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The Bahá'í Faith has a teaching of a harmony or unity between science and religion; that is, the processes and practices of science, of rational thought, and the disciplines of thought and practice of religion, are in harmony while excluding the polarized aspects of both. This is usually put "the harmony of science and religion". Some have taken it to mean each are necessary but serve in complementary domains while others see them as overlapping domains with complementary approaches to taking in observations and experience. However there is no room for ignoring either one in the practices of society.

Individual scholars have also appealed to various schools in the field of philosophy of science that they perceive as resonant with the Bahá'í approach. The community and leadership have also applied the teaching in various circumstances in principled ways rather than a blind faith in science. At times the religion has raised up a community's implementation of education and technology for the betterment of each and all while on the other hand has sometimes sided with minority opinions when the majority's scholarly views went against the betterment of each and all. However, in most cases, an overall stance towards the considered views of science, technology, and education have been underscored while the views of religionists who take their scripture in a literalist and exclusivist sense, and ignoring the successive comments of religious scriptures, as a great difficulty to be overcome.

The principle in Bahá'í scriptures
While writing on the Bahá'í views on science, certain excerpts from Bahá'í scriptures are commonly used by experts; the following are a few examples.

Nader Saiedi, adjunct professor at UCLA, notes Bahá'u'lláh criticized a pursuit of pseudoscience which claimed that "…numerous esoteric sciences is required to understand the mysteries of the sacred Word."saying: … How clear and evident it is to every discerning heart that this so-called learning is and hath ever been, rejected by Him Who is the one true God…. Whoso desireth to fathom the mystery of this “Mi‘raj,” and craveth a drop from this ocean, if the mirror of his heart be already obscured by the dust of these learnings, he must needs cleanse and purify it ere the light of this mystery can be reflected therein. In this day, they that are submerged beneath the ocean of ancient Knowledge, and dwell within the ark of divine wisdom, forbid the people such idle pursuits.…(quoting the Kitáb-i-Íqán ) and: 'Arts, crafts and sciences uplift the world of being, and are conducive to its exaltation. Knowledge is as wings to man’s life, and a ladder for his ascent. Its acquisition is incumbent upon everyone. The knowledge of such sciences, however, should be acquired as can profit the peoples of the earth, and not those which begin with words and end with words. Great indeed is the claim of scientists and craftsmen on the peoples of the world. Unto this beareth witness the Mother Book in this conspicuous station.'(quoted from the Epistle to the Son of the Wolf )

'Abdu'l-Bahá anonymously published The Secret of Divine Civilization in 1875 in Iran, noting how the country had declined among the nations "as a result of poor education, bad governance, ignorance of scientific advances, rejection of innovation, and the atrophy of the life of the mind." and later restated Bahá'u'lláh's teaching, saying: Religious teaching which is at variance with science and reason is human invention and imagination unworthy of acceptance, for the antithesis and opposite of knowledge is superstition born of the ignorance of man. If we say religion is opposed to science, we lack knowledge of either true science or true religion, for both are founded upon the premises and conclusions of reason, and both must bear its test.”(quoted from The Promulgation of Universal Peace ) Religion and science are the two wings upon which man’s intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress. It is not possible to fly with one wing alone! Should a man try to fly with the wing of religion alone he would quickly fall into the quagmire of superstition, whilst on the other hand, with the wing of science alone he would also make no progress, but fall into the despairing slough of materialism.(quoting Paris Talks  ) Scientific knowledge is the highest attainment upon the human plane, for science is the discoverer of realities. It is of two kinds: material and spiritual. Material science is the investigation of natural phenomena; divine science is the discovery and realization of spiritual verities. The world of humanity must acquire both.(quoted from The Promulgation of Universal Peace )

Shoghi Effendi, head of the religion 1921-1957, offered a vision of the future including this principle: In such a world society, science and religion, the two most potent forces in human life, will be reconciled, will co-operate, and will harmoniously develop…. The economic resources of the world will be organized, its sources of raw materials will be tapped and fully utilized, its markets will be co-ordinated and developed, and the distribution of its products will be equitably regulated.(quoting World Order of Bahá'u'lláh )

