HIST 270 American Military University Wk 8 The Physicists Essay

Federal laboratories, Universities, or Industrial Laboratories? Based on the course readings, which institutional setting contributed most significantly to the development of physics in the 20th century? Explain your rationale with examples. Additionally, did 20th century physicists have more significant achievements on earth or in space (including all institutional settings)? Explain why. Finally, which physicist made the greatest contribution? Explain how

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Which Science? Whose Religion?
Copyright 2011. Oxford University Press.
All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.
David N. Livingstone
Steven Shapin’s revisionist account of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century opens with a provocation: “There was no such thing as
the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.”1 This collection of
essays could appropriately end on a similar note. There is no such thing as
the relationship between science and religion, and this is a book about it. It
is for this reason that I have taken as my cue, in seeking an appropriate
rubric under which to compose these concluding remarks, the title of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? In part, MacIntyre’s
argument is that there is no rationality that is not the rationality of some
particular tradition, and that in every instance when an effort is made to
provide rational justification for a course of moral action we need to figure
out which is the rationality and whose is the justice in question. It is much
the same with thinking about science and religion. In every case we need
to ascertain which scientific enterprise and whose religious tradition is
under consideration. Indeed, I argue in what follows that the story of
encounters between particular scientific ventures and specific religious
movements needs to be complicated in yet further ways if we are to do
justice to the complexities of the historical record rather than succumb to
the allure of comfortable typecasting. As Thomas Dixon recently put it in a
popular introduction to the whole subject, “There has certainly not been a
single and unchanging relationship between two entities called ‘science’
and ‘religion.’”2
Further complicating the story of the relations between scientific enterprises and religious traditions is thus my goal in the pages that follow. And
it builds on the widespread recognition among historians of science that the
old conflict model, presuming inherent antagonism between science and
religion, is now moribund. This view, however, is far from universally
shared. The recent resignation of Professor Michael Reiss, an evolutionary
biologist, from the post of director of education for the Royal Society over
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some comments he made on creationism is illustrative. On September 13,
2008, the Nobel Prize–winner Sir Richard Roberts of the New England Biolabs in Ipswich, Massachusetts, supported by several other laureates, wrote
to Sir Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, demanding “that Professor
Reiss step down, or be asked to step down, as soon as possible.” “We gather
Professor Reiss is a clergyman, which in itself is very worrisome,” the letter
went on. “Who on earth thought that he would be an appropriate Director of
Education, who could be expected to answer questions about the differences
between science and religion in a scientific, reasoned way?”3 Enshrined in
this communiqué is the presumption that science and religion are inescapably at odds, such that inceptive suspicion is necessarily thrown on the
scientific integrity of individuals with religious convictions. Commenting on
the whole episode in the New Scientist, Sir Harold Kroto, recipient of the
1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, observed: “There is no way that an ordained
minister—for whom unverified dogma must represent a major, if not the
major, pillar in their lives can present free-thinking, doubt-based scientific
philosophy honestly or disinterestedly.”4 For all the sterling efforts of historians to dispel the myth of inevitable and persistent internecine warfare
between science and religion, it seems, the idea of inexorable conflict—like
a resilient virus—is proving exceptionally hard to eradicate. Nevertheless,
this volume constitutes a collective contribution toward that project.
“What is the relationship between science and religion?” is a question in
need of questioning. In different ways, the essays in this collection conspire
to trouble the seeming simplicity of the assumption that the task is to map
encounters between two realms respectively labeled “science” and “religion.”
The global reach of the preceding chapters, for example, forces on us the
thought that this whole way of proceeding may be a local Western perspective
that is imperiously imposed on the rest of the world. This suspicion manifests
itself, perhaps with greatest clarity, in the analysis of science, religion, and
medicine in sub-Saharan Africa provided by Steven Feierman and John M.
Janzen (see chap. 10). Several things are particularly notable about their intervention. First, their account proceeds with the understanding that the vocabulary of “science” and “religion” as entities whose relationship is at the heart
of this inquiry constitutes, in the African case, the imposition of categories of
interpretation that do not track well indigenous understandings. As their
analysis shows in different ways, whether dealing with iron-smelting practices,
eco-sensitive land-use regulation, or the complex relationships between medical “objects” and socio-spiritual structures, the idea of a relationship,
or boundary line, or dialogue, between “science and religion” misconstrues
the issue. Portraying these performances in the language of “science and
religion,” as though they can be tidily segregated, is to import Western categories and inflict them on non-Western cultures. Imperialism, we should
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note in passing, can also be of a temporal variety—namely, imposing contemporary categories on historical episodes or engaging in the Whiggish form of
inquiry that reconstructs the past only in presentist terms. The danger here is
that a manufactured past is constructed by historians who zealously dig out
scattered “scientific” hints from sacred texts and thereby create, rather than
uncover, some presumed “tradition” or “stance” on “science and religion.”
Second, this is the chapter where anthropological apparatus is most
clearly brought to bear on the whole subject. This raises the intriguing
question why science and religion as belief systems in the Westernized
world are not brought so conspicuously within the arc of anthropological
scrutiny. Breaking down presumed boundaries between practice and belief,
object and meaning, Feierman and Janzen’s analysis challenges students of
science and religion in other settings to elucidate how various activities,
whether dubbed scientific or religious, function in the society in which they
are domesticated.
