in the report, he talked about "Science and Religion": His landmark 1966 article in IBM's Think magazine, "The Convergence of Science and Religion," attempted to reconcile the sometimes-warring camps. To Townes, science was the pursuit of understanding about the order of the universe, religion the pursuit of understanding and acceptance of the meaning of the universe. "Science and religion are both universal, and basically very similar," he wrote. "The essential role of faith in religion is so well known that taking things on faith rather than proving them is usually taken as characteristic of religion, and as distinguishing religion from science. ... It is just this faith in an orderly universe, understandable to man, which allowed the basic change from an age of superstition to an age of science." "The fact that the universe had a beginning is a very striking thing," Townes told The Times in 1996, in regard to the widely accepted Big Bang theory. "How do you explain that unique event" without God?
