So, here's a question: do you have to switch your brain off to believe in God. Are science and logic totally opposed to the interesting, but unprovable, tenets of religion and faith, as Richard Dawkins and others would have us believe?

I reckon that down the centuries the waters have become muddied as Galileo tried to teach the Pope theology (he wasn't totally the innocent party in that affair!) and religious people tried to clamp down on scientific advances because it upset their notion of the universe.

Having trained as a scientist, I have never felt the deep divide that some perceive. It seems to me that both science and religion are seeking after the truth. Neither discipline knows all that much of the total that is to be known, and should therefore display a reasonable degree of humility. Most importantly, the means of seeking truth, and the kind of truth sought, are so different that we should be wary of mixing them up.

There is little point, for example, in asking a chemist to give you the chemical formula for love; nor is it reasonable to ask a theologian to explain the miracles of Jesus in purely scientific terms. Most people find a purely reductionist form of science - people are just self-concious collections of molecules walking around - as being distinctly short of the whole truth. Is love really nothing more than a chemical/ biological/ evolutionary response? Similarly, we struggle to fit the stories of the Bible - perfectly acceptable in their own time - into our quite rigidly scientific culture.

I think we need to remember two things: that science is constantly changing, and growing, and that theories are put forward and later retracted; and that religion is no more that a glimpse off an immense possibility and that we can see so little.

So, over to you! Do you find that the discoveries of science make it hard to believe? Or do you find the Bible hard or irrelevant in a scientific age? Please add your own comments.