Other insights throughout this collection also disturb the presumption of
a singular relationship between science and religion. In different settings,
different traditions approach the “problematic” differently, and hence
solve—or resolve—it in different ways. In some cases there is a fusion of
what in other situations would be disaggregated; in others it is a matter of
harmonizing dissonant claims to achieve coherence; in yet others the
strategy is to allocate science and religion to different spheres and thereby to
prevent the development of any relationship, whether hostile or cordial. In
Mark Csikszentmihalyi’s chapter on early China (chap. 7), for example, it
becomes clear that the ideas of natural cycles and homologies are both
religious and scientific conceptions at the same time. In this case the idea of
“harmonizing” science and religion is misconceived, as these convictions
inherently fuse what elsewhere might be disaggregated into the scientific
and the religious. In a comparable way, as Geoffrey Cantor notes in his treatment of modern Judaism (chap. 2), some positive assessments of evolutionary transformation by nineteenth-century rabbis were at least as much to
do with their use of Kabbalistic understandings of change as with anything
specifically derived from Darwinian biology. Indeed, one rabbi, Abraham
Isaac HaKohen Kook, far from setting out to “reconcile” Judaism and modern
science, claimed that in adopting Darwin’s theory of evolutionary change,
naturalists were only coming to recognize a negligible part of a much larger
cosmic picture that traditional Judaism had long cherished.
Early Islamic science, it seems, stands in marked contrast to these forms
of synaptic blending. According to Ahmad Dallal (chap. 5), the way in which
knowledge was classified in early Islam meant that religion and natural
science occupied separate spheres of knowledge. For Abu Rayhan al-Biruni
(973–1048 CE), Qur’anic teaching and scientific endeavors did not impinge
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on each other—a perspective reinforced by the Qur’anic exegete Fakhr
al-Din al-Razi in the twelfth century. For Dallal, these represent a segregationist perspective that allocates cognitive authority to different domains by
assigning religious and scientific knowledges to their own compartments.
This partitionist strategy, of course, is not solely the prerogative of religious
believers. The Englishman Thomas Henry Huxley was an advocate of the
two-spheres model, and he used it to challenge the elision of science and
natural theology in the Newtonian world picture. At the same time, as
Bernard Lightman (chap. 11) points out, he considered that true science and
true religion were “twin-sisters”—a sentiment remarkably similar to that of
John William Draper, author of the polemical History of the Conflict between
Religion and Science (1874), who considered that “modern Science is the
legitimate sister—indeed, it is the twin-sister—of the Reformation.”5
In our own time, the two-spheres tactic has had committed defenders,
such as Stephen Jay Gould, whose Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the
Fullness of Life (1999) further popularized the idea of science and religion as
two Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA). A couple of years earlier he had
put forward this concordat as “the principled resolution of supposed ‘conflict’ or ‘warfare’ between science and religion. No such conflict should exist
because each subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching
authority—and these magisteria do not overlap (the principle that I would
like to designate as NOMA, or ‘nonoverlapping magisteria’).”6 In his review
of this proposal, though, Michael Ruse detected that such a stratagem might
not be as irenic or benign as it at first appears; Ruse suspected that Gould’s
territorial cartography drew its boundary line too far on the side of science
and not sufficiently toward the middle ground.7 As noted above, partition is
not even an option in some settings. Feierman and Janzen’s investigation of
sub-Saharan Africa reveals that in this context the very idea of there being
two spheres that interact—science and religion—misconceives the issue.
Even today, they can itemize a range of scientific-medical practitioners of
one sort or another bridging what they refer to as “the science/religion continuum” by integrating pharmaceutical and traditional traditions of health
care management.
The essays in this collection, then, advertise complexity in sciencereligion discourses at different points in time and in different locations. The
presumption that the issue is simply how to manage the relationship
between two realms is as problematic as the grand narrative that assumes
that science is an inescapably secularizing force. As B. V. Subbarayappa
notes (chap. 8), to take just one example, the expansion of India’s scientifictechnological infrastructure has gone hand in hand with the construction of
new temples and novel forms of religious observance. Such eventualities
alert us to the multifarious ways in which science-religion dialogues have
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been conducted. In places where science and religion are fused into an
indivisible entity, or indeed where speaking of “science and religion” at all is
a misconception, the conversation will differ markedly from contexts where
epistemic apartheid operates to keep science and religion in isolation from
each other. Where the aim is to harmonize the claims of faith with the
findings of science, a different dynamic will be in operation, one that sharply
contrasts with situations where religious dogma imperiously stifles scientific inquiry or where scientific enterprises ride roughshod over spiritual
sensibilities.
COMPLICATIONS
Woven into the fabric of this volume are numerous threads that further
complicate our thinking about science and religion. Here I want to offer
four recommendations that might appropriately be mobilized to interrogate
particular episodes in the history of science and religion. For convenience,
we might consider these as a set of hypothetical imperatives: pluralize,
localize, hybridize, politicize. This does not mean that all are appropriate
tactics for making sense of every encounter; what I mean, rather, is that it is
never mistaken to ask if, say, local circumstances are critically important to
understanding the dynamic of some particular dispute, or if there are
political currents running through the claims of interlocutors.
First, the need to pluralize. The singularity that ordinarily attends public
discussion of the subject needs to be replaced by a recognition that it is
more helpful to think in terms of the encounter between sciences and
religious traditions. This realization surfaces in many of the essays in this
volume. Dallal’s account of science and early Islam, for example, identifies
a sequence of different scientific enterprises—astronomy, optics, medicine,
and so on—to which Muslims contributed. Similarly, Donald Lopez’s scrutiny of Buddhism (chap. 9) carries the warning that a number of scholars
insist on the need to speak of several “Buddhisms” rather than a single
“Buddhism.” He also notes that key Buddhist figures engaging with European sciences during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries came from
different Buddhist cultures and held contrasting views on which form of
Buddhism they considered to be the most authentic. At the same time he
reminds us that the label “science” carries insufficient semantic precision to
cover everything from the Big Bang and evolutionary theory to the development of instruments like the microscope and spectrometer. Neither
Buddhism nor science is a unified tradition. B. V. Subbarayappa makes a
comparable point. Even within the three Indic religious traditions that his
chapter encompasses, he insists that none is a monolith.
