Science v Religion?

The Beaker Folk have invented a tremendous new game, which now officially replaces all discussions on science and religion. A taster

The players take up a position on either side of the fence. They take it in turns to throw their cards over it. The aim of each card is to trump the other team's previous card. For example, if the Science player plays the "Spanish Inquisition" card, the Religion team might play the "Darwinian eugenics" card. Likewise a "Homophobia" card might be met by a "Gays will burn in Hell" card - or possibly by a "My vicar's gay actually, but he just doesn't shout about it" card. Although the latter card is rare, and only available in the limited Edition "C of E" game pack, where you're allowed to sit on the fence.

For slightly more serious approach, you could try
The Faraday Papers series of free downloads by eminent authors on questions of science and religion.

Test of Faith a new site set up by the Faraday Institute, with study materials, videos, links to a big range of sites discussing science and religion.

This page at the Pew Forum has a transcript of a conference on science and faith, with Francis Collins (former director of the Human Genome project) talking about how he found his atheism challenged by what he discovered as a scientist. Here's a bit:

...I began to realize that even in science, where I had spent most of my time, there were pointers to God that I had paid no attention to that were actually pretty interesting.

One obvious one, although maybe it’s not so obvious, is that there is something instead of nothing. There’s no reason there should be anything at all. Wigner’s wonderful phrase “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” also comes to mind – Eugene Wigner, the Nobel laureate in physics, talking about the amazing thing about the whole study of physics is that mathematics makes sense; it can describe the properties of matter and energy in simple, even beautiful, laws. Why should that be? Why should gravity follow an inverse square law? Why should Maxwell’s five equations describe electromagnetism in very simple terms, and they actually turn out to be true? A thoughtful and interesting question. This is certainly one that Einstein also wrote about quite significantly.

The Big Bang, the fact that the universe had a beginning out of nothingness, as far as we can tell. From this unimaginable singularity, the universe came into being and has been flying apart ever since. That cries out for some explanation. Since we have not observed nature to create itself, where did this come from? That seems to ask you to postulate a creator who must not be part of nature or you haven’t solved the problem. In fact, one can also make a pretty good philosophical argument that a creator of this sort must also be outside of time or you haven’t solved the problem.

So now we have the idea of a creator who is outside of time and space, and who is a pretty darn good mathematician, and apparently also must be an incredibly good physicist.....

For an odd tangent on this whole business, read about the atheist scientist who thinks that a rediscovery of God as 'divine punisher' may help us to get real about climate change.