And if you mean to fight, the first thing you must do is to try to understand conflict, which has been understood and lucidly explained ever since Mr. Tse Sun wrote the Thirteen Chapters in about 400 BC. So your synthesis has to include not only religion and science; it has to include war as well, or your synthesis will be worthless.
So where does such a comprehensive synthesis lead to? Where does my Religion Rewritten lead to? It leads straight to a vision of a world created by God, which we have not had in Europe since the Middle Ages. It was a superb vision, and enabled ordinary men and women to feel at home with Nature, and to find their own significance in everyone having a part to play in society. Alas it was destroyed by science, which showed that too much of the detail was false; it was destroyed principally by Newton’s wonderful synthesis that the same forces held the Universe together, from an apple falling to the ground, and the moon circling the earth with her silver light, to the planets in their orbits round the sun. Newton himself did not consider that his theory of gravitation made much difference to the idea of a world created by God, but his disciples thought differently, particularly in France where the Encyclopaedists opened the way for the secular society of the Enlightenment, which culminated of course in revolution, the September massacres and the terror of the guillotine. Sadly in the mass of publications that followed the publication of Newton’s Principia, the Church leaders remained parochial, and had neither the vision nor the intelligence to welcome science with open arms, and say it did not make much difference how God had created the world. Even 200 years later, with the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species, except for Frederick Temple, they still tried to defend their own little corner, with the inevitable result that the Church was dethroned from its commanding position in society, and now is little more than a trivial sect in the varied social life of the nation. Church leaders have largely reduced religion to an interesting, if unusual, social accomplishment.
To restore the medieval vision of a world created by God, whilst jettisoning the absurdity of the medieval view that Biblical truth even embraced scientific truth, involved doing two things. Firstly giving to scientific truth the respect due to it, namely accepting the equal validity of its truth with the truth of religion. Each is true in its own very different way; and frankly neither is much good on its own. Secondly showing that any objections to having a vision of a world created by God, turn out on examination to be illusory, mere cobwebs which one can easily brush aside. Why is this? Because no mental discipline is more than a profile of the life we all have to live in practice. And those who claim that their theory is nearer to reality than life as we all experience it, in old-fashioned language are indulging in idolatry, in modern English are so ignorant that they understand neither science nor religion.