicitly mentions the special creation of Adam out of clay, most Muslims refuse to accept that humans evolved from hominin ancestors. Nevertheless, Muslim scientists such as Guessoum (2011) and Rana Dajani (2015) have advocated acceptance of evolution.

Hinduism is the world’s third largest religion, though the term “Hinduism” is an awkward catch-all phrase that denotes diverse religious and philosophical traditions that emerged on the Indian subcontinent between 500 BCE and 300 CE. The vast majority of Hindus live in India; most others live in Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia, with a significant diaspora in western countries such as the United States (Hackett 2015 [ Other Internet Resources ]). In contrast to the Abrahamic monotheistic religions, Hinduism does not always draw a sharp distinction between God and creation. (While there are pantheistic and panentheistic views in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, these are minority positions.) Many Hindus believe in a personal God, and identify this God as immanent in creation. This view has ramifications for the science and religion debate, in that there is no sharp ontological distinction between creator and creature (Subbarayappa 2011). Religious traditions originating on the Indian subcontinent, including Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism, are referred to as dharmic religions. Philosophical points of view are referred to as darśana .

One factor that unites the different strands of Hinduism is the importance of foundational texts composed between ca. 1600 and 700 BCE. These include the Vedas, which contain hymns and prescriptions for performing rituals, Brāhmaṇa, accompanying liturgical texts, and Upaniṣad, metaphysical treatises. The Vedas discuss gods who personify and embody natural phenomena such as fire (Agni) and wind (Vāyu). More gods appear in the following centuries (e.g., Gaṇeśa and Sati-Parvati in the 4th century). Note that there are both polytheistic and monotheistic strands in Hinduism, so it is not the case that individual believers worship or recognize all of these gods. Ancient Vedic rituals encouraged knowledge of diverse sciences, including astronomy, linguistics, and mathematics. Astronomical knowledge was required to determine the timing of rituals and the construction of sacrificial altars. Linguistics developed out of a need to formalize grammatical rules for classical Sanskrit, which was used in rituals. Large public offerings also required the construction of elaborate altars, which posed geometrical problems and thus led to advances in geometry. Classic Vedic texts also frequently used very large numbers, for instance, to denote the age of humanity and the Earth, which required a system to represent numbers parsimoniously, giving rise to a 10-base positional system and a symbolic representation for zero as a placeholder, which would later be imported in other mathematical traditions (Joseph 1991 [2000]). In this way, ancient Indian dharma encouraged the emergence of the sciences.

Around the sixth–fifth century BCE, the northern part of the Indian subcontinent experienced an extensive urbanization. In this context, medicine ( āyurveda ) became standardized. This period also gave rise to a wide range of heterodox philosophical schools, including Buddhism, Jainism, and Cārvāka. The latter defended a form of metaphysical naturalism, denying the existence of gods or karma. The relationship between science and religion on the Indian subcontinent is complex, in part because the dharmic religions and philosophical schools are so diverse. For example, Cārvāka proponents had a strong suspicion of inferential beliefs, and rejected Vedic revelation and supernaturalism in general, instead favoring direct observation as a source of knowledge.

Natural theology also flourished in the pre-colonial period, especially in the Advaita Vedānta, a darśana that identifies the self, ātman , with ultimate reality, Brahman. Advaita Vedāntin philosopher Adi Śaṅkara (fl. first half eighth century) was an author who regarded Brahman as the only reality, both the material and the efficient cause of the cosmos. Śaṅkara formulated design and cosmological arguments, drawing on analogies between the world and artifacts: in ordinary life, we never see non-intelligent agents produce purposive design, yet the universe is suitable for human life, just like benches and pleasure gardens are designed for us. Given that the universe is so complex that even an intelligent craftsman cannot comprehend it, how could it have been created by non-intelligent natural forces? Śaṅkara concluded that it must have been designed by an intelligent creator (C.M. Brown 2008: 108).

From 1757 to 1947, India was under British colonial rule. This had a profound influence on its culture as Hindus came into contact with Western science and technology. For local intellectuals, the contact with Western science presented a challenge: how to assimilate these ideas with Hinduism? Mahendrahal Sircar (1833–1904) was one of the first authors to examine evolutionary theory and its implications for Hindu religious beliefs. Sircar was an evolutionary theist, who believed that God used evolution to create current life forms. Evolutionary theism was not a new hypothesis in Hinduism, but the many lines of empirical evidence Darwin provided for evolution gave it a fresh impetus. While Sircar accepted organic evolution through common descent, he questioned the mechanism of natural selection as it was not teleological, which went against his evolutionary theism. This was a widespread problem for the acceptance of evolutionary theory, one that Christian evolutionary theists also wrestled with (Bowler 2009). He also argued against the British colonists’ beliefs that Hindus were incapable of scientific thought, and encouraged fellow Hindus to engage in science, which he hoped would help regenerate the Indian nation (C.M. Brown 2012: chapter 6).

The assimilation of Western culture prompted various revivalist movements that sought to reaffirm the cultural value of Hinduism. They put forward the idea of a Vedic science, where all scientific findings are already prefigured in the Vedas and other ancient texts (e.g., Vivekananda 1904). This idea is still popular within contemporary Hinduism, and is quite similar to ideas held by contemporary Muslims, who refer to the Qurʾān as a harbinger of scientific theories.

Responses to evolutionary theory were as diverse as Christian views on this subject, ranging from creationism (denial of evolutionary theory based on a perceived incompatibility with Vedic texts) to acceptance (see C.M. Brown 2012 for a thorough overview). Authors such as Dayananda Saraswati (1930–2015) rejected evolutionary theory. By contrast, Vivekananda (1863–1902), a proponent of the monistic Advaita Vedānta enthusiastically endorsed evolutionary theory and argued that it is already prefigured in ancient Vedic texts. His integrative view claimed that Hinduism and science are in harmony: Hinduism is scientific in spirit, as is evident from its long history of scientific discovery (Vivekananda 1904). Sri Aurobindo Ghose, a yogi and Indian nationalist who was educated in the West, formulated a synthesis of evolutionary thought and Hinduism. He interpreted the classic avatara doctrine, according to which God incarnates into the world repeatedly throughout time, in evolutionary terms. God thus appears first as an animal, later as a dwarf, then as a violent man (Rama), and then as Buddha, and as Kṛṣṇa. He proposed a metaphysical picture where both spiritual evolution (reincarnation and avatars) and physical evolution are ultimately a manifestation of God (Brahman). This view of reality as consisting of matter ( prakṛti ) and consciousness ( puruṣa ) goes back to sāṃkhya , one of the orthodox Hindu darśana, but Aurobindo made explicit reference to the divine, calling the process during which the supreme Consciousness dwells in matter involution (Aurobindo, 1914–18 [2005], see C.M. Brown 2007 for discussion).

During the twentieth century, Indian scientists began to gain prominence, including C.V. Raman (1888–1970), a Nobel Prize winner in physics, and Satyendra Nath Bose (1894–1974), a theoretical physicist who described the behavior of photons statistically, and who gave his name to bosons. However, these authors were silent on the relationship between their scientific work and their religious beliefs. By contrast, the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920) was open about his religious beliefs and their influence on his mathematical work. He claimed that the goddess Namagiri helped him to intuit solutions to mathematical problems. Likewise, Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937), a theoretical physicist, biologist, biophysicist, botanist, and archaeologist who worked on radio waves, saw the Hindu idea of unity reflected in the study of nature. He started the Bose institute in Kolkata in 1917, the earliest interdisciplinary scientific institute in India (Subbarayappa 2011).

Buddhism, like the other religious traditions surveyed in this entry, encompasses many views and practices. The principal forms of Buddhism that exist today are Theravāda and Mahāyāna. (Vajrayāna, the tantric tradition of Buddhism, is also sometimes seen as a distinct form.) Theravāda is the dominant form of Buddhism of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. It traditionally refers to monastic and textual lineages associated with the study of the Pāli Buddhist Canon. Mahāyāna refers to a movement that likely began roughly four centuries after the Buddha’s death; it became the dominant form of Buddhism in East and Central Asia. It includes Chan or Zen, and also tantric Buddhism, which today is found mostly in Tibet, though East Asian forms also exist.

Buddhism originated in the historical figure of the Buddha (historically, Gautama Buddha or Siddhārtha Gautama, ca. 5 th –4 th century BCE). His teaching centered on ethics as well as metaphysics, incapsulated in the Four Noble Truths (on suffering and its origin in human desires), and the Noble Eightfold Path (right view, right aspiration, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration) to end suffering and to break the cycle of rebirths, culminating in reaching Nirvana. Substantive metaphysical teachings include belief in karma, the no-self, and the cycle of rebirth.

