lucis

A couple of really amazing short stories by Arthur C. Clarke.

The first is titled The Nine Billion Names of God. I read this one a long time back, but immediately remembered it when I recently read another similar story by the same author.

Which brings us to the second short story. This is titled The Star (Thanks to arnab for the link).

Clark brings religion and science together beautifully. Both are extremely well written, and have surprise ending. There isnt much I can say about either that you wont get from simply reading them, so do that!

Another example of this religion-science-fiction literature is Contact by Carl Sagan. Though the movie was great, the book goes much deeper into the philosophy of everything. There is this scene in the book where a believer is proving his faith by standing in front of a giant pendulum. Science says that the pendulum should obey conservation of energy, and attain a certain height before it swings back. The argument here is that if this person stands closer than this distance to the pendulum, would God make it stop before it hits his face? And it so happens that just before the pendulum is about to be swung, the curator comes in and stops the “nonsense". Thus something intervenes!

There are sure to be other such interesting books/stories. I havent really read many others (I can think of another couple, but am too tired to look for references atm - maybe later).