The Universal House of Justice, current head of the religion, through its Bahá'í International Community, released a statement in 1995, The Prosperity of Humankind which says in part: For the vast majority of the world’s population, the idea that human nature has a spiri­tual dimension—indeed that its fundamental identity is spiritual—is a truth requiring no demonstration. It is a perception of reality that can be discovered in the earliest records of civilization and that has been cultivated for several millennia by every one of the great religious traditions of humanity’s past. Its enduring achievements in law, the fine arts, and the civilizing of human intercourse are what give substance and meaning to history. In one form or another its promptings are a daily influence in the lives of most people on earth and, as events around the world today dramatically show, the longings it awakens are both inextinguishable and incalculably potent. and further Future generations … will find almost incomprehensible the circumstance that, in an age paying tribute to an egalitarian philosophy and related democratic principles, development planning should view the masses of humanity as essentially recipients of benefits from aid and training. Despite acknowledgment of participation as a principle, the scope of the decision making left to most of the world’s population is at best secondary, limited to a range of choices formulated by agencies inaccessible to them and determined by goals that are often irreconcilable with their perceptions of reality. The Statement scholar Graham Hassall summarizes stating it "demonstrates the breath-taking scope of the Bahá'í pro­gram of governance reform, from local to global levels, and encompasses not only political and legal fundamentals, but the roles of science and technology in the global distribution of knowl­edge and power." and university professor Sabet Behrooz called "…a brilliant statement …(showing) the necessity of harmony between science and religion…(which) must be the guiding light and the organizing principle of our endeavors in integrative studies of the Bahá'í Faith."

Science vs religion
It is admitted that the relations between people and communities of practice of science and religion in general have come to a low point. In the Bahá'í field of scholarship scholars have examined the history of relationships of the issue as well as developed analyses of philosophers of science for comparison and insight on the relationship between science and religion and the validity of the Bahá'í approach. They have noted the evolving patterns of thought in Western scholarship of an opposition between science and religion, also phrased as faith vs reason, in the debates in society.

Saiedi sees the scientific community wrestling with the diverse religions by rejecting them all "…as a set of superstitions and/or reduces them to nonreligious phenomena… at the same time (often unconsciously) elevates some other principle… to the status of the sacred or the ulti­mate cause." On the other hand there is another reaction to the diversity of religions, "…the fundamentalist and exclusivist approach to religion… the believer finds other religions to be delusions, fabrications, and distortions of religious truth… rejects other Prophets as impostors and only recognizes the truth of one’s own religion." A third approach is postmodernism which to Saiedi recognizes no ultimate authority and beliefs just exist to the extent we chose them for our own sake regardless that some religious teachings seem to be universal and there are ways of reconciling religions among eachother, and religion and science or rational thought as well.

Cosmologist and data scientist Steven Phelps identifies the very perception of a conflict of science and religion as often presented as the result of dualistic thinking itself rather than being an inevitable relationship and offers non-dualistic thinking as a different lens to view the relationship through, rather than one being wrong and the other right, "These views are able to coexist within the community through a shared conviction that a greater harmony underlies its differences, through mutual love and respect, and through a consultative framework that ensures that action is taken in unity even when differences persist." It is recognized that seeing conflict and disunity between science and religion is a widespread opinion and not just a matter of philosophers, scientists, or religionists; scholars William S. Hatcher and J. D. Martin attributed the issue to "human fallibility and arrogance" whether on the side of religious systems that drifted from their origins, a wide scale problem in this era, or of unsupported speculations from schools of scientific thought that blurred evidence and through popularity have made claims beyond the evidence. Hatcher similarly saw the dichotomies in the history between science and religion across society and offered multiple proofs of the existence of God. Hatcher further characterized the enterprise of philosophy of the twentieth century as an a struggle between positivist/objectivist (allied with scientific proponents,) and postmodernist/subjectivist (allied with religious thinkers if not specific religions,) positions attacking the weaknesses of each and exaggerating stances.

Roland Faber, a theologian/philosopher, reviewed some pre-modern trends ending with the position that neither religion nor science alone has proved satisfactory and there has been no peace between the two, that postmodernism is "disillu­sioned" and that the struggle between them has "hindered a cosmopolitan aim of harmonization and peace, of the universal healing of this brokenness because of their suspicion that universalization is always oppressive, and have admitted a substantialist model again by which traditions (in the plural), liberated from universalizing reason and common human experience of being human, can be pitched against one another anew."