As a response to colonialist attitudes, modern Buddhists since the nineteenth century have often presented Buddhism as harmonious with science (Lopez 2008). The argument is roughly that since Buddhism doesn’t require belief in metaphysically substantive entities such as God, the soul, or the self (unlike, for example, Christianity), Buddhism should be easily compatible with the factual claims that scientists make. (Note, however, that historically most Buddhist have believed in various forms of divine abode and divinities.) We could thus expect the dialogue and integration view to prevail in Buddhism. An exemplar for integration is the fourteenth Dalai Lama, who is known for his numerous efforts to lead dialogue between religious people and scientists. He has extensively written on the relationship between Buddhism and various scientific disciplines such as neuroscience and cosmology (e.g., Dalai Lama 2005, see also the Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics series, a four-volume series conceived and compiled by the Dalai Lama, e.g., Jinpa 2017). Donald Lopez Jr (2008) identifies compatibility as an enduring claim in the debate on science and Buddhism, in spite of the fact that what is meant by these concepts has shifted markedly over time. As David McMahan (2009) argues, Buddhism underwent profound shifts in response to modernity in the west as well as globally. In this modern context, Buddhists have often asserted the compatibility of Buddhism with science, favorably contrasting their religion to Christianity in that respect.

The full picture of the relationship between Buddhism and religion is more nuanced than one of wholesale acceptance of scientific claims. I will here focus on East Asia, primarily Japan and China, and the reception of evolutionary theory in the early twentieth century to give a sense of this more complex picture. The earliest translations of evolutionary thought in Japan and China were not drawn from Darwin’s Origin of Species or Descent of Man , but from works by authors who worked in Darwin’s wake, such as Ernst Haeckel and Thomas Huxley. For example, the earliest translated writings on evolutionary theory in China was a compilation by Yan Fu entitled On Natural Evolution ( Tianyan lun ), which incorporated excerpts by Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley. This work drew a close distinction between social Darwinism and biological evolution (Ritzinger 2013). Chinese and Japanese Buddhists received these ideas in the context of western colonialism and imperialism. East Asian intellectuals saw how western colonial powers competed with each other for influence on their territory, and discerned parallels between this and the Darwinian struggle for existence. As a result, some intellectuals such as the Japanese political adviser and academic Katō Hiroyuki (1836–1916) drew on Darwinian thought and popularized notions such as “survival of the fittest” to justify the foreign policies of the Meiji government (Burenina 2020). It is in this context that we can situate Buddhist responses to evolutionary theory.

Buddhists do not distinguish between human beings as possessing a soul and other animals as soulless. As we are all part of the cycle of rebirth, we have all been in previous lives various other beings, including birds, insects, and fish. The problem of the specificity of the human soul does not even arise because of the no-self doctrine. Nevertheless, as Justin Ritzinger (2013) points out, Chinese Buddhists in the 1920s and 1930s who were confronted with early evolutionary theory did not accept Darwin’s theory wholesale. In their view, the central element of Darwinism—the struggle for existence—was incompatible with Buddhism, with its emphasis on compassion with other creatures. They rejected social Darwinism (which sought to engineer societies along Darwinian principles) because it was incompatible with Buddhist ethics and metaphysics. Struggling to survive and to propagate was clinging onto worldly things. Taixu (1890–1947), a Chinese Reformer and Buddhist modernist, instead chose to appropriate Pyotr Kropotkin’s evolutionary views, specifically on mutual aid and altruism. The Russian anarchist argued that cooperation was central to evolutionary change, a view that is currently also more mainstream. However, Kropotkin’s view did not go far enough in Taixu’s opinion because mutual aid still requires a self. Only when one recognizes the no-self doctrine could one dedicate oneself entirely to helping others, as bodhisattvas do (Ritzinger 2013).

Similar dynamics can be seen in the reception of evolutionary theory among Japanese Buddhists. Evolutionary theory was introduced in Japan during the early Meji period (1868–1912) when Japan opened itself to foreign trade and ideas. Foreign experts, such as the American zoologist Edward S. Morse (1838–1925) shared their knowledge of the sciences with Japanese scholars. The latter were interested in the social ramifications of Darwinism, particularly because they had access to translated versions of Spencer’s and Huxley’s work before they could read Darwin’s. Japanese Buddhists of the Nichiren tradition accepted many elements of evolutionary theory, but they rejected other elements, notably the struggle for existence, and randomness and chance, as this contradicts the role of karma in one’s circumstances at birth.

Among the advocates of the modern Nishiren Buddhist movement is Honda Nisshō (1867–1931). Honda emphasized the importance of retrogressions (in addition to progress, which was the main element in evolution that western authors such as Haeckel and Spencer considered). He strongly argued against social Darwinism, the application of evolutionary principles in social engineering, on religious grounds. He argued that we can accept humans are descended from apes without having to posit a pessimistic view of human nature that sees us as engaged in a struggle for survival with fellow human beings. Like Chinese Buddhists, Honda thought Kropotkin’s thesis of mutual aid was more compatible with Buddhism, but he was suspicious of Kropotkin’s anarchism (Burenina 2020). His work, like that of other East Asian Buddhists indicates that historically, Buddhists are not passive recipients of western science but creative interpreters. In some cases, their religious reasons for rejecting some metaphysical assumptions in evolutionary theory led them to anticipate recent developments in biology, such as the recognition of cooperation as an evolutionary principle.

Judaism is one of the three major Abrahamic monotheistic traditions, encompassing a range of beliefs and practices that express a covenant between God and the people of Israel. Central to both Jewish practice and beliefs is the study of texts, including the written Torah (the Tanakh, sometimes called “Hebrew Bible”), and the “Oral Law” of Rabbinic Judaism, compiled in such works like the Talmud. There is also a corpus of esoteric, mystical interpretations of biblical texts, the Kabbalah, which has influenced Jewish works on the relationship between science and religion. The Kabbalah also had an influence on Renaissance and early modern Christian authors such as Pico Della Mirandola, whose work helped to shape the scientific revolution (see the entry on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola ). The theologian Maimonides (Rabbi Moshe ben-Maimon, 1138–1204, aka Rambam) had an enduring influence on Jewish thought up until today, also in the science and religion literature.

Most contemporary strains of Judaism are Rabbinic, rather than biblical, and this has profound implications for the relationship between religion and science. While both Jews and Evangelical Christians emphasize the reading of sacred texts, the Rabbinic traditions (unlike, for example, the Evangelical Christian tradition) holds that reading and interpreting texts is far from straightforward. Scripture should not be read in a simple literal fashion. This opens up more space for accepting scientific theories (e.g., Big Bang cosmology) that seem at odds with a simple literal reading of the Torah (e.g., the six-day creation in Genesis) (Mitelman 2011 [ Other Internet Resources ]). Moreover, most non-Orthodox Jews in the US identify as politically liberal, so openness to science may also be an identity marker given that politically liberal people in the US have positive attitudes toward science (Pew Forum, 2021 [ Other Internet Resources ]).

Jewish thinkers have made substantive theoretical contributions to the relationship between science and religion, which differ in interesting respects from those seen in the literature written by Christian authors. To give just a few examples, Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), a prominent neo-Kantian German Jewish philosopher, thought of the relationship between Judaism and science in the light of the advances in scientific disciplines and the increased participation of Jewish scholars in the sciences. He argued that science, ethics, and Judaism should all be conceived of as distinct but complementary sciences. Cohen believed that his Jewish religious community was facing an epistemic crisis. All references to God had become suspect due to an adherence to naturalism, at first epistemological, but fast becoming ontological. Cohen saw the concept of a transcendent God as foundational to both Jewish practice and belief, so he thought adherence to wholesale naturalism threatened both Jewish orthodoxy and orthopraxy. As Teri Merrick (2020) argues, Cohen suspected this was in part due to epistemic oppression and self-censuring (though Cohen did not frame it in these terms). Because Jewish scientists wanted to retain credibility in the Christian majority culture, they underplayed and neglected the rich Jewish intellectual legacy in their practice. In response to this intellectual crisis, Cohen proposed to reframe Jewish thought and philosophy so that it would be recognized as both continuous with the tradition and essentially contributing to ethical and scientific advances. In this way, he reframed this tradition, articulating a broadly Kantian philosophy of science to combat a perceived conflict between Judaism and science (see the entry on Hermann Cohen for an in-depth discussion).

Jewish religious scholars have examined how science might influence religious beliefs, and vice versa. Rather than a unified response we see a spectrum of philosophical views, especially since the nineteenth and early twentieth century. As Shai Cherry (2003) surveys, Jewish scholars in the early twentieth century accepted biological evolution but were hesitant about Darwinian natural selection as the mechanism. The Latvian-born Israeli rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935) thought that religion and science are largely separate domains (a view somewhat similar to Gould’s NOMA), though he believed that there was a possible flow from religion to science. For example, Kook challenged the lack of directionality in Darwinian evolutionary theory. Using readings of the Kabbalah (and Halakhah, Jewish law), he proposed that biological evolution fits in a larger picture of cosmic evolution towards perfection.

By contrast, the American rabbi Morcedai Kaplan (1881–1983) thought information flow between science and religion could go in both directions, a view reminiscent to Barbour’s dialogue position. He repeatedly argued against scientism (the encroachment of science on too many aspects of human life, including ethics and religion), but he believed nevertheless we ought to apply scientific methods to religion. He saw reality as an unfolding process without a pre-ordained goal: it was progressive, but not teleologically determined. Kaplan emphasized the importance of morality (and identified God as the source of this process), and conceptualized humanity as not merely a passive recipient of evolutionary change, but an active participant, prefiguring work in evolutionary biology on the importance of agency in evolution (e.g., Okasha 2018). Thus, Kaplan’s reception of scientific theories, especially evolution, led him to formulate an early Jewish process theology.

