So tonight we get to decide whether religion and science are compatible. No, I'm not going to offer you any spoilers right at the beginning here, but I will say that this is part of a larger question of whether faith and reason are compatible, and that question's been going on for quite some time.

Down through the centuries, some have found ways to harmonize these two, and others have

seen only irreconcilable conflict. You could say that Socrates was an early victim of this conflict, this Greek philosopher, apostle of reason.

If you know his story, he was condemned by the Athenian court for, among other things, impiety with respect to Greek religion.

There's another Greek philosopher, Aristotle, who found a way to harmonize his philosophy with the religion of his time.

He offered a philosophical proof that there must be a first principle of all things, which he called the unmoved mover.

You may know that St. Thomas Aquinas incorporated that proof

into his own ways of showing that God exists in his Sumo Theologica.

But Aristotle went on to say that this first principle,

this philosophical truth, could be found in religion,

though there he thought it was expressed in a kind of

mythical form in the Greek religion of the time, the gods and goddesses and so on.

In the early centuries of the church, Christian believers did not see reason, as found in Greek Greek philosophy to be opposed to faith.

Rather, they borrowed concepts from the philosophy to express the truth of their faith.

So at the Council of Nicaea in 325, they engaged philosophical notions like person and essence to explain their belief in the Trinity,

in the one God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, proclaiming, in philosophical terms,

that God is one essence but three persons.

And I think Greek philosophy provided a kind of powerful tool for explaining the faith,

but not everyone at the time was happy with that marriage of faith and reason. There's one father of the church,

Tertullian, who was particularly displeased. He wrote, what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?

Athens was the famous city for the Greek philosophers, Jerusalem, of course, the city of faith.

So what has one to do with the other?

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