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This pluralizing imperative can be readily extended. Noah Efron begins
his analysis (chap. 1) of science and early Judaism with the reminder that
“there has been no single, enduring Jewish attitude toward nature and its
study.” And Geoffrey Cantor confirms this impulse when he contrasts the
differences between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jewry, and notes the marked
divergences between Reform and ultra-Orthodox schools. John Hedley
Brooke points out (chap. 4) that even within the same Christian tradition
attitudes toward particular scientific theories may vary: the doctrine of creation,
for example, has been mobilized for very different purposes by Christians—
sometimes to support scientific stances, sometimes to oppose them. The
collective import of these delineations is to make us suspicious of the familiar “isms” to which we all too readily resort. Buddhism, evangelicalism,
Judaism, Calvinism, and so on name faith communities that are, at best,
related by family resemblance. Agnosticism and atheism might well be
appended to the list. Trading in such intellectual shorthand risks both
stereotyping genuine diversity and substituting bloodless abstraction for the
messiness of real history. In different locations, for example, Calvinists with
seriously similar theological convictions could react very differently to
Darwin’s theory of evolution depending on a host of other contingent
factors.8 Indeed, the fact that Darwinism itself was differently constructed
in different settings and made to mean different things further complicates
attempts to sort out religious, cultural, political, and other responses to
evolutionary theory.9
If pluralizing both science and religion in efforts to construct a map of
the historical terrain is desirable, so too is the range of enterprises that could
usefully be incorporated within the arc of relevant sciences. Neither the
social sciences, notably anthropology and sociology, nor what might be
called the historical-cultural sciences, such as philology or textual criticism,
ordinarily feature in standard treatments of “science and religion.” Here
and there throughout the present collection, significant intersections along
these lines occur. Donald Lopez, for instance, tellingly reminds us that it
was as a result of critical developments in the science of philology that key
Buddhist texts could be studied in the original by Buddhist scholars. The
development of Sanskrit studies in Europe facilitated the opening up of the
early history of Buddhism in new ways. Indeed, there is a sense in which, as
part of the intellectual circuitry of colonial networks and imperial imagining, the European interrogation of recovered Buddhist texts conspired to
“produce a new Buddha” (see chap. 9). According to Subbarayappa, it also
facilitated Europe’s encounter with Indian scientific knowledge in medical
and alchemical treatises, notably in the work of P. C. Ray.
The need to pluralize goes hand in hand with a second desideratum: the
value of localizing science-religion encounters and placing them in their
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geographical setting. Indeed, the salience of geography to the entire enterprise of rethinking global science and religion tellingly manifests itself in the
titles of various preceding chapters.10 Mark Csikszentmihalyi, for example,
organizes his contribution by region—China—and discusses a range of
religious traditions—Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism—within that geographical space (chap. 7). The different relationships these different religions
sustained with natural science, and indeed with the imperial state, highlights
something of the geopolitics of the whole subject. Again, Feierman and Janzen bound their study of sub-Saharan Africa by linguistic geography—
namely, by dwelling on those areas of eastern, central, and southern Africa
speaking variants of Bantu. More generally, the number of geographical
modifiers that are attached to religious nouns are considerable: French
rabbis, American Jews, Egyptian Muslims, Ottoman medreses, Indian spirituality, Irish monasteries, Scottish Calvinists, British evangelicals, English
Anglicans, Japanese Buddhists, and so on. These characterizations alert us to
the role of geographical location in the constitution of local traditions. Thus
Geoffrey Cantor reminds us that the lineaments of any particular Jewish
engagement with scientific knowledge depend “greatly on local factors, such
as the level of discrimination against Jews” (see chap. 2). As for early Islamic
science, Dallal emphasizes that Arabic astronomy developed differently in
different settings, with conspicuous divergences between an eastern Maragha
school and developments in North Africa. The same is also true of the evolution of modern atheism. If there are geographies of belief, so too are there
spaces of unbelief. As Lightman observes, the fate of atheism has differed
from national context to national context. In part, of course, this is because
there is a social, as well as intellectual, history of unbelief. Over the years
atheists, and proponents of heterodoxy more generally, have had to negotiate
their way around legal sanction of one sort or another, and their fortunes
have been contingent on the degree to which they could become socially
acceptable. Considered seditious and subversive in Newton’s time, atheists
were later paraded by Enlightenment radicals in France as clear-thinking
rational figures battling against the dark forces of superstition and prejudice.
In recent times, the pattern of atheist commitment has differed between, say,
Russia and the United States in response to contrasting ideologies and the
differential role accorded to the idea of a state church. The geography of religion, obviously, goes hand in hand with the geography of secularization.
What is also clear from the foregoing analyses are the different spatial
scales at which the location of science and religion may be analyzed. At one
scale of operations, Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu (chap. 6) considers recent
Islamic encounters with science within the context of the Ottoman Empire.