Reform Judaism endorses an explicit anti-conflict view on the relationship between science and religion. For example, the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, the first document of the Reform rabbinate, has a statement that explicitly says that science and Judaism are not in conflict:

We hold that the modern discoveries of scientific researches in the domain of nature and history are not antagonistic to the doctrines of Judaism.

This Platform had an enduring influence on Reform Judaism over the next decades. Secular Jewish scientists such as Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Douglas Daniel Kahneman, and Stephen J. Gould have also reflected on the relationship between science and broader issues of existential significance, and have exerted considerable influence on the science and religion debate.

3. Central topics in the debate

Current work in the field of science and religion encompasses a wealth of topics, including free will, ethics, human nature, and consciousness. Contemporary natural theologians discuss fine-tuning, in particular design arguments based on it (e.g., R. Collins 2009), the interpretation of multiverse cosmology, and the significance of the Big Bang (see entries on fine-tuning arguments and natural theology and natural religion ). For instance, authors such as Hud Hudson (2013) have explored the idea that God has actualized the best of all possible multiverses. Here follows an overview of two topics that continue to generate substantial interest and debate: divine action (and the closely related topic of creation) and human origins. The focus will be on Christian work in science and religion, due to its prevalence in the literature.

Before scientists developed their views on cosmology and origins of the world, Western cultures already had a doctrine of creation, based on biblical texts (e.g., the first three chapters of Genesis and the book of Revelation) and the writings of church fathers such as Augustine. This doctrine of creation has the following interrelated features: first, God created the world ex nihilo, i.e., out of nothing. Differently put, God did not need any pre-existing materials to make the world, unlike, e.g., the Demiurge (from Greek philosophy), who created the world from chaotic, pre-existing matter. Second, God is distinct from the world; the world is not equal to or part of God (contra pantheism or panentheism) or a (necessary) emanation of God’s being (contra Neoplatonism). Rather, God created the world freely. This introduces an asymmetry between creator and creature: the world is radically contingent upon God’s creative act and is also sustained by God, whereas God does not need creation (Jaeger 2012b: 3). Third, the doctrine of creation holds that creation is essentially good (this is repeatedly affirmed in Genesis 1). The world does contain evil, but God does not directly cause this evil to exist. Moreover, God does not merely passively sustain creation, but rather plays an active role in it, using special divine actions (e.g., miracles and revelations) to care for creatures. Fourth, God made provisions for the end of the world, and will create a new heaven and earth, in this way eradicating evil.

Views on divine action are related to the doctrine of creation. Theologians commonly draw a distinction between general and special divine action, but within the field of science and religion there is no universally accepted definition of these two concepts. One way to distinguish them (Wildman 2008: 140) is to regard general divine action as the creation and sustenance of reality, and special divine action as the collection of specific providential acts, such as miracles and revelations to prophets. Drawing this distinction allows for creatures to be autonomous and indicates that God does not micromanage every detail of creation. Still, the distinction is not always clear-cut, as some phenomena are difficult to classify as either general or special divine action. For example, the Roman Catholic Eucharist (in which bread and wine become the body and blood of Jesus) or some healing miracles outside of scripture seem mundane enough to be part of general housekeeping (general divine action), but still seem to involve some form of special intervention on God’s part. Alston (1989) makes a related distinction between direct and indirect divine acts. God brings about direct acts without the use of natural causes, whereas indirect acts are achieved through natural causes. Using this distinction, there are four possible kinds of actions that God could do: God could not act in the world at all, God could act only directly, God could act only indirectly, or God could act both directly and indirectly.

In the science and religion literature, there are two central questions on creation and divine action. To what extent are the Christian doctrine of creation and traditional views of divine action compatible with science? How can these concepts be understood within a scientific context, e.g., what does it mean for God to create and act? Note that the doctrine of creation says nothing about the age of the Earth, nor does it specify a mode of creation. This allows for a wide range of possible views within science and religion, of which Young Earth creationism is but one that is consistent with scripture. Indeed, some scientific theories, such as the Big Bang theory, first proposed by the Belgian Roman Catholic priest and astronomer Georges Lemaître (1927), look congenial to the doctrine of creation. The theory is not in contradiction, and could be integrated into creatio ex nihilo as it specifies that the universe originated from an extremely hot and dense state around 13.8 billion years ago (Craig 2003), although some philosophers have argued against the interpretation that the universe has a temporal beginning (e.g., Pitts 2008).

The net result of scientific findings since the seventeenth century has been that God was increasingly pushed into the margins. This encroachment of science on the territory of religion happened in two ways: first, scientific findings—in particular from geology and evolutionary theory—challenged and replaced biblical accounts of creation. Although the doctrine of creation does not contain details of the mode and timing of creation, the Bible was regarded as authoritative, and that authority got eroded by the sciences. Second, the emerging concept of scientific laws in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century physics seemed to leave no room for special divine action. These two challenges will be discussed below, along with proposed solutions in the contemporary science and religion literature.

Christian authors have traditionally used the Bible as a source of historical information. Biblical exegesis of the creation narratives, especially Genesis 1 and 2 (and some other scattered passages, such as in the Book of Job), remains fraught with difficulties. Are these texts to be interpreted in a historical, metaphorical, or poetic fashion, and what are we to make of the fact that the order of creation differs between these accounts (Harris 2013)? The Anglican archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656) used the Bible to date the beginning of creation at 4004 BCE. Although such literalist interpretations of the biblical creation narratives were not uncommon, and are still used by Young Earth creationists today, theologians before Ussher already offered alternative, non-literalist readings of the biblical materials (e.g., Augustine De Genesi ad litteram , 416). From the seventeenth century onward, the Christian doctrine of creation came under pressure from geology, with findings suggesting that the Earth was significantly older than 4004 BCE. From the eighteenth century on, natural philosophers, such as Benoît de Maillet, Lamarck, Chambers, and Darwin, proposed transmutationist (what would now be called evolutionary) theories, which seem incompatible with scriptural interpretations of the special creation of species. Following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), there has been an ongoing discussion on how to reinterpret the doctrine of creation in the light of evolutionary theory (see Bowler 2009 for an overview).

Ted Peters and Martinez Hewlett (2003) have outlined a divine action spectrum to clarify the distinct positions about creation and divine action in the contemporary science and religion literature that focuses on Christians, agnostics, and atheists. They discern two dimensions in this spectrum: the degree of divine action in the natural world, and the form of causal explanations that relate divine action to natural processes. At one extreme are creationists. Like other theists, they believe God has created the world and its fundamental laws, and that God occasionally performs special divine actions (miracles) that intervene in the fabric of those laws. Creationists deny any role of natural selection in the origin of species. Within creationism, there are Old and Young Earth creationism, with the former accepting geology and rejecting evolutionary biology, and the latter rejecting both. Next to creationism is Intelligent Design, which affirms divine intervention in natural processes. Intelligent Design creationists (e.g., Dembski 1998) believe there is evidence of intelligent design in organisms’ irreducible complexity; on the basis of this they infer design and purposiveness (see Kojonen 2016). Like other creationists, they deny a significant role for natural selection in shaping organic complexity and they affirm an interventionist account of divine action. For political reasons they do not label their intelligent designer as God, as they hope to circumvent the constitutional separation of church and state in the US which prohibits teaching religious doctrines in public schools (Forrest & Gross 2004). Theistic evolutionists hold a non-interventionist approach to divine action: God creates indirectly, through the laws of nature (e.g., through natural selection). For example, the theologian John Haught (2000) regards divine providence as self-giving love, and natural selection and other natural processes as manifestations of this love, as they foster creaturely autonomy and independence. While theistic evolutionists allow for special divine action, particularly the miracle of the Incarnation in Christ (e.g., Deane-Drummond 2009), deists such as Michael Corey (1994) think there is only general divine action: God has laid out the laws of nature and lets it run like clockwork without further interference. Deism is still a long distance from ontological materialism, the view that the material world is all there is. Ontological materialists tend to hold that the universe is intelligible, with laws that scientists can discover, but there is no lawgiver and no creator.

Views on divine action were influenced by developments in physics and their philosophical interpretation. In the seventeenth century, natural philosophers, such as Robert Boyle and John Wilkins, developed a mechanistic view of the world as governed by orderly and lawlike processes. Laws, understood as immutable and stable, created difficulties for the concept of special divine action (Pannenberg 2002). How could God act in a world that was determined by laws?

One way to regard miracles and other forms of special divine action is to see them as actions that somehow suspend or ignore the laws of nature. David Hume (1748: 181), for instance, defined a miracle as “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the deity, or by the interposal of some invisible agent”, and, more recently, Richard Swinburne (1968: 320) defines a miracle as “a violation of a law of Nature by a god”. This concept of divine action is commonly labeled interventionist. Interventionism regards the world as causally deterministic, so God has to create room for special divine actions. By contrast, non-interventionist forms of divine action require a world that is, at some level, non-deterministic, so that God can act without having to suspend or ignore the laws of nature.

