Modern medicine places importance on the physical aspect of human diseases and biomedicalapproaches are employed as principal methods to cure iseases. Although religion and medicine were closely associated with each other in earlier times, ｍｏｓｔ present-day medical experts do not pay much heed to theinfluence that religion may have on medicine. This paper aims to reflect the possibility of taking religion and medicine into consideration in order to develop better medicines. First，we confirm the function of religion according to the religion of science and identify the followｉｎｇ three functions: １)ｐｒoviding an individual with a eason to continue living, 2)offering hope,ａｎｄ ３)filling him/her with joy. Second, we consider the reasons that medical experts tend to adopt an indiffereｎt or confrontatioanal attitude toward religion and find that their views of religion and science largely depend on enlightenment and positivism. As is often pointed out,Christianity and Neoplatonism had an important influence on the birth and development of modern science. Bergson believes that scientific cognition is not the only method、and that both scientific and philosopbical cognitions are indispensable to the development of knowledge. Finally,we show that the consideration of and cooperation between religion and medicine are necessary for the patients and medical development for the folIowing reasons: １)an individual is a biopsychosocioexistential unity and therefore biological medicine alone is not sufficient, ２)the disease structure has shifted flom mfectious diseases to lifestyle-related diseases, ３）the present segmentation of religion and medicine encourages them to be indifferent to each other. We believe that our attempt to clarily the roles and methods of religion and medicine may possibly make their consideration in the development of medicine absolutely necessary.