However sociologist Margit Warburg has said that the scholarly discipline of science can investigate religion allowing for spiritual input - noting that claims have been made on the influence of the Holy Ghost which cannot be independently confirmed but which isn't abstained from mention in the scholarly literature, but credits the problem focused on the side of religious institutional response to scientific inquiry such as the story of Galileo vs the Catholic Church where religion responded harshly when scientific inquiry ran counter to religious teachings, as well as a more recent case with the Scottish Free Church but offers in counterpoint the example of Thomas L. Thompson when striving against what Thompson characterized as fundamentalist positions on reading scripture as literal history while maintaining his Christian faith, though she allows the issue remains "a general and persistent topic for religious studies within at least the Christian and Islamic traditions."

Enunciating the principle and early applications of the teaching
The principle of the harmony of science (or rational reason) and religion (or having faith) has been a verbalized principle of the religion since ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's journeys to the West 1910-1913 as an extension of the view of the singularness of reality to be explored through independent investigations by reasoned and spiritual methods. It had been discussed without the specific wording a decade earlier via a compilation Anton Haddad put together with Mírzá Abu'l-Faḍl along with their own perspective - a subject that was subsequently taken up by American Bahá'ís. Saiedi characterizes the relationship between science and the religion, and the religion and the importance of reason, as "one of its main spiritual principles". The influence of the teaching was visible in the practice of the religion dating back to the 1870s in the face of a perception of a lot of superstition of Iranian society and taking a stance towards education, science, and technology. Scholars Filip Boicu and Siyamak Zabihi-Maghaddam underscored the Bahá'í view on education directly related to this teaching of the religion which led to some early Bahá'í schools in Iran.

The support for science in the Bahá'í Faith is a principled stance rather than a blind faith in science. An example comes later in the early 20th century as the religion was expanding in American society when it addressed the issue of race according to another principle of the religion - the oneness of humanity - initiated earlier but substantiated by 1912 during also `Abdu'l-Bahá's engagement with American society. This was counter to views of the majority of scientists of the coming decades and for a time in government policies, which endorsed eugenics as legal steps against Indigenous Americans, people of African descent, and generally People of Color, and other practices according to white-society standards, and similarly in other countries such as when the religion was banned in Germany under the Nazis, (cf American Indian boarding schools, Jim Crow laws, and the Chinese Exclusion Act as instances of white supremacism in America.) But its religionists didn't approach this standard in American life by denigrating the scholarly thought of the day with which it differed but by supporting the then-minority view of scholars which progressively grew in wider society. Among its efforts were a series of compilations of religious and scholarly thought on the unity of humanity starting in the early 1920s, Marion Carpenter, a notable early Bahá'í youth, is quoted in 1925 saying “Not religion or science, but religion and science, the combination of faith and reason, is the teaching of Bahá’u’lláh to the world today.” and Herbert Miller spoke a minority-view scientist's opinion on race issues at a Bahá'í sponsored World Unity Conference in 1926 in Cleveland, a position for which he was fired by Ohio State University in 1931. On the other hand the US national Bahá'í publishing agency was endorsed in 1932 by black columnist Clifford C. Mitchell during the Great Depression in the United States to encourage people of color where they can buy quality reading material. The next compilation on race/unity of humanity was developed by Bahá'ís in 1935 following the suggestion in the work of race amity by comments of Shoghi Effendi's, then head of the religion, during a pilgrimage in the Holy Land, and updated in 1942-3 and was part of a program of action in 1943, a year of three race riots in America. This compilation was reviewed by the Associated Negro Press and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a copy in his library by 1963. It wasn’t until 1986 that a successor work was published.

This principled approach has been summarized as emphasizing recognition of the process of science, although not one isolated to the "scientific method" from a set of values and societal choices and understandings, not mere faith in the conclusions which are always open to refinement, without casting so much doubt that the process of science is somehow lacking because it is influenced by current understandings and conditions to which religion can have a strong influence.