In the seventeenth century, the explanation of the workings of nature in terms of elegant physical laws suggested the ingenuity of a divine designer. The design argument reached its peak during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century (McGrath 2011). For example, Samuel Clarke (1705: part XI, cited in Schliesser 2012: 451) proposed an a posteriori argument from design by appealing to Newtonian science, calling attention to the

exquisite regularity of all the planets’ motions without epicycles, stations, retrogradations, or any other deviation or confusion whatsoever.

A late proponent of this view of nature as a perfect smooth machine is William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802).

Another conclusion that the new laws-based physics suggested was that the universe was able to run smoothly without requiring an intervening God. The increasingly deterministic understanding of the universe, ruled by deterministic causal laws as, for example, outlined by Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827), seemed to leave no room for special divine action, which is a key element of the traditional Christian doctrine of creation. Newton resisted interpretations like these in an addendum to the Principia in 1713: the planets’ motions could be explained by laws of gravity, but the positions of their orbits, and the positions of the stars—far enough apart so as not to influence each other gravitationally—required a divine explanation (Schliesser 2012). Alston (1989) argued, contra authors such as Polkinghorne (1998), that mechanistic, pre-twentieth century physics is compatible with divine action and divine free will. Assuming a completely deterministic world and divine omniscience, God could set up initial conditions and the laws of nature in such a way as to bring God’s plans about. In such a mechanistic world, every event is an indirect divine act.

Advances in twentieth-century physics, including the theories of general and special relativity, chaos theory, and quantum theory, overturned the mechanical clockwork view of creation. In the latter half of the twentieth century, chaos theory and quantum physics have been explored as possible avenues to reinterpret divine action. John Polkinghorne (1998) proposed that chaos theory not only presents epistemological limits to what we can know about the world, but that it also provides the world with an “ontological openness” in which God can operate without violating the laws of nature. One difficulty with this model is that it moves from our knowledge of the world to assumptions about how the world is: does chaos theory mean that outcomes are genuinely undetermined, or that we as limited knowers cannot predict them? Robert Russell (2006) proposed that God acts in quantum events. This would allow God to directly act in nature without having to contravene the laws of nature. His is therefore a non-interventionist model: since, under the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are no natural efficient causes at the quantum level, God is not reduced to a natural cause. Murphy (1995) outlined a similar bottom-up model where God acts in the space provided by quantum indeterminacy. These attempts to locate God’s actions either in chaos theory or quantum mechanics, which Lydia Jaeger (2012a) has termed “physicalism-plus-God”, have met with sharp criticism (e.g., Saunders 2002; Jaeger 2012a,b). After all, it is not even clear whether quantum theory would allow for free human action, let alone divine action, which we do not know much about (Jaeger 2012a). Next to this, William Carroll (2008), building on Thomistic philosophy, argues that authors such as Polkinghorne and Murphy are making a category mistake: God is not a cause in the way creatures are causes, competing with natural causes, and God does not need indeterminacy in order to act in the world. Rather, as primary cause God supports and grounds secondary causes. While this neo-Thomistic proposal is compatible with determinism (indeed, on this view, the precise details of physics do not matter much), it blurs the distinction between general and special divine action. Moreover, the Incarnation suggests that the idea of God as a cause among natural causes is not an alien idea in theology, and that God incarnate as Jesus at least sometimes acts as a natural cause (Sollereder 2015).

There has been a debate on the question to what extent randomness is a genuine feature of creation, and how divine action and chance interrelate. Chance and stochasticity are important features of evolutionary theory (the non-random retention of random variations). In a famous thought experiment, Gould (1989) imagined that we could rewind the tape of life back to the time of the Burgess Shale (508 million years ago); the chance that a rerun of the tape of life would end up with anything like the present-day life forms is vanishingly small. However, Simon Conway Morris (2003) has insisted species very similar to the ones we know now, including humans, would evolve under a broad range of conditions.

Under a theist interpretation, randomness could either be a merely apparent aspect of creation, or a genuine feature. Plantinga suggests that randomness is a physicalist interpretation of the evidence. God may have guided every mutation along the evolutionary process. In this way, God could

guide the course of evolutionary history by causing the right mutations to arise at the right time and preserving the forms of life that lead to the results he intends. (2011: 121)

By contrast, other authors see stochasticity as a genuine design feature, and not just as a physicalist gloss. Their challenge is to explain how divine providence is compatible with genuine randomness. (Under a deistic view, one could simply say that God started the universe up and did not interfere with how it went, but that option is not open to the theist, and most authors in the field of science and religion are not deists.) The neo-Thomist Elizabeth Johnson (1996) argues that divine providence and true randomness are compatible: God gives creatures true causal powers, thus making creation more excellent than if they lacked such powers. Random occurrences are also secondary causes. Chance is a form of divine creativity that creates novelty, variety, and freedom. One implication of this view is that God may be a risk taker—although, if God has a providential plan for possible outcomes, there is unpredictability but not risk. Johnson uses metaphors of risk taking that, on the whole, leave the creator in a position of control. Creation, then, is akin to jazz improvisation. Why would God take risks? There are several solutions to this question. The free will theodicy says that a creation that exhibits stochasticity can be truly free and autonomous:

Authentic love requires freedom, not manipulation. Such freedom is best supplied by the open contingency of evolution, and not by strings of divine direction attached to every living creature. (Miller 1999 [2007: 289])

The “only way theodicy” goes a step further, arguing that a combination of laws and chance is not only the best way, but the only way for God to achieve God’s creative plans (see, e.g., Southgate 2008 for a defense).

Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have similar creation stories, which ultimately go back to the first book of the Hebrew Bible (Genesis). According to Genesis, humans are the result of a special act of creation. Genesis 1 offers an account of the creation of the world in six days, with the creation of human beings on the sixth day. It specifies that humans were created male and female, and that they were made in God’s image. Genesis 2 provides a different order of creation, where God creates humans earlier in the sequence (before other animals), and only initially creates a man, later fashioning a woman out of the man’s rib. Islam has a creation narrative similar to Genesis 2, with Adam being fashioned out of clay. These handcrafted humans are regarded as the ancestors of all living humans today. Together with Ussher’s chronology, the received view in eighteenth-century Europe was that humans were created only about 6000 years ago, in an act of special creation.

Humans occupy a privileged position in these creation accounts. In Christianity, Judaism, and some strands of Islam, humans are created in the image of God ( imago Dei ). Humans also occupy a special place in creation as a result of the Fall. In Genesis 3, the account of the Fall stipulates that the first human couple lived in the Garden of Eden in a state of innocence and/or righteousness. This means they were able to not sin, whereas we are no longer able to refrain from sinning. By eating from the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil they fell from this state, and death, manual labor, as well as pain in childbirth were introduced. Moreover, as a result of this so-called “original sin”, the effects of Adam’s sin are passed on to every human being. The Augustinian interpretation of original sin also emphasizes that our reasoning capacities have been marred by the distorting effects of sin (the so-called noetic effects of sin): as a result of sin, our original perceptual and reasoning capacities have been marred. This interpretation is influential in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. For example, Plantinga (2000) appeals to the noetic effects of sin to explain religious diversity and unbelief, offering this as an explanation for why not everyone believes in God even though this belief would be properly basic.

There are different ways in which Christians have thought about the Fall and original sin. In Western Christianity, Augustine’s doctrine of original sin is very influential, though there is no generally accepted Christian doctrine on original sin (Couenhoven 2005). For Augustine, humans were in a state of original righteousness before the Fall, and by their action not only marred themselves but the entirety of creation. By contrast, Eastern Orthodox churches are more influenced by Irenaeus, an early Church Father who argued that humans were originally innocent and immature, rather than righteous. John Hick (1966) was an influential proponent of “Irenaean style” theodicy in contemporary Christianity.

Over the past decades, authors in the Christian religion and science literature have explored these two interpretations (Irenaean, Augustinian) and how they can be made compatible with scientific findings (see De Smedt and De Cruz 2020 for a review). Scientific findings and theories relevant to human origins come from a range of disciplines, in particular geology, paleoanthropology (the study of ancestral hominins, using fossils and other evidence), archaeology, and evolutionary biology. These findings challenge traditional religious accounts of humanity, including the special creation of humans, the imago Dei , the historical Adam and Eve, and original sin.

In natural philosophy, the dethroning of humanity from its position as a specially created species predates Darwin and can already be found in early transmutationist publications. For example, Benoît de Maillet’s posthumously published Telliamed (1748, the title is his name in reverse) traces the origins of humans and other terrestrial animals from sea creatures. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed chimpanzees as the ancestors to humans in his Philosophie Zoologique (1809). The Scottish publisher and geologist Robert Chambers’ anonymously published Vestiges of Creation (1844) stirred controversy with its detailed naturalistic account of the origin of species. He proposed that the first organisms arose through spontaneous generation, and that all subsequent organisms evolved from them. Moreover, he argued that humans have a single evolutionary origin:

The probability may now be assumed that the human race sprung from one stock, which was at first in a state of simplicity, if not barbarism (1844: 305)

a view starkly different from the Augustinian interpretation of humanity as being in a prelapsarian state of perfection.

