A marriage between two avowed enemies can be hazardous. Any two people who are absolutely certain that their view is the only right one will create terrible tension. Just look at the bloody battlefield between spirituality and science.

If you are committed to both medical science and spiritual truth, how are you supposed to sort through the maze of information and supposition to find reliable conclusions? 

And why would anyone want to combine medical information and religious belief in the first place?

The answer to the second question is easy. When you are younger and more foolish, you feel invincible and the physical person is all that really counts. But as you age, the events of life reveal more of the close connection between physical and mental (this includes the social, emotional, creative, and memory) functions. Late in life, awareness presses even closer about the religious and spiritual.

At the end of a presentation promoting the use of science and spiritual information together, a surgeon friend of mine began a lively discussion.

His final argument was persuasive: if you want the very best in spiritual information you have to go to the ancient philosophers, find the conclusions they'd reached and put it together from there. The ancient scholars were more to be trusted about such things.