Although Pope John Paul II declared in 1992 that the church had erred in condemning Galileo, the incident was never a simple conflict between science and religion. Theologians readily accepted whatever proofs for God's existence the new science chose to give. By the 18th century, astronomer Pierre Laplace could explain nature as a self-sufficient mechanism. Nor, a century later, did Darwin in his theory of evolution. Now, at the end of the millennium, religion and science are beginning to talk, though neither answers to the other's authority.
Philosophers of science examine the often-hidden assumptions on which scientific theories rest.
Confronted by dimensions of the world no scripture has encoded, theologians are discovering a God who resists domestication into any single theory of how the world works.