Darwin was initially reluctant to publish on human origins. While he did not discuss human evolution in his Origin of Species , he promised, “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history” (1859: 487). Huxley (1863) wrote Man’s Place in Nature , the first book on human evolution from a Darwinian point of view which discussed fossil evidence, such as the then recently uncovered Neanderthal fossils from Gibraltar. Darwin’s (1871) Descent of Man identified Africa as the likely place where humans originated, and used comparative anatomy to demonstrate that chimpanzees and gorillas were closely related to humans. In the twentieth century, paleoanthropologists debated whether humans separated from the other great apes (at the time wrongly classified into the paraphyletic group Pongidae ) about 15 million years ago, or about 5 million years ago. Molecular clocks—first immune responses (e.g., Sarich & Wilson 1967), then direct genetic evidence (e.g., Rieux et al. 2014)—favor the shorter chronology.

The discovery of many hominin fossils, including Ardipithecus ramidus (4.4 million years ago), Australopithecus afarensis (nicknamed “Lucy”), about 3.5 million years old, the Sima de los Huesos hominins (about 400,000 years old, ancestors to the Neanderthals), Homo neanderthalensis , and the intriguing Homo floresiensis (small hominins who lived on the island of Flores, Indonesia, dated to 700,000–50,000 years ago) have created a rich, complex picture of hominin evolution. These finds are supplemented by detailed analyses of ancient DNA extracted from fossil remains, bringing to light a previously unknown species of hominin (the Denisovans) who lived in Siberia up to about 40,000 years ago. Taken together, this evidence indicates that humans did not evolve in a simple linear fashion, but that human evolution resembles an intricate branching tree with many dead ends, in line with the evolution of other species. Genetic and fossil evidence favors a predominantly African origin of our species Homo sapiens (as early as 315,000 years ago) with limited gene-flow from other hominin species such as Neanderthals and Denisovans (see, e.g., Richter et al. 2017).

In the light of these scientific findings, contemporary science and religion authors have reconsidered the questions of human uniqueness, imago Dei , the Incarnation, and the historicity of original sin. Some authors have attempted to reinterpret human uniqueness as a number of species-specific cognitive and behavioral adaptations. For example, van Huyssteen (2006) considers the ability of humans to engage in cultural and symbolic behavior, which became prevalent in the Upper Paleolithic, as a key feature of uniquely human behavior. Other theologians have opted to broaden the notion of imago Dei. Given what we know about the capacities for morality and reason in non-human animals, Celia Deane-Drummond (2012) and Oliver Putz (2009) reject an ontological distinction between humans and non-human animals, and argue for a reconceptualization of the imago Dei to include at least some nonhuman animals. Joshua Moritz (2011) raises the question of whether extinct hominin species, such as Homo neanderthalensis and Homo floresiensis , which co-existed with Homo sapiens for some part of prehistory, partook in the divine image.

There is also discussion of how we can understand the Incarnation (the belief that Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, became a human being) with the evidence we have of human evolution. Some interpret Christ’s divine nature quite liberally. For instance, Peacocke (1979) regarded Jesus as the point where humanity is perfect for the first time. Christ is the progression and culmination of what evolution has been working toward in the teleological, progressivist interpretation of evolution by Teilhard de Chardin (1971). According to Teilhard, evil is still horrible but no longer incomprehensible; it becomes a natural feature of creation—since God chose evolution as his mode of creation, evil arises as an inevitable byproduct. Deane-Drummond (2009), however, points out that this interpretation is problematic: Teilhard worked within a Spencerian progressivist model of evolution, and he was anthropocentric, seeing humanity as the culmination of evolution. Contemporary evolutionary theory has repudiated the Spencerian progressivist view, and adheres to a stricter Darwinian model. Deane-Drummond, who regards human morality as lying on a continuum with the social behavior of other animals, conceptualizes the Fall as a mythical, rather than a historical event. It represents humanity’s sharper awareness of moral concerns and its ability to make wrong choices. She regards Christ as incarnate wisdom, situated in a theodrama that plays against the backdrop of an evolving creation. Like all human beings, Christ is connected to the rest of creation through common descent. By saving us, he saves the whole of creation.

Debates on the Fall and the historical Adam have centered on how these narratives can be understood in the light of contemporary science. On the face of it, limitations of our cognitive capacities can be naturalistically explained as a result of biological constraints, so there seems little explanatory gain to appeal to the narrative of the Fall. Some have attempted to interpret the concepts of sin and Fall in ways that are compatible with paleoanthropology, notably Peter van Inwagen (2004) and Jamie K. Smith (2017), who have argued that God could have providentially guided hominin evolution until there was a tightly-knit community of primates, endowed with reason, language, and free will, and this community was in close union with God. At some point in history, these hominins somehow abused their free will to distance themselves from God. These narratives follow the Augustinian tradition. Others, such as John Schneider (2014, 2020), on the other hand, argue that there is no genetic or paleoanthropological evidence for such a community of superhuman beings.

This survey has given a sense of the richness of the literature of science and religion. Giving an exhaustive overview would go beyond the scope of an encyclopedia entry. Because science and religion are such broad terms, the literature has split up in diverse fields of “science engaged theology”, where a specific claim or subfield in science is studied in relation to a specific claim in theology (Perry & Ritchie 2018). For example, rather than ask if Christianity is compatible with science, one could ask whether Christian eschatology is compatible with scientific claims about cultural evolution, or the cosmic fate of the universe. As the scope of science and religion becomes less parochial and more global in its outlook, the different topics the field can engage with become very diverse.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Brown, Malcolm, 2008, “Good Religion Needs Good science”, Church of England web site. [ Brown 2008 available online (archived) ].
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• Pew Forum, 2021, “Most U.S. Jews Identify as Democrats, but Most Orthodox Are Republicans”, Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project, 4 May 2021. [ Pew Forum 2021 available online ]
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• Wikipedia article on the relationship between religion and science .
• National Center for Science Education: Science and Religion .
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Comte, Auguste | cosmological argument | Hume, David: on religion | teleology: teleological arguments for God’s existence | theology, natural and natural religion

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Bryce Huebner, Evan Thompson, Meir-Simchah Panzer, Teri Merrick, Geoff Mitelman, Joshua Yuter, Katherine Dormandy, Isaac Choi, Egil Asprem, Johan De Smedt, Taede Smedes, H.E. Baber, Fabio Gironi, Erkki Kojonen, Andreas Reif, Raphael Neelamkavil, Hans Van Eyghen, and Nicholas Joll, for their feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript.

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Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology

World Religions Overview Essay

The Movement of Religion and Ecology: Emerging Field and Dynamic Force

Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, Yale University

Originally published in the Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology

As many United Nations reports attest, we humans are destroying the life-support systems of the Earth at an alarming rate. Ecosystems are being degraded by rapid industrialization and relentless development. The data keeps pouring in that we are altering the climate and toxifying the air, water, and soil of the planet so that the health of humans and other species is at risk. Indeed, the Swedish scientist, Johan Rockstrom, and his colleagues, are examining which planetary boundaries are being exceeded. (Rockstrom and Klum, 2015)

The explosion of population from 3 billion in 1960 to more then 7 billion currently and the subsequent demands on the natural world seem to be on an unsustainable course. The demands include meeting basic human needs of a majority of the world’s people, but also feeding the insatiable desire for goods and comfort spread by the allure of materialism. The first is often called sustainable development; the second is unsustainable consumption. The challenge of rapid economic growth and consumption has brought on destabilizing climate change. This is coming into full focus in alarming ways including increased floods and hurricanes, droughts and famine, rising seas and warming oceans.

Can we turn our course to avert disaster? There are several indications that this may still be possible. On September 25, 2015 after the Pope addressed the UN General Assembly, 195 member states adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). On December 12, 2015 these same members states endorsed the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Both of these are important indications of potential reversal. The Climate Agreement emerged from the dedicated work of governments and civil society along with business partners. The leadership of UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres, and many others was indispensable.

One of the inspirations for the Climate Agreement and for the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals was the release of the Papal Encyclical, Laudato Si’ in June 2015. The encyclical encouraged the moral forces of concern for both the environment and people to be joined in “integral ecology”.  “The cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor” are now linked as was not fully visible before. (Boff, 1997 and in the encyclical) Many religious and environmental communities are embracing this integrated perspective and will, no doubt, foster it going forward. The question is how can the world religions contribute more effectively to this renewed ethical momentum for change. For example, what will be their long-term response to population growth? As this is addressed in the article by Robert Wyman and Guigui Yao, we will not take it up here. Instead, we will consider some of the challenges and possibilities amid the dream of progress and the lure of consumption.

Challenges: The Dream of Progress and the Religion of Consumption

Consumption appears to have become an ideology or quasi-religion, not only in the West but also around the world. Faith in economic growth drives both producers and consumers. The dream of progress is becoming a distorted one. This convergence of our unlimited demands with an unquestioned faith in economic progress raises questions about the roles of religions in encouraging, discouraging, or ignoring our dominant drive toward appropriately satisfying material needs or inappropriately indulging material desires. Integral ecology supports the former and critiques the latter.

Moreover, a consumerist ideology depends upon and simultaneously contributes to a worldview based on the instrumental rationality of the human. That is, the assumption for decision-making is that all choices are equally clear and measurable. Market based metrics such as price, utility, or efficiency are dominant. This can result in utilitarian views of a forest as so much board feet or simply as a mechanistic complex of ecosystems that provide services to the human.