'Abdu'l-Bahá did tell jokes at the expense of materialist scientists but reserved his harshest condemnations for religionists who took religious scripture literally, who "…have become the cause of much of the conflict in the world, whether between different faith communities or between science and religion…."

Implications
A number of scholars have drawn points out of the Bahá'í teaching. Saiedi outlines several implications of the Bahá'í view of an agreement between religion and science or reason: Phelps agrees phrasing his focus on three points:
 * religious evolution of understanding laws and institutions.
 * religion is not a substitute or competition with science but have a mutual reciprocity because of their individual qualities
 * rather than take religious statements literally, the Bahá'í Faith provides a lexicon of interpretations or allegorical relationships of past statements
 * an acceptance of the laws of nature as an expression of divine will and so called miracles are not evidence otherwise.
 * that ultimate reality is ineffable
 * that humility about what can be understood and applied is itself "the highest degree of human attainment"
 * that religious scripture is metaphorical, not literal.

Ian Kluge, independent scholar, observed a relationship between the Bahá'í stance of science and reason and the Bahá'í teaching on independent investigation for the individual where without reason and faith together, quoting `Abdu'l-Bahá, "… the heart finds no rest in it, and real faith is impossible…" and beyond the individual to societal progress which would be "…trapped in traditional worldviews or paradigms, be they religious, cultural, intellectual, or scientific…" and appealed to Aristotle’s four-fold causality which to him "…suggests that science deals with material and efficient causality whereas religion deals with issues related to formal and final causality."

Phelps quotes Bahá'u'lláh on the issue of language and understanding: "[S]ince all do not possess the same degree of spiritual understanding, certain statements will inevitably be made, and there shall arise, as a consequence, as many differing opinions as there are human minds and as many divergent beliefs as there are created things. This is certain and settled, and can in no wise be averted…. Our aim is that thou shouldst urge all the believers to show forth kindness and mercy and to overlook certain shortcomings among them, that differences may be dispelled; true harmony be established; and the censure and reproach, the hatred and dissension, seen among the peoples of former times may not arise anew."

Internal to the religion itself
Warburg quotes a 1978 letter from the Universal House of Justice "The principle of the harmony of science and religion means not only that religious teachings should be studied with the light of reason and evidence as well as of faith and inspiration, but also that everything in this creation, all aspects of human life and knowledge, should be studied in light of revelation as well as in that of purely rational investigation." From it Warburg sees a "clear stance in the dilemma between academic freedom and acceptance of religious premises" and the issues of where "possible conflict with doctrines that can be tested empirically" can occur. She notes that at the inauguration of the Chair for Bahá'í Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Peter Khan spoke saying in part that the place of Bahá'í understanding between science and religion was not in the "narrow definitions of legitimate scholarly activity in some disciplines within the academic community" criticizing the materialistic scientific studies of religion, asking that Bahá'í scholars, in Warburg's words, "should not comply with their academic tradition" which ignore the spiritual inputs of religion which will conflict with the Bahá'í Faith's own teachings. Warburg criticizes Khan's statement as a spokesman of the Bahá'í Faith in this situation and what it could mean for Bahá'í administration. "That is precisely what is at stake in the case of the controversial sources to Babi and Baha’i history, as well as concerning the sources to the construction of Abraham." However Farzam Arbab, project developer and Bahá'í administrator, agrees that literalism in religions is a problem, and Amanda Ripley, decades-long professional long form journalist wrote in her 2021 book High Conflict: why we get trapped and how we get out, about a phenomena of when "A conflict that becomes self-perpetuating and all-consuming, in which almost everyone ends up worse off. Typically an us-versus-them conflict." in which she describes the Bahá'í administration electoral and system of governance saying "…everything about these elections is designed to reduce the odds of high conflict." indeed that "The Bahá'ís try to select people who do not crave attention and power." and "In every meeting, they follow a protocol called 'consultation,' and it’s designed to allow people to speak their mind without getting too attached to their own brilliance." In Ripley's summation "If social scientists designed a religion, it would look like this.… In this way, Baha’i elections are … designed to exploit the human capacity for cooperation, rather than competition."