At another he makes it clear that science, oriental languages, and religion
were collectively taught in Islamic medreses and imperial naval and medical
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schools. In the early Middle Ages, as Peter Harrison and David Lindberg’s
chapter registers (chap. 3), very specific sites (like the monastery) served as
venues for the cultivation of mathematical arts, medicine, and calendrical
practices. In the same period, the University of Paris was a vital center of
learning and the site of controversy with the banning of Aristotle’s writings
on natural philosophy at various points in time during the thirteenth
century. Addressing the question of location, moreover, directly connects to
matters of locution. In different venues different things may be said, and
heard, by speakers and auditors alike. Elsewhere I have explored the significance of place in controversial cases where interlocutors paid the price for
saying the wrong thing in the wrong place.11 The geologist Alexander
Winchell, who was dismissed from his position at Vanderbilt University in
1878, did not succeed in his self-imposed effort to refrain from “the utterance of opinions which I supposed were disapproved of by the officers of
the University.”12 His views on human origins rubbed the local Methodist
fraternity the wrong way. In this volume, Lightman reminds us that in certain places eighteenth-century atheists and materialists feared persecution
if they spoke openly. Such circumstances redraw attention to the importance of locating encounters between science and religion in specific places
at particular times.
If localizing the relationships between religious traditions and scientific
enterprises allows the disorderliness of history to triumph over theoretical
prescription, it also brings into focus the significance of what might appropriately be called hybridization. Many of the stories told in this collection
draw attention to cross-cultural syntheses of one sort or another. Chinese
science, Csikszentmihalyi tells us, developed what he calls hybrid astronomies; during the fifteenth century, the Qing dynasty’s astronomical instruments in Bejing included an ecliptic armilla that had been designed by the
Flemish Jewish missionary Père Ferdinand Verbiest. Buddhism brought
Indian and Tibetan traditions into China, and the arrival of the Abrahamic
religions heralded the integration of indigenous and Western systems of
science. Again, early Jewish science changed in response to the different
host environments within which it was cultivated and to shifting Islamic or
Christian influences. Later, as Cantor notes, Jewish science was shaped by
the relations local Jewish communities sustained with the host culture.
İhsanoğlu’s chapter shows how Islamic astronomy and medicine were
influenced by the presence of Jewish scholars taking refuge in the Ottoman
Empire. It also includes the intriguing suggestion that the idea of a conflict
between science and religion was introduced into Islam from the Christian
West through such events as the publication of a Turkish translation of
Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, which called
forth critical commentary from Ahmed Midhat, and the controversy
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surrounding the pro-Darwin statements advanced by Edwin Lewis at the
Syrian Protestant College in Beirut.13
In India, the Hellenistic astronomy of figures like Ptolemy was synthesized with Vedic astrology to facilitate zodiac readings necessary for the
proper performance of rituals and festivals. Similarly, the eleventh-century
Islamic scholar, al-Biruni, incorporated Hindu astronomy into his writings,
while in the thirteen and fourteenth centuries, according to Subbarayappa,
Greek Hippocratic medicine was synthesized with Hindu medical knowledge. During the European Renaissance, as Harrison and Lindberg remind
us, Christian thinkers debated the value of Aristotelianism for their approach
to the natural world. Christian missionaries in sub-Saharan Africa played the
intriguing role of disenchanting African “folk” medical customs by castigating them as pagan, first, and then re-enchanting medical practices
through the integration of prayer and other spiritual exercises into hospital
treatment. As Feierman and Janzen tellingly note, this was a project in the
secularization of health care as a prelude to resacralizing it in a Christian key.
In missionary contexts, Brooke makes clear, the advancement of scientific
knowledge often depended on creative relationships with indigenous knowledge systems. As he points out, several Baptist missionaries in India sought
to foster dialogue between European and local ways of knowing by teaching
Sanskrit science side by side with European science. Similar patterns are
discernible elsewhere too, not least in Africa, where Swiss missionaries
working in entomology and botany engaged in a process of mutual knowledge exchange with indigenous Africans. Focusing on the work of HenriAlexandre Junod, who arrived in Mozambique in 1889, Patrick Harries has
shown something of how he “recognized both the different ways indigenous
people comprehended and gave meaning to nature and the ways in which
they contributed to his knowledge,” even though he remained convinced of
the superiority of Western knowledge regimes.14
As with the natural world, of course, intellectual hybridism has not
always been considered fertile. Missionary endeavors are a case in point: in
such contexts synthesis has frequently been branded syncretism. But this
only serves to underscore the productive role of religious heterodoxy in
scientific history.15 The Unitarianism of Isaac Newton and Joseph Priestley
is illustrative. As Brooke points out, it was their concern to cultivate a
rationalized Christianity that fostered both social radicalism and a strongly
proscientific outlook. Not only do such maneuvers defy the easy bipolarity of
doctrinal orthodoxy or unbelieving skepticism, but they underscore the
contingency of theological labeling: convictions dubbed heterodox in one
place and time may acquire the benediction of conservative orthodoxy—or
vice versa—in others. Harrison and Lindberg, for example, compellingly
show how atomism, at one point deemed to display atheistic tendencies,
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could later be staged as a friend, not a foe, of Christianity and certainly more
hospitable than Aristotelian matter theory.