One long-term effect of this is that the individual human decision-maker is further distanced from nature because nature is reduced to measurable entities for profit or use. From this perspective we humans may be isolated in our perceived uniqueness as something apart from the biological web of life. In this context, humans do not seek identity and meaning in the numinous beauty of the world, nor do they experience themselves as dependent on a complex of life-supporting interactions of air, water, and soil. Rather, this logic sees humans as independent, rational decision-makers who find their meaning and identity in systems of management that now attempt to co-opt the language of conservation and environmental concern. Happiness is derived from simply creating and having more material goods. This perspective reflects a reading of our current geological period as human induced by our growth as a species that is now controlling the planet. This current era is being called the “Anthropocene” because of our effect on the planet in contrast to the prior 12,000 year epoch known as the Holocene.

This human capacity to imagine and implement a utilitarian-based worldview regarding nature has undermined many of the ancient insights of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions. For example, some religions, attracted by the individualistic orientations of market rationalism and short-term benefits of social improvement, seized upon material accumulation as containing divine sanction. Thus, Max Weber identified the rise of Protestantism with an ethos of inspirited work and accumulated capital.

Weber also identified the growing disenchantment from the world of nature with the rise of global capitalism. Karl Marx recognized the “metabolic rift” in which human labor and nature become alienated from cycles of renewal. The earlier mystique of creation was lost. Wonder, beauty, and imagination as ways of knowing were gradually superseded by the analytical reductionism of modernity such that technological and economic entrancement have become key inspirations of progress.

Challenges: Religions Fostering Anthropocentrism

This modern, instrumental view of matter as primarily for human use arises in part from a dualistic Western philosophical view of mind and matter. Adapted into Jewish, Christian and Islamic religious perspectives, this dualism associates mind with the soul as a transcendent spiritual entity given sovereignty and dominion over matter. Mind is often valued primarily for its rationality in contrast to a lifeless world. At the same time we ensure our radical discontinuity from it.

Interestingly, views of the uniqueness of the human bring many traditional religious perspectives into sync with modern instrumental rationalism. In Western religious traditions, for example, the human is seen as an exclusively gifted creature with a transcendent soul that manifests the divine image and likeness. Consequently, this soul should be liberated from the material world. In many contemporary reductionist perspectives (philosophical and scientific) the human with rational mind and technical prowess stands as the pinnacle of evolution. Ironically, religions emphasizing the uniqueness of the human as the image of God meet market-driven applied science and technology precisely at this point of the special nature of the human to justify exploitation of the natural world. Anthropocentrism in various forms, religious, philosophical, scientific, and economic, has led, perhaps inadvertently, to the dominance of humans in this modern period, now called the Anthropocene. (It can be said that certain strands of the South Asian religions have emphasized the importance of humans escaping from nature into transcendent liberation. However, such forms of radical dualism are not central to the East Asian traditions or indigenous traditions.)

From the standpoint of rational analysis, many values embedded in religions, such as a sense of the sacred, the intrinsic value of place, the spiritual dimension of the human, moral concern for nature, and care for future generations, are incommensurate with an objectified monetized worldview as they not quantifiable. Thus, they are often ignored as externalities, or overridden by more pragmatic profit-driven considerations. Contemporary nation-states in league with transnational corporations have seized upon this individualistic, property-based, use-analysis to promote national sovereignty, security, and development exclusively for humans.

Possibilities: Systems Science

Yet, even within the realm of so-called scientific, rational thought, there is not a uniform approach. Resistance to the easy marriage of reductionist science and instrumental rationality comes from what is called systems science and new ecoogy. By this we refer to a movement within empirical, experimental science of exploring the interaction of nature and society as complex dynamic systems. This approach stresses both analysis and synthesis – the empirical act of observation, as well as placement of the focus of study within the context of a larger whole. Systems science resists the temptation to take the micro, empirical, reductive act as the complete description of a thing, but opens analysis to the large interactive web of life to which we belong, from ecosystems to the biosphere. There are numerous examples of this holistic perspective in various branches of ecology. And this includes overcoming the nature-human divide. (Schmitz 2016) Aldo Leopold understood this holistic interconnection well when he wrote: “We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” (Leopold, 1966)

Collaboration of Science and Religion

Within this inclusive framework, scientists have been moving for some time beyond simply distanced observations to engaged concern. The Pope’s encyclical, Laudato Si , has elevated the level of visibility and efficacy of this conversation between science and religion as perhaps never before on a global level. Similarly, many other statements from the world religions are linking the wellbeing of people and the planet for a flourishing future. For example, the World Council of Churches has been working for four decades to join humans and nature in their program on Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation.

Many scientists such as Thomas Lovejoy, E.O. Wilson, Jane Lubchenco, Peter Raven, and Ursula Goodenough recognize the importance of religious and cultural values when discussing solutions to environmental challenges. Other scientists such as Paul Ehrlich and Donald Kennedy have called for major studies of human behavior and values in relation to environmental issues. ( Science , July 2005) This has morphed into the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere. (mahb.standford.edu). Since 2009 the Ecological Society of America has established an Earth Stewardship Initiative with yearly panels and publications.  Many environmental studies programs are now seeking to incorporate these broader ethical and behavioral approaches into the curriculum.

Possibilities: Extinction and Religious Response

The stakes are high, however, and the path toward limiting ourselves within planetary boundaries is not smooth. Scientists are now reporting that because of the population explosion, our consuming habits, and our market drive for resources, we are living in the midst of a mass extinction period. This period represents the largest loss of species since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago when the Cenozoic period began. In other words, we are shutting down life systems on the planet and causing the end of this large-scale geological era with little awareness of what we are doing or its consequences.

As the cultural historian Thomas Berry observed some years ago, we are making macrophase changes on the planet with microphase wisdom. Indeed, some people worry that these rapid changes have outstripped the capacity of our religions, ethics, and spiritualities to meet the complex challenges we are facing.

The question arises whether the wisdom traditions of the human community, embedded in institutional religions and beyond, can embrace integral ecology at the level needed? Can the religions provide leadership into a synergistic era of human-Earth relations characterized by empathy, regeneration, and resilience? Or are religions themselves the wellspring of those exclusivist perspectives in which human societies disconnect themselves from other groups and from the natural world? Are religions caught in their own meditative promises of transcendent peace and redemptive bliss in paradisal abandon? Or does their drive for exclusive salvation or truth claims cause them to try to overcome or convert the Other?

Authors in this volume are exploring these issues within religious and spiritual communities regarding the appropriate responses of the human to our multiple environmental and social challenges. What forms of symbolic visioning and ethical imagining can call forth a transformation of consciousness and conscience for our Earth community? Can religions and spiritualites provide vision and inspiration for grounding and guiding mutually enhancing human-Earth relations? Have we arrived at a point where we realize that more scientific statistics on environmental problems, more legislation, policy or regulation, and more economic analysis, while necessary, are no longer sufficient for the large-scale social transformations needed? This is where the world religions, despite their limitations, surely have something to contribute.

Such a perspective includes ethics, practices, and spiritualities from the world’s cultures that may or may not be connected with institutional forms of religion. Thus spiritual ecology and nature religions are an important part of the discussions and are represented in this volume. Our own efforts have focused on the world religions and indigenous traditions. Our decade long training in graduate school and our years of living and traveling throughout Asia and the West gave us an early appreciation for religions as dynamic, diverse, living traditions. We are keenly aware of the multiple forms of syncretism and hybridization in the world religions and spiritualties. We have witnessed how they are far from monolithic or impervious to change in our travels to more than 60 countries.

Problems and Promise of Religions

Several qualifications regarding the various roles of religion should thus be noted. First, we do not wish to suggest here that any one religious tradition has a privileged ecological perspective. Rather, multiple interreligious perspectives may be the most helpful in identifying the contributions of the world religions to the flourishing of life.

We also acknowledge that there is frequently a disjunction between principles and practices: ecologically sensitive ideas in religions are not always evident in environmental practices in particular civilizations. Many civilizations have overused their environments, with or without religious sanction.

Finally, we are keenly aware that religions have all too frequently contributed to tensions and conflict among various groups, both historically and at present. Dogmatic rigidity, inflexible claims of truth, and misuse of institutional and communal power by religions have led to tragic consequences in many parts of the globe.

Nonetheless, while religions have often preserved traditional ways, they have also provoked social change. They can be limiting but also liberating in their outlooks. In the twentieth century, for example, religious leaders and theologians helped to give birth to progressive movements such as civil rights for minorities, social justice for the poor, and liberation for women.  Although the world religions have been slow to respond to our current environmental crises, their moral authority and their institutional power may help effect a change in attitudes, practices, and public policies. Now the challenge is a broadening of their ethical perspectives.

Traditionally the religions developed ethics for homicide, suicide, and genocide. Currently they need to respond to biocide, ecocide, and geocide. (Berry, 2009)

Retrieval, Reevaluation, Reconstruction

There is an inevitable disjunction between the examination of historical religious traditions in all of their diversity and complexity and the application of teachings, ethics, or practices to contemporary situations. While religions have always been involved in meeting contemporary challenges over the centuries, it is clear that the global environmental crisis is larger and more complex than anything in recorded human history. Thus, a simple application of traditional ideas to contemporary problems is unlikely to be either possible or adequate. In order to address ecological problems properly, religious and spiritual leaders, laypersons and academics have to be in dialogue with scientists, environmentalists, economists, businesspeople, politicians, and educators. Hence the articles in this volume are from various key sectors.

