In a cultural moment when public debate often casts science and religion as irreconcilable adversaries, a new book offers a different framework. Living With Both: Faith, Science, and the Search for Meaning by Meenakshi Dhar, an engineer and technologist with experience in the space industry, argues that scientific understanding and spiritual belief are not competing explanations but complementary ways of engaging with reality.
Dhar’s central claim is that science and faith operate in fundamentally different domains. Science, she writes, explains the mechanisms of the physical universe, while faith addresses questions of meaning, value, and lived human experience. The book does not attempt to reconcile the two by forcing them into a single framework; instead, it contends that a complete worldview requires recognizing that different kinds of questions demand different kinds of answers.
The stakes of this argument are significant. As technological advancement continues to expand knowledge, it does not automatically produce meaning. Dhar warns against what she calls ‘overreach’—the assumption that science alone can resolve questions of morality, purpose, or grief. Her critique is not of science itself, which she praises as a tool of disciplined inquiry, but of the expectation that it can answer questions it was never designed to address.
Drawing on her academic background in engineering and her professional work in technology systems connected to the space sector, Dhar brings analytical clarity to philosophical questions. The book spans cosmology, the Big Bang, evolution, consciousness, morality, grief, and existential purpose. Yet it remains grounded in personal narrative. A defining element is her experience of sudden loss following her father’s death. While scientific reasoning could explain the biological and physiological causes of death with precision, it could not address the deeper emotional rupture that followed. That moment became a turning point in her intellectual and spiritual journey, leading her to see faith not as blind certainty but as a mode of understanding that provides emotional grounding, resilience, and the ability to live with unanswered questions.
Living With Both invites readers into a reflective space where doubt is welcomed rather than feared. It speaks to scientists, skeptics, believers, and seekers alike, encouraging dialogue rather than division. In an era where certainty is often demanded, Dhar’s book makes a case for intellectual humility—the recognition that knowledge and mystery can coexist.