Hybridism, of course, steals into intellectual circulation in other ways
too, for example, through acts of translation. For translation is never simply transmission; it is transformation. As Marwa Elshakry has pointed out,
modern science translations into Arabic have been freighted with cultural
politics. The fact that there was no specific Arabic term for the word “species” made translation of Darwin’s Origin anything but straightforward;
the lack of a precise Arabic equivalent for the term “evolution” only compounded the problem. Choosing whether to refashion older terms or to
make up new ones had hybridizing implications for intellectual exchange.16
In the present collection, Ahmad Dallal points out that by translating Greek
works into Arabic, Islamic scholars “did more than simply preserve the
Greek scientific legacy”—they brought about a significant Islamization of
science (see chap. 5). During the colonial period in India, European scientific ideas and practices were not introduced into India through a smooth
process of diffusion. Rather, they were domesticated to local needs, not least
in the work of Raja Rammohun Roy, who remained Hindu to the core of his
being even while championing the introduction of various European-style
natural sciences into the curriculum.17 All of this challenges the assumption
that modern European science simply diffused across the globe. Instead, as
Kapil Raj has shown, intercultural encounters were of crucial significance
for the growth of knowledge about botany, cartography, terrestrial surveying,
and linguistics.18
Other instances of the hybrid intertwining of different scientific and religious traditions could readily be elaborated. The point is that the collective
import of cultivating a sensitivity toward the hybrid, the amalgamated, and
the synthetic is that it subverts the idea of science or religion as “pure” enterprises. Their “impurity,” moreover, alerts us to the wider context of “science”
and “religion,” and thus to the ways in which they may be mobilized in the
interests of cultural politics. Lopez notes how certain versions of Buddhism
were adopted by some people in search of a scientific religion as an alternative
to traditional theism. In early-modern Europe, as Harrison and Lindberg
show, Newtonian science and religion were deployed as resources in the
service of monarchy and moderatism against republicanism and radicalism.
“Newton’s divinely controlled mechanical universe,” Lightman writes,
“became the model for the triumph of the new Whig constitution and
for the liberal Christians who supported it” (see chap. 11). And Brooke
points out that Joseph Priestley thought certain Christian doctrines were
indispensable for social control. All this serves to remind us that “science
and religion” are always embedded in wider socio-political networks and
their relationship is conditioned by the prevailing cultural arrangements.
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Precisely the same is no less true of “agnosticism.” Coined by Thomas
Henry Huxley, this term enabled him to place himself somewhere between
traditional faith and extremist forms of unbelief that circulated among
disreputable working-class radicals.
Science and religion have served as cultural resources in other ways too.
Their role in the maintenance of cultural identity, for example, is not insignificant. A critical distinction can be drawn between confessional believers
and those resorting to religion simply as a marker of ethnic belonging.
Geoffrey Cantor’s chapter is illustrative for its treatment of atheistic Jews
who align themselves culturally with the Jewish community but possess no
specifically religious convictions. Complications of this stripe crucially
inflect our understanding of the role of Judaism in scientific enterprises.
Such circumstances point to the role of the iconic in elucidating encounters
between science and religion. Some episodes achieve symbolic significance
and are staged as emblematic of wider intellectual currents. The WilberforceHuxley confrontation in Oxford in 1860, the Tyndall furor at the 1874 British
Association meeting in Belfast, the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in
1925, even the name of Charles Darwin have come to symbolize conservatism, skepticism, intransigence, far-sightedness, or atheism—depending on
how they are represented. Here historical fact concedes to cultural politics.
Attending to the place of symbolism modulates the interpretation of science
and religion in critical ways. In China, for example, Csikszentmihalyi
reminds us that the project of adapting indigenous belief to scientific
demands ran the risk of being seen as capitulating to the Westernization of
values. In a comparable way, as Noah Efron makes clear, natural knowledge
was sometimes seen by Jews as embodying foreign wisdom, a view that
could breed an attitude of suspicion about science and make it “unseemly.”
Greater sensitivity to the symbolic significance of pronouncements and performances would enrich our understanding of the long history of science
and religion in far-reaching ways.
FLASH POINTS AND TRADING ZONES
If this collection of essays complicates received wisdom about “science and
religion” by challenging monochrome portrayals of the relationship as
inherently pugilistic or irenic, it also identifies what I want to call flash
points and trading zones. By the former I mean those matters—different
from tradition to tradition, from place and place, from time to time—that
have been seen to matter in religion’s encounter with science. Identifying
some of these shows how variegated the intellectual landscape has been. By
trading zones I refer to those arenas of engagement where the interface
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between science and religion has facilitated fruitful intellectual exchange.