With these qualifications in mind we can then identify three methodological approaches that appear in the still emerging study of religion and ecology. These are retrieval, reevaluation, and reconstruction. Retrieval involves the scholarly investigation of scriptural and commentarial sources in order to clarify religious perspectives regarding human-Earth relations. This requires that historical and textual studies uncover resources latent within the tradition. In addition, retrieval can identify ethical codes and ritual customs of the tradition in order to discover how these teachings were put into practice. Traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) is an important part of this for all the world religions, especially indigenous traditions.

With reevaluation, traditional teachings are evaluated with regard to their relevance to contemporary circumstances. Are the ideas, teachings, or ethics present in these traditions appropriate for shaping more ecologically sensitive attitudes and sustainable practices? Reevaluation also questions ideas that may lead to inappropriate environmental practices. For example, are certain religious tendencies reflective of otherworldly or world-denying orientations that are not helpful in relation to pressing ecological issues? It asks as well whether the material world of nature has been devalued by a particular religion and whether a model of ethics focusing solely on human interactions is adequate to address environmental problems.

Finally, reconstruction suggests ways that religious traditions might adapt their teachings to current circumstances in new and creative ways. These may result in new syntheses or in creative modifications of traditional ideas and practices to suit modern modes of expression. This is the most challenging aspect of the emerging field of religion and ecology and requires sensitivity to who is speaking about a tradition in the process of reevaluation and reconstruction. Postcolonial critics have appropriately highlighted the complex issues surrounding the problem of who is representing or interpreting a religious tradition or even what constitutes that tradition. Nonetheless, practitioners and leaders of particular religions are finding grounds for creative dialogue with scholars of religions in these various phases of interpretation.

Religious Ecologies and Religious Cosmologies

As part of the retrieval, reevaluation, and reconstruction of religions we would identify “religious ecologies” and “religious cosmologies” as ways that religions have functioned in the past and can still function at present. Religious ecologies are ways of orienting and grounding whereby humans undertake specific practices of nurturing and transforming self and community in a particular cosmological context that regards nature as inherently valuable. Through cosmological stories humans narrate and experience the larger matrix of mystery in which life arises, unfolds, and flourishes. These are what we call religious cosmologies. These two, namely religious ecologies and religious cosmologies, can be distinguished but not separated. Together they provide a context for navigating life’s challenges and affirming the rich spiritual value of human-Earth relations.

Human communities until the modern period sensed themselves as grounded in and dependent on the natural world. Thus, even when the forces of nature were overwhelming, the regenerative capacity of the natural world opened a way forward. Humans experienced the processes of the natural world as interrelated, both practically and symbolically. These understandings were expressed in traditional environmental knowledge, namely, in hunting and agricultural practices such as the appropriate use of plants, animals, and land. Such knowledge was integrated in symbolic language and practical norms, such as prohibitions, taboos, and limitations on ecosystems’ usage. All this was based in an understanding of nature as the source of nurturance and kinship. The Lakota people still speak of “all my relations” as an expression of this kinship. Such perspectives will need to be incorporated into strategies to solve environmental problems. Humans are part of nature and their cultural and religious values are critical dimensions of the discussion.

Multidisciplinary approaches: Environmental Humanities

We are recognizing, then, that the environmental crisis is multifaceted and requires multidisciplinary approaches. As this book indicates, the insights of scientific modes of analytical and synthetic knowing are indispensable for understanding and responding to our contemporary environmental crisis. So also, we need new technologies such as industrial ecology, green chemistry, and renewable energy. Clearly ecological economics is critical along with green governance and legal policies as articles in this volume illustrate.

In this context it is important to recognize different ways of knowing that are manifest in the humanities, such as artistic expressions, historical perspectives, philosophical inquiry, and religious understandings. These honor emotional intelligence, affective insight, ethical valuing, and spiritual awakening.

Environmental humanities is a growing and diverse area of study within humanistic disciplines. In the last several decades, new academic courses and programs, research journals and monographs, have blossomed. This broad-based inquiry has sparked creative investigation into multiple ways, historically and at present, of understanding and interacting with nature, constructing cultures, developing communities, raising food, and exchanging goods. 

It is helpful to see the field of religion and ecology as part of this larger emergence of environmental humanities. While it can be said that environmental history, literature, and philosophy are some four decades old, the field of religions and ecology began some two decades ago. It was preceded, however, by work among various scholars, particularly Christian theologians. Some eco-feminists theologians, such as Rosemary Ruether and Sallie McFague, Mary Daly, and Ivone Gebara led the way.

The Emerging Field of Religion and Ecology

An effort to identify and to map religiously diverse attitudes and practices toward nature was the focus of a three-year international conference series on world religions and ecology. Organized by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, ten conferences were held at the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions from 1996-1998 that resulted in a ten volume book series (1997-2004). Over 800 scholars of religion and environmentalists participated. The director of the Center, Larry Sullivan, gave space and staff for the conferences. He chose to limit their scope to the world religions and indigenous religions rather than “nature religions”, such as wicca or paganism, which the organizers had hoped to include.

Culminating conferences were held in fall 1998 at Harvard and in New York at the United Nations and the American Museum of Natural History where 1000 people attended and Bill Moyers presided. At the UN conference Tucker and Grim founded the Forum on Religion and Ecology, which is now located at Yale. They organized a dozen more conferences and created an electronic newsletter that is now sent to over 12,000 people around the world. In addition, they developed a major website for research, education, and outreach in this area (fore.yale.edu). The conferences, books, website, and newsletter have assisted in the emergence of a new field of study in religion and ecology. Many people have helped in this process including Whitney Bauman and Sam Mickey who are now moving the field toward discussing the need for planetary ethics. A Canadian Forum on Religion and Ecology was established in 2002, a European Forum for the Study of Religion and the Environment was formed in 2005, and a Forum on Religion and Ecology @ Monash in Australia in 2011.

Courses on this topic are now offered in numerous colleges and universities across North America and in other parts of the world. A Green Seminary Initiative has arisen to help educate seminarians. Within the American Academy of Religion there is a vibrant group focused on scholarship and teaching in this area. A peer-reviewed journal, Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology , is celebrating its 25 th year of publication. Another journal has been publishing since 2007, the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture . A two volume Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature edited by Bron Taylor has helped shape the discussions, as has the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture he founded. Clearly this broad field of study will continue to expand as the environmental crisis grows in complexity and requires increasingly creative interdisciplinary responses.

The work in religion and ecology rests in an intersection between the academic field within education and the dynamic force within society. This is why we see our work not so much as activist, but rather as “engaged scholarship” for the flourishing of our shared planetary life. This is part of a broader integration taking place to link concerns for both people and the planet. This has been fostered in part by the twenty-volume Ecology and Justice Series from Orbis Books and with the work of John Cobb, Larry Rasmussen, Dieter Hessel, Heather Eaton, Cynthia Moe-Loebeda, and others. The Papal Encyclical is now highlighting this linkage of eco-justice as indispensable for an integral ecology.

The Dynamic Force of Religious Environmentalism

All of these religious traditions, then, are groping to find the languages, symbols, rituals, and ethics for sustaining both ecosystems and humans. Clearly there are obstacles to religions moving into their ecological, eco-justice, and planetary phases. The religions are themselves challenged by their own bilingual languages, namely, their languages of transcendence, enlightenment, and salvation; and their languages of immanence, sacredness of Earth, and respect for nature. Yet, as the field of religion and ecology has developed within academia, so has the force of religious environmentalism emerged around the planet. Roger Gottlieb documents this in his book A Greener Faith . (Gottlieb 2006) The Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew held international symposia on “Religion, Science and the Environment” focused on water issues (1995-2009) that we attended. He has made influential statements on this issue for 20 years. The Parliament of World Religions has included panels on this topic since 1998 and most expansively in 2015. Since 1995 the UK based Alliance of Religion and Conservation (ARC), led by Martin Palmer, has been doing significant work with religious communities around under the patronage of Prince Philip.

These efforts are recovering a sense of place, which is especially clear in the environmental resilience and regeneration practices of indigenous peoples. It is also evident in valuing the sacred pilgrimage places in the Abrahamic traditions (Jerusalem, Rome, and Mecca) both historically and now ecologically. So also East Asia and South Asia attention to sacred mountains, caves, and other pilgrimage sites stands in marked contrast to massive pollution.

In many settings around the world religious practitioners are drawing together religious ways of respecting place, land, and life with understanding of environmental science and the needs of local communities. There have been official letters by Catholic Bishops in the Philippines and in Alberta, Canada alarmed by the oppressive social conditions and ecological disasters caused by extractive industries. Catholic nuns and laity in North America, Australia, England, and Ireland sponsor educational programs and conservation plans drawing on the eco-spiritual vision of Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme. Also inspired by Berry and Swimme, Paul Winter’s Solstice celebrations and Earth Mass at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York Winter have been taking place for three decades.