Behrooz proposed a review of the progressive nature of religion and scholarly activity with history and present contexts in 2000. He stated that "An integrative approach to understanding the implications of the Bahá'í teachings, however, follows developmental processes that begin as primarily internal and evolve in a direction of externalization and fusion with other branches of knowledge.… Historically, religions show a similarity of patterns in the development of learning and scholarship methods. For instance, in earlier configurations of integrative studies, a conflict between internal and external is unavoidable since the internal values of the emerging religion are based on a prescriptive (or declarative) style of thinking that presupposes the existence of an inherent circle of unity among its teachings, while the dominant mode of scholarship in the scientific and academic community may view the validity of those presuppositions untenable.… Generally speaking, absolutist positions and authoritarian attitudes expressed by the gatekeepers of knowledge in both science and religion have obscured people's clarity of vision and hindered the union of these two essential entities of human life. In the Bahá'í view, universal teachings of religion should be interpreted within the context of the relativity of human comprehension and the historical nature of knowledge."

Resonant views
Scholars noted favorable comparisons of the Bahá'í approach with various philosophers of science. Karlberg and Smith underscore and summarize the work of Alan Chalmers and Peter Godfrey-Smith who had published university press texts, in relation to the Bahá'í Faith on a number of points. Arbab appealed to Thomas Nagel's thoughts on "sophisticated secularism". Faber elaborated this approach in parallel with the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (so called Process philosophy,) and Hatcher saw his derivations with western science and religion compatible with the understanding of Aristotle, Avicenna, Bertrand Russell, and the thinking of Stephen Hawking.

Application of religion and science
Others have addressed the work of a relationship between science and religion in practical expressions of development. Matthew Weinberg and Arbab, Boicu and Zabihi-Maghaddam, reviewed cases of a social engagement in locally meaningful progress that included a cooperative engagement between religion and science in particular processes.

Boicu and Zabihi-Maghaddam, recalling the Bahá'í experience in Iran on early schooling which had been extended about education of girls, followed developments of three models of education - Anisa, FUNDAEC, and the Core Curriculum - all of which had direct applications of the teaching and only being distinguished on the application between the individual alone, the individual in a society, and the the last one being of all people in the whole of society and a global community.

Project analyst Matthew Weinberg outlined socioeconomic development cases using the non-profit ISGP - the Institute for Studies for Global Prosperity, "a non-profit organization working in collab­oration with the Baha’i International Community", in India, Uganda, and Brazil. In India stakeholders in a project developed an engagement of religion and science anchored in community of practice was seen as a majority point of view of the participants in the conference and the Indian National Spiritual Assembly established an office - the "Secretariat for the Promotion of the Discourse on Science, Religion, and Development" in 2001. They had successive meetings in 2004 and 2007 and ongoing. In Uganda work reached a point in 2001 working with IGSP that Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni encouraged the work of nurturing social unity "by championing the equality of women and men, alleviating poverty, and overcoming entrenched patterns of corruption." Again materialistic approaches were seen as failing alone. In Brazil again in 2001 a program of action was initiated, seminars were held and a group formed to develop analysis of the system published a book and simultaneously application in some local community "Centers of Learning" and one as a pilot project, but to advance the group needed to approach the work with some values: "To set out on a new path requires courage—not an arrogant disposition that demands swift and radical action, but one that is tempered with humility and wisdom. It requires an environment where the dynamics of individual and collective transformation are fully considered; where it is realized that growth and change are organic, that they are gradual and slow, and that they involve constant action, evaluation, and study; and where it is understood that, in pursuing such transformation, one is faced with an ongoing tension between absorbing setbacks and gaining new ground."

Sociologist Michael McMullen found that Bahá'í converts in America appreciated the teaching of a harmony between science and religion as resolving their sense of these - that they had been disillusioned with traditional organized religion and seeing the way Bahá'ís use science to inform religion so it "makes sense and provides meaning in a globalized world" by presenting an evolutionary perspective on revelation via the teaching of progressive revelation. Post-doctoral scholar in Ottoman Studies and faculty at the Wilmette Institute, Necati Alkan documented a case of Muslim Abdullah Cevdet in looking at the influence of the Bahá'í Faith and the teaching on a harmony of science and religion specifically as a model of reform but which was not accepted by the Turkish Moslem community.