The term “trading zone” has been used in anthropological studies to
describe something of the processes by which different cultures have been
able to exchange commodities despite their differences in language, social
relations, and so on. It has been deployed in studies of science and technology to explain how trading can take place even when the partners, as
Peter Galison puts it, “ascribe utterly different significance to the objects
being exchanged.”19
So far as flash points are concerned, the list of potential candidates is a
lengthy one, and a few examples must suffice. In Britain and the United
States, a persistent though not universal source of contention has centered
on questions of design, teleology, and natural theology. As Lightman’s chapter shows, Richard Dawkins’s recent The God Delusion, for example, largely
rotates around the conviction that Darwin’s theory of evolution shattered
“the illusion of design” by showing that apparent purpose is nothing more
than the product of humdrum, natural causes (see chap. 11). This, of course,
is only the last in a long sequence of scientific assaults on teleology. French
advocates of a more radical enlightenment in the eighteenth century, like
Diderot and d’Holbach, attacked the Newtonian moderates and pushed for
an all-embracing naturalism. Their stance stood in marked contrast to Newton’s Unitarian defense of a purposive cosmic order and Voltaire’s commitment to providential deism. Later, as Brooke notes, nineteenth-century
figures like William Whewell were of the opinion that scientific analysis
could not proceed without invoking final causes. Design was also an issue
for Islamic encounters with scientific claims. Because traditional Kalam
arguments from design remained important, as İhsanoğlu points out, what
he calls the “more ideological forms” of Darwinism and materialism, alongside philosophical positivism and social Darwinism, brought discord. By
contrast, arguments from design are only conspicuous in Jewish works by
their relative absence. At the same time, different stances could be adopted
within traditions. The flourishing of natural theology in seventeenth-century
England represented one Christian response to what were perceived to be
the dangers of a mechanistic atomism; by contrast, later writers as diverse
as Thomas Chalmers and John Henry Newman did not hesitate to identify
theological reservations about the teleological argument. Newman never
cared for the design argument because he was never able to see its logical
force; Chalmers thought it could never lead to Christian theism.20
Other flash points could readily be elaborated. In certain religious traditions the question of origins has loomed large; in others this has not been
the case. In contrast to Christian and Islamic anxieties over the implications
of evolution, not least for understanding the nature of the image of God and
the dignity of the human species, Hindus generally displayed much less
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distress about Darwinism, because their immanentist philosophy avoided
the dualism between creator and creation (as noted in chap. 8). The links
between natural philosophy and the tradition of natural magic were more
troublesome for some traditions than others. For Jews, Efron reminds us,
Talmudic bans on magic were critically important, and later Maimonides
sought to undermine astrology. In traditions united by a canonical text, the
development of the science of textual criticism could create major difficulties for orthodox believers. In other times, places, and settings, different
issues dominated the science-religion skyline. Among these we might refer
to the questioning of divine miracle by the idea of omnipresent natural law;
the subversion of free will in deterministic projects that conflated mind and
brain; the challenges that new theories of matter posed to some understandings of the Eucharist; the materialistic ethos of certain strands of scientific
reductionism; the use of scientific research to support various forms of
eugenics. All these—and doubtless many more—have been flash points for
certain groups in certain places at certain times in science’s dialogue with
religion. This realization forces us to acknowledge the complexities of
science-religion narratives and should curb any inclination to universalize
particulars. Because Copernicanism was problematic in parts of Christian
Europe, for example, is no reason to presume that it was universally troublesome for religious communities. According to İhsanoğlu, heliocentrism
caused no comparable stir among Ottoman scholars when it was reported in
Arabic translation.
Flash points in one mode, of course, may surface as trading zones in
another. If their commitment to teleology made some religious believers
resistant to certain forms of scientific explanation, natural theology in
different settings could act as a stimulus to scientific inquiry. The idea of a
divinely designed natural world was foundational to the work on natural
history conducted by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers John
Ray and William Derham. For them, the belief that living things were
divinely adapted to their natural environments fostered their inquiries into
plant and animal life. The treatises produced by figures like these were
thus both theological and scientific at the same time. The doctrine of
humanity’s fall from grace and the theology of original sin could likewise
serve as a trading ground for scientific and theological exchange. Advocates
of the new experimental philosophy of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries frequently took with great seriousness the adverse implications
of these particular Judeo-Christian doctrines for human rationality—what
Harrison and Lindberg judiciously call “the wounding of reason.” Recognition of this fallen condition kindled a sense that mechanisms needed to be
put in place to overcome the epistemic consequences of original corruption
and its legacy of human depravity.21 New observational instruments,
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Which Science? Whose Religion?
291
measuring devices, experimental apparatus, and warranting procedures
were all espoused in hopes of introducing greater rigor into knowledgeacquiring enterprises. In this trading zone, productive exchanges could take
place between theological thinking about the epistemic implications of fallen
humanity and technological developments in scientific instrumentation.
The belief of the monotheistic religions that all humankind have
descended from Adam has also fostered intellectual traffic between theological conviction and scientific inquiry. The search for Adam’s language,
efforts to elucidate human racial differentiation, whether the human race is
of monogenetic or polygenetic origin, the relationship between the world
chronologies of different regional cultures, how emerging archeological
artifacts should be interpreted—stances on all of these subjects were hammered out on the terrain of humankind’s Adamic ancestry.22 The character
of reading practices has also been a ground on which science and religion
have traded wares. According to Harrison and Lindberg, shifts in how the
book of scripture was read had a critical effect on ways of reading the book
of nature during the early-modern development of science. The demise of
allegorical approaches to Bible reading, they suggest, had subsidiary consequences for the tradition of interpreting the natural order through emblems
and symbols. In this case literalism, which in a later era could disrupt science’s relationship with theology, had a positive impact on the development
of scientific theory.23
Such zones of exchange, of course, are not restricted to Judeo-Christian
traditions. The eliding of certain strands in Buddhism with various forms of
psychoanalysis (in the wake of the contributions by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki
on Zen) and with aspects of modern physics (such as Fritjof Capra’s The Tao
of Physics) are cases in point, as Lopez’s chapter illustrates. Indeed it has
been claimed that Buddhist philosophy exemplifies the operation of scientific method in the realm of psychological self-scrutiny. The Dalai Lama, for
example, has warmly embraced scientific achievements, thereby legitimizing
a transfer space between religion and modern science. Zonal trafficking
is also part of the story of science and religion in the Vedic traditions.
Metaphysics and mathematics, for example, engaged in cross-border trading
with the concept of zero serving as tender while, as Subbarayappa shows,
the study of eclipses facilitated the development of astronomical techniques
for Vedic astrological purposes. More recently, in his pioneering work in
physics and physiology, J. C. Bose believed he could see manifestations of
the Hindu idea of unity. Commerce in such zones, of course, may not always
have dealt in the currency of explanation, but they certainly have made space
available for empirical advancements.
