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"Fans of Jesus and Darwin have been glaring at each other from across a wide chasm, and yet, they tested the waters, found it shallow enough to wade through, and are now building a bridge.”

Carl Safina, president of the environmental group Blue Ocean Institute, delivered this hopeful message during his keynote address to a conference at the Monterey Bay Aquarium this week. The gathering marked the launch of a new program called the Living Ocean Initiative, which was touted as a breakthrough event—the first-ever coming-together of religious leaders and environmental scientists to focus on the dangers confronting the world’s oceans.

The event was built around the idea that the critical plight of the oceans—the decimated fisheries, the vast dead zones—presents a challenge to anyone concerned with the well-being of humanity. Never before, participants were told, have men and women of science and members of the clergy put aside their differences to focus on this issue.

The conference was in fact a rare occasion—scientists and religious thinkers do not generally confer about any subject whatsoever. We live in a time when science and religion are two nations at war. Consequently, environmentalists and believers rarely talk about the passions that drive them, much less work together. The Living Ocean Initiative conference was unique simply for bringing leaders from these two warring camps into conversation with each other.

It would seem like a natural alliance. Committed scientists and religious clergy have some important things in common—while many of us are satisfied to fill our lives with work, friends and family, these people find time to concern themselves with the big issues. While they might disagree about the ultimate nature of the world, they care about that question more than most of us do. And they generally also care about making the world a better place.

But the whole world has come between science and religion. Political fights—about evolution, abortion, stem-cell research, global warming, etc.—have driven many scientists and clergy into opposing camps. The meeting at the Aquarium this week marked an effort to find common ground around an issue both might agree on—the protection of something both cherish.

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The Living Ocean Initiative was launched by Rev. Deborah Streeter, a Big Sur resident and ordained minister who sits on the advisory board of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Streeter runs a unique organization called Upwellings, which she describes as an “Environmental Ministry” with a mission “to bring faith communities, environmentalists, and the scientific community together.”

This connection Streeter is aiming toward, which took a step forward this week, is an old one. The antagonism between the world of God and the world of nature has been with us for some time, but it was not always so.

Throughout the eons before the invention of the God of the Jews, Muslims and Christians, people in every part of the world believed that nature was holy. That belief came to be seen as heresy—grounds for church-sanctioned imprisonment or mob-wrought violence. Nowadays, organized religion is softening its stand against the belief once reviled as primitivism, Paganism, and the like.

The Catholic theologian Réville offers a contemporary understanding of the ways in which Christian thought can coexist with something like nature worship: “Whether we say God or prefer to say nature, the important thing is that our minds are filled with the sense of a power, to all appearance infinite and eternal, a power to which our own being is inseparably connected, in the knowledge of whose ways alone is safety and well-being, in the contemplation of which we find a beatific vision.”

But while modern religious philosophers may again open their arms to Mother Earth, the contemporary “scientific” view of the world is still seen as lacking in spirit.

“Natural mythology has given place to science, which sees mechanism where will, purpose, and love had been suspected before and drops the name of God, to take up instead the less awful name of Nature,” Réville writes. “Nature is the residuum that is left after the elimination of everything supernatural.”

We are probably still a ways from the middle ground where scientists are willing to see a holy universe, and where clerics are able to see beyond their gods to recognize a sacred natural world. But it is heartening that some of them have begun talking.