Evolution
Another controversial area between religion and science is the field of biological evolution. There have been religious groups that accept and reject it. While the concept of evolution of religion has already been mentioned (religious evolution of understanding laws and institutions and the revelatory foundation of religions, ) there is also the application of this in biology. Kluge addresses this most recently via the question of human nature - that we have a relationship with and distinction from other domains: the mineral, plant, animal while humanity, according to the Bahá'í scriptures, is the so called "image of God". Phrased another way "Consequently, without humankind, the material universe is incomplete since the purpose of existence is the appearance of God’s perfections." This evolutionary process in the Bahá'í understanding requires the appearances of Manifestations of God, termed prophets or other terms in previous religions, and the process of education - that we can learn to do better than what we inherit either personally or collectively though we do not change our essence in the process, and that state or condition does not, itself, evolve, but is in its essence a "soul" which is itself eternal once formed where we continue to learn, evolving that way, and are not dependent on personal or collective qualities like gender, race, cultures or disease, but are affected by our choices and ability to choose, though these conditions do affect the expression of our choices.

In 1991 Islamic studies and translator Keven Brown and then senior biochemist Eberhard von Kitzing developed a project on the Bahá'í understanding on the issue published in final form in 2001 which Abrahamic religions scholar Stephen Lambden and others lauded. It notes that 'Abdu'l-Bahá did not oppose the physical evolution of the forms of life. What 'Abdu'l-Bahá adds to the standard view of biological evolution is that there is and always has been a goal, that situations of existence are not mere change but progress of "God’s prior creation of the possible" and not only responding the physical requirements and though types of living beings can also decline and regress. And among the possible to beings the universe was given a goal of producing humanity. This was re-echoed in 2003 when physics professor Courosh Mehanian and professional optical/semi-conductor physicist Stephen Friberg echoed the points again and claiming the position being an expression of the harmony of science and religion that has otherwise polarized people.

Genesis and ancient Earth
Baháʼís believe that the story of creation in Genesis is a rudimentary account that conveys the broad essential spiritual truths of existence without a level of detail and accuracy that would have been unnecessary and incomprehensible at the time. And rather than accepting the idea of a Young Earth, Baháʼí theology accepts that the Earth is ancient.

Existence of ether
Aether, or ether, was a substance theorized in the late 19th century to be the medium for the propagation of light; today the concept is considered an obsolete scientific theory. ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's use of the aether concept in one of his talks when the theory was still prevalent - his audience including scientists of the time - has been the source of some controversy since then. The chapter in ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's Some Answered Questions which mentions aether/ether differentiates between things that are "perceptible to the senses" and those which are "realities of the intellect" and would never be perceptible to the senses. The Universal House of Justice referring to ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's use of the word state that, "in due course, when scientists failed to confirm the physical existence of the 'ether' by delicate experiments, they constructed other intellectual concepts to explain the same phenomena" which is consistent with ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's categorization of aether, as an intellectual reality. Robin Mihrshahi also presented that Baháʼu'lláh and ʻAbdu'l-Bahá were using already existing concepts and terms to accurately explain what they had in mind, "in such a way that they would neither offend Their addressees who believed in certain (erroneous) contemporary scientific concepts, nor make use of a terminology that had not yet been developed by contemporary scientists."

Creation
Baháʼu'lláh taught that the differing views on the subject of the creation of the universe are relative to the observer. He writes, regarding the age of the earth, that "Wert thou to assert that it hath ever existed and shall continue to exist, it would be true; or wert thou to affirm the same concept as is mentioned in the sacred Scriptures, no doubt would there be about it". 'Abdu'l-Bahá elucidated the apparent contradiction between the origination and eternality of the universe, writing that “existence and nonexistence are both relative. If it be said that such a thing came into existence from nonexistence, this does not refer to absolute nonexistence, but means that its former condition in relation to its actual condition was nothingness.”. In the Tablet of Wisdom, Baháʼu'lláh refers to an active force and its recipient. The terminology used here echoes Hindu philosophy and refers to ancient Greek and Islamic philosophy. Jean-Marc Lepain, Robin Mihrshahi and Julio Savi suggest a possible relation of this statement with the religious interpretations of the Big Bang theory.