Despite widespread reports of secularization in the West, a number
of new contact zones have been opened up in the wake of a series of
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scientific-metaphysical developments during the twentieth century. Brooke
advertises several of these in the closing pages of his chapter. The principle
of indeterminacy (arising from quantum mechanics), the Big Bang
cosmology, and the exceptionally constricted range of conditions necessary
for carbon-based life have all been used as resources to underwrite an antideterministic defense of free will, the reassertion of the doctrine of creation,
and the revisiting of teleology through the idea of cosmic fine-tuning. And
the list could be further extended. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit
paleontologist, controversially extended the principle of evolutionary transformation into the spiritual realm with his conception of the noosphere as a
kind of phenomenological layer of human collective consciousness that
evolved after the geosphere and biosphere, and his claim that the Omega
Point is the ultimate goal toward which all creation is moving.24 Wolfhart
Pannenberg and others, such as T. F. Torrance, have—no less contentiously—
fastened upon the idea of fields of force in modern physics as a resource for
thinking about the nature of God.25 In these proposals and the ensuing
debates, modern field theory serves as the territory on which modern theology seeks to engage contemporary natural science.
TENSIONS AND POLARITIES
Science and Religion around the World delightfully complicates popular
narratives of “the relationship between science and religion.” It pluralizes
the entire enterprise, identifies cross-cutting themes, highlights the role of
cultural politics, and attends to difference and divergence from time to time
and place to place. It also discloses the wide range of issues that have been
the focal point of contention between religious believers and scientific practitioners, as well as zones of contact that have opened up new channels of
communication and intellectual commerce. But this does not mean that
there is no further work to be done. A sequence of tensions and polarities
remain that should form agenda items for future investigation.
In my view, a tension between the particular and the general still persists
in accounts of the historical relations between science and religion. When
grand narratives are deconstructed by tradition, period, and place, there
remains the problem of ascertaining how very specific case studies of individuals or communities relate to broader currents of thought and action.
Just how to use a biography or local study without underclaiming or
overclaiming remains a difficulty. Figuring out the way in which Belfast
Presbyterians responded to the challenge of Darwin in the 1870s—to take
one example—tells us something both about Belfast and about Presbyterians. It tells us something about two scales of inquiry—local and global.
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Exactly what it tells about each is no less easy to discern than ascertaining
how these different scales of operation relate to one another. How to handle
the differences between intellectual leaders and popular audiences also
remains a difficulty. As Brooke makes clear, it is important to distinguish
between “opinions formulated by an intellectual elite and by relatively
unsophisticated members of the public.”26 And at the same time, critical
differences may be discernible between different kinds of elites. Jewish
understandings of science are not restricted to the commentaries of rabbis;
the stances adopted by practicing Jewish scientists also constitute a critical
part of the story. These are differences that make a difference, for they disturb any presumption that it is possible to identify the Jewish, or Christian,
or Hindu, or Muslim reaction to, say, Darwinian evolution, or Freudian
psychoanalysis, or Einsteinian relativity.
A careful reading of these essays will also serve to underscore the fact that
science and religion may converge on the ground of practice as much as
theory. There is much said in the different chapters about ideas, theories,
ideologies, and theologies. But from time to time, the critical importance of
performance and practice also shines through. Think of how metallurgical
skills in China were crucial to the construction of ancient bells used for
religious purposes. In China, too, musical technology was mobilized to
produce instruments that were integral to the practices of geomancy and
other ritual performances. In early Judaism, knowledge about animals was
a combination of observation and ritual practice. In sub-Saharan Africa
certain “practices, at once religious and medical, were seen as an intervention involving supernatural forces and natural processes” (see chap. 10).
Among the Indic religions, the performance of sacrifice required precise
determination of timing, which, in turn, stimulated astronomical inquiry,
while the construction of sacrificial altars was intimately bound up with
developments in Vedic geometry. The production of astronomical devices
for determining the sacred direction in Islam, the cultivation of science as
itself a godly pursuit in early-modern England, and the use of mathematics
for the calendrical calculation of holy dates are just a few additional spheres of
practice in which science and religion have come together. Collectively they
alert us to the performative dimensions of both science and religion—an
association that is too often forgotten.
Finally, understanding the dynamic of science and religion runs the spectrum from what I would call religious science to the science of religion. In
spaces where religion tends to dominate the conversation, adjectival science
surfaces: Torah science, Hindu medicine, Islamic astronomy, creation
science, Catholic psychology. Where science governs the discourse, religion
tends to be explained by science: the anthropology of religion, the search for
the God gene, the evolution of spirituality, the economics of communal
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faith, the neurochemistry of religious experience.27 And yet it would be easy
to make unwarranted assumptions at either end of the spectrum, as two
concluding cases will illustrate.
The development of a self-conscious Calvinist science at the Free University of Amsterdam during the 1930s, in the wake of Abraham Kuper’s
vision, constituted a concerted attempt to conduct scientific research on
Calvinist principles. But this did not mean confrontation with the conventional science of the time. Ironically, the Calvinist worldview of key
members of the faculty permitted a certain freedom of scientific inquiry
that facilitated the “acceptance of mainstream science in Dutch Calvinist
circles.”28 Through their work on such subjects as radioactivity and the
age of the earth, the philosophy of physics and causality, quantum mechanics and the nature of reality, they sought to keep science and religion
in tandem.
At the opposite end of the continuum, it was when anthropologically
inclined scholars brought religion within the sphere of scientific explanation and treated it as a dependent variable that conflicts arose—as in
Ernest Renan’s portrayal of Islam as inherently unsuited to the cultivation
of science. Among British anthropologists during the latter part of the
nineteenth century, the anthropology of religion could be recruited to bolster what Lightman calls “a new tradition of secular theorizing about religion without reference to the truth-content of its claims” (see chap. 12).