Even in the industrial growth that grips China, there are calls from many in politics, academia, and NGOs to draw on Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist perspectives for environmental change. In 2008 we met with Pan Yue, the Deputy Minister of the Environment, who has studied these traditions and sees them as critical to Chinese environmental ethics. In India, Hinduism is faced with the challenge of clean up of sacred rivers, such as the Ganges and the Yamuna. To this end in 2010 with Hindu scholars, David Haberman and Christopher Chapple, we organized a conference of scientists and religious leaders in Delhi and Vrindavan to address the pollution of the Yamuna.

Many religious groups are focused on climate change and energy issues. For example, InterFaith Power and Light and GreenFaith are encouraging religious communities to reduce their carbon footprint. Earth Ministry in Seattle is leading protests against oil pipelines and terminals. The Evangelical Environmental Network and other denominations are emphasizing climate change as a moral issue that is disproportionately affecting the poor. In Canada and the US the Indigenous Environmental Network is speaking out regarding damage caused by resource extraction, pipelines, and dumping on First Peoples’ Reserves and beyond. All of the religions now have statements on climate change as a moral issue and they were strongly represented in the People’s Climate March in September 2015. Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, published the first collection of articles on religion and climate change from two conferences we organized there. (Tucker & Grim, 2001)

Striking examples of religion and ecology have occurred in the Islamic world. In June 2001 and May 2005 the Islamic Republic of Iran led by President Khatami and the United Nations Environment Programme sponsored conferences in Tehran that we attended. They were focused on Islamic principles and practices for environmental protection. The Iranian Constitution identifies Islamic values for ecology and threatens legal sanctions. One of the earliest spokespersons for religion and ecology is the Iranian scholar, Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Fazlun Khalid in the UK founded the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Science. In Indonesia in 2014 a fatwa was issued declaring that killing an endangered species is prohibited.

These examples illustrate ways in which an emerging alliance of religion and ecology is occurring around the planet. These traditional values within the religions now cause them to awaken to environmental crises in ways that are strikingly different from science or policy. But they may find interdisciplinary ground for dialogue in concerns for eco-justice, sustainability, and cultural motivations for transformation. The difficulty, of course, is that the religions are often preoccupied with narrow sectarian interests. However, many people, including the Pope, are calling on the religions to go beyond these interests and become a moral leaven for change.

Renewal Through Laudato Si’

Pope Francis is highlighting an integral ecology that brings together concern for humans and the Earth. He makes it clear that the environment can no longer be seen as only an issue for scientific experts, or environmental groups, or government agencies alone. Rather, he invites all people, programs and institutions to realize these are complicated environmental and social problems that require integrated solutions beyond a “technocratic paradigm” that values an easy fix. Within this integrated framework, he urges bold new solutions.

In this context Francis suggests that ecology, economics, and equity are intertwined. Healthy ecosystems depend on a just economy that results in equity. Endangering ecosystems with an exploitative economic system is causing immense human suffering and inequity. In particular, the poor and most vulnerable are threatened by climate change, although they are not the major cause of the climate problem. He acknowledges the need for believers and non-believers alike to help renew the vitality of Earth’s ecosystems and expand systemic efforts for equity.

In short, he is calling for “ecological conversion” from within all the world religions. He is making visible an emerging worldwide phenomenon of the force of religious environmentalism on the ground, as well as the field of religion and ecology in academia developing new ecotheologies and ecojustice ethics. This diverse movement is evoking a change of mind and heart, consciousness and conscience. Its expression will be seen more fully in the years to come.

The challenge of the contemporary call for ecological renewal cannot be ignored by the religions. Nor can it be answered simply from out of doctrine, dogma, scripture, devotion, ritual, belief, or prayer. It cannot be addressed by any of these well-trod paths of religious expression alone. Yet, like so much of our human cultures and institutions the religions are necessary for our way forward yet not sufficient in themselves for the transformation needed.  The roles of the religions cannot be exported from outside their horizons.  Thus, the individual religions must explain and transform themselves if they are willing to enter into this period of environmental engagement that is upon us. If the religions can participate in this creativity they may again empower humans to embrace values that sustain life and contribute to a vibrant Earth community.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berry, Thomas. 2009. The Sacred Universe: Earth Spirituality and Religion in the 21st Century (New York: Columbia University Press).

Boff, Leonardo. 1997. Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books).

Gottlieb, Roger. 2006. A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planetary Future . (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Grim, John and Mary Evelyn Tucker, eds. 2014. Ecology and Religion. (Washington, DC: Island Press).

Leopold, Aldo. 1966. A Sand County Almanac . (Oxford University Press).

Rockstrom, Johan and Mattias Klum. 2015. Big World, Small Planet: Abundance Within Planetary Boundaries . (New Haven: Yale University Press)

Schmitz, Oswald. 2016. The New Ecology: Science for a Sustainable World. (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

Taylor, Bron, ed. 2008. Encyclopedia of Religion, Nature, and Culture. (London: Bloomsbury).

Tucker, Mary Evelyn. 2004. Worldly Wonder: Religions Enter their Ecological Phase . (Chicago: Open Court).

Tucker, Mary Evelyn and John Grim, eds. 2001 Religion and Ecology: Can the Climate Change? Daedalus Vol. 130, No.4.

Header photo: ARC procession to UN Faith in Future Meeting, Bristol, UK

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Essays on Religion

Essays about religion hold immense significance as they provide a platform for exploring the diverse beliefs, practices, and cultural influences that shape human spirituality and understanding of the divine. The purpose of such essays is to promote interfaith dialogue, enhance cross-cultural awareness, and encourage critical examination of religious concepts, ethics, and rituals. By fostering discussions about religion, these essays contribute to tolerance, understanding, and the broader exploration of the complexities of faith in a globalized world.

Cultural and Historical Context

One of the primary goals of essays about religion is to explore the cultural and historical context of various faith traditions. These essays delve into the origins, development, and evolution of religious beliefs, shedding light on how they have shaped societies over time.

Essays on religion also aim to examine the core beliefs, practices, and rituals of different faiths. These essays provide insights into the ways individuals seek spiritual connection, guidance, and purpose through their religious affiliations. Essays about religion serve as valuable tools for promoting interfaith understanding, cultural awareness, and critical thinking. By exploring the rich tapestry of religious beliefs and practices, these essays contribute to a more harmonious and connected global society.

Who is God in My Life

Throughout human history, the concept of God has been a central and deeply personal one. It transcends religious boundaries and philosophical discourse, touching the very core of our existence. In this essay, I will explore who God is in my life, examining the multifaceted ways...

The Importance of Religious Freedom: Preserving Liberty and Diversity

Religious freedom is a fundamental human right that plays a pivotal role in fostering a just and inclusive society. This essay delves into the significance of religious freedom, its historical context, and its role in promoting diversity, tolerance, and peaceful coexistence among individuals of varying...

Impact of Religion on the Lives of Its Followers

Religion holds a significant place in human society, influencing various aspects of individuals' lives. From shaping beliefs and values to guiding daily practices and providing a sense of purpose, religion has a profound impact on its followers. This essay explores the ways in which religion...

Islam: the Religion of Peace and Compassion

Amidst the intricate mosaic of diverse religious beliefs, Islam stands out as a faith that embodies peace, compassion, and a profound connection with the Divine. This discourse plunges into the essence of Islam as a religion of peace, delving into its foundational principles, teachings, historical...

How I Spent My Ramadan: Reflections on Spiritual Renewal

Ramadan, a sacred month in the Islamic calendar, is a time of spiritual reflection, self-discipline, and devotion. This essay recounts how I spent my Ramadan, embracing the rituals and practices that define this holiest of months. It sheds light on the personal growth, inner reflections,...

My Relationship with God: a Personal Reflection

Attempting to describe my relationship with God is akin to the challenge of encapsulating the vastness of the cosmos within a single breath. This essay embarks on a humble journey to offer a glimpse into the profound and intricate connection that underpins my beliefs, shapes...

Religious Intolerance: a Barrier to Unity and Understanding

Religious intolerance, marked by prejudice and hostility toward individuals or groups based on their religious beliefs, stands as a significant challenge to social harmony and global progress. This phenomenon, often fueled by misunderstandings and fear, undermines the principles of empathy, respect, and coexistence that are...

The Significance of Freedom of Religion

Freedom of religion, a fundamental human right, plays a pivotal role in fostering diverse societies and upholding individual autonomy. This essay delves into the importance of freedom of religion, exploring its role in promoting cultural diversity, protecting human rights, and fostering social harmony. Freedom of...

The Catholic View on Abortion

The Catholic Church's stance on abortion is deeply rooted in its moral and ethical teachings. This essay explores the Catholic view on abortion, examining the theological, philosophical, and ethical reasons that shape the Church's position, the importance of the sanctity of life, and the implications...

Jesus Christ and His Mission to the World

Jesus Christ, a central figure in Christianity, holds profound significance as both a historical figure and a spiritual leader. This essay delves into the life and mission of Jesus Christ, exploring his teachings, impact on humanity, and the enduring legacy of his message of love,...

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• Christianity
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• Religious Tolerance
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• Gospel of John
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• Hagia Sophia
• Image of God
• Old Testament
• Religious Beliefs
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• Religious Liberty
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