Author's Find Fertile Mix of Science and Religion

NPR explores the literary world looking for writers who combine science and religion in their work and do so well. Margaret Atwood and Karen Armstrong come to mind.

From the piece (complete with audio podcast)...

Science and religion have an uneasy relationship. Margaret Atwood, known for her literary science fiction, thinks the future holds in store a religion that combines the two. She takes her lessons from a past charted by contemporary religious scholar Karen Armstrong.

Armstrong is a religious scholar who has studied the history of belief. In her latest book, The Case for God, she looks at the relationship between science and religion. The current conflict between the two, with Darwin's theory of evolution as a flash point, is not in keeping with historical interpretations of scripture.

"Darwin came along and found a natural explanation for life itself," Armstrong says. But she notes that at an earlier point, this wouldn't have caused conflict. "Saint Augustine had ... laid down an important principle ... that if a scriptural text contradicts science, you must give it an allegorical interpretation."

While Armstrong's work looks at the lessons of the past, Atwood extrapolates from the past to create visions of the future. One of Atwood's best known novels is The Handmaid's Tale, which imagines a future in which America has become a Christian fundamentalist theocracy.

Atwood says science fiction became necessary when the contradictions between objective reality and religious orthodoxy became too difficult to ignore.