And yet this was not universally the case. William Robertson Smith’s historical anthropology of sacrifice, totemism, and exogamy, despite the assault to which he was subjected by his fellow churchmen, only served to
reinforce his belief that through his excavations into the archeology of
primitive religion he was unearthing the “first germs” of “eternal” theological “truths.”29
Counterintuitive stances like these usefully stand as emblematic of the
argument that I have sought to marshal in this epilogue. They subvert
expectations, they localize encounters, they resist stereotype, and they
inspire the conviction that the misplaced certainties of presumption are not
to be preferred to the messy contingencies of history.
Notes
1. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996), 1.
2. Thomas Dixon, Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 3.
3. Priya Shetty and Andy Coghlan, “Royal Society Fellows Turn on Director over
Creationism” New Scientist, September 16, 2008. Available online at: www.newscientist.
com/article/dn14744-royal-society-fellows-turn-on-director-over-creationism.
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Which Science? Whose Religion?
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html. The full text of the letter appears on Richard Dawkins’s website: http://
richarddawkins.net/articles/3119.
4. Quoted in Shetty and Coghlan, “Royal Society Fellows Turn on Director.”
5. John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (London: Henry King, 1875), 353.
6. Stephen Jay Gould, “Nonoverlapping Magisteria,” Natural History 106 (March
1997): 16–22.
7. Michael Ruse, “Review of Stephen Jay Gould’s ‘Rocks of Ages,’” Global Spiral
(July 1999), available online at: www.metanexus.net/magazine/ArticleDetail/
tabid/68/id/3044/Default.aspx.
8. I have discussed this in “Darwinism and Calvinism: The Belfast-Princeton
Connection,” Isis 83 (1992): 408–28, and “Science, Region, and Religion: The Reception of Darwinism in Princeton, Belfast, and Edinburgh,” in Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender, ed. Ronald L. Numbers and John
Stenhouse, 7–38 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
9. See David N. Livingstone, “Science, Text and Space: Thoughts on the Geography of Reading,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35 (2005): 391–401.
10. My thoughts on the subject of the historical geographies of science are developed in David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific
Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
11. David N. Livingstone, “Science, Site, and Speech: Scientific Knowledge and
the Spaces of Rhetoric,” History of the Human Sciences 20 (2007): 71–98. See also
Diarmid A. Finnegan, “Exeter-Hall Science and Evangelical Rhetoric in mid-Victorian
London,” Journal of Victorian Culture 16 (2011): in press.
12. Quoted in Leonard Alberstadt, “Alexander Winchell’s Preadamites—A Case
for Dismissal from the Vanderbilt University,” Earth Sciences History 13 (1994):
97–112.
13. See also Marwa Elshakry, “The Gospel of Science and American Evangelicalism in Late Ottoman Beirut,” Past and Present 197 (August 2007): 173–214.
14. Patrick Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of
Knowledge in South-East Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2007), 5.
15. See John Hedley Brooke and Ian Maclean, eds., Heterodoxy in Early Modern
Science and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
16. Marwa S. Elshakry, “Knowledge in Motion: The Cultural Politics of Modern
Science Translations in Arabic,” Isis 99 (2008): 701–30.
17. See also Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj, 1857–1905 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
18. Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of
Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (London: Palgrave, 2007).
19. Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997), 783.
20. See the discussions in Michael Ruse, Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have
a Purpose? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
21. Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).
22. I have discussed this in Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion and the Politics of
Human Origins (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
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23. See also Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural
Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
24. For a discussion of this and comparable evolutionary eschatologies, see Ernst
Benz, Evolution and Christian Hope: Man’s Concept of the Future from the Early Fathers
to Teilhard de Chardin (New York: Doubleday, 1966).
25. See Max Jammer, Einstein and Physics: Physics and Theology (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1999).
26. For a history of popular responses to science and religion, see Ronald L.
Numbers, “Science and Christianity among the People: A Vulgar History,” in Science
and Christianity in Pulpit and Pew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 11–38.
27. A useful brief overview of such contemporary projects is “Where Angels No
Longer Fear to Tread: Scientists Try to Explain Religion,” Economist, March 22, 2008.
28. Abraham C. Flipse, “Against the Science-Religion Conflict: The Genesis of a
Calvinist Science Faculty in the Netherlands in the Early Twentieth Century,” Annals
of Science 65 (2008): 363–91, on 363.
29. William Robertson Smith, “Sacrifice,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed., 24
vols. (Edinburgh, 1875–1889), 9:138.
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Copyright 2008. OUP Oxford.
All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.
Chapter 1
What are science–religion
debates really about?
In Rome on 22 June 1633 an elderly man was found guilty by the
Catholic Inquisition of rendering himself ‘vehemently suspected
of heresy, namely, of having held and believed a doctrine which is
false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture’. The doctrine
in question was that ‘the sun is the centre of the world and does
not move from east to west, that the earth moves and is not the
centre of the world, and that one may hold and defend as probable
an opinion after it has been declared and defined as contrary to
Holy Scripture’. The guilty man was the 70-year-old Florentine
philosopher Galileo Galilei, who was sentenced to imprisonment
(a punishment that was later commuted to house arrest) and
instructed to recite the seven penitential Psalms once a week for
the next three years as a ‘salutary penance’. That included a weekly
recitation of the particularly apt line addressed to God in Psalm
102: ‘In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth, and
the heavens are the work of your hands.’ Kneeling before the
‘Reverend Lord Cardinals, Inquisitors-General’, Galