Blackholes, time travel, the multiverse. These are all real or hypothetical topics.

You might reasonably expect me to discuss with today's guest,

astrophysicist Jeff Swearing, PhD.

And we do.

But how about God?

From a scientific perspective.

There is a widely held belief that religion and science are somehow incompatible,

and British biologist Richard Dawkins

is among those from the scientific world who have championed the cause of promoting

atheism on a scientific basis. But Jeff Swearing and his colleagues at reasons to the

lead think that science not only fails to disprove the existence of

God, but in fact science proves that God does exist. The apparent incompatibility of science in religion originated fairly recently in the 19th century. Jeff traces its origin to the so-called conflict thesis by John William Draper and Andrew Dixon White as he explains.

The idea that they put forth is that science and religion are in conflict with one another.

And so as science advances, religion's going to diminish into the past, but it's this idea that they're

antagonistic towards one another.

What's interesting is that in the intervening years

since they put that forth, people have looked and said,

is that the case or not?

And people who study the history of science, what they will show is that the scholarship

says is that that is not a valid way of looking at things.

There have been periods of conflict, or issues of conflict more than periods of conflict or issues of conflict more than periods of

conflict but the vast majority of time what goes on is that science and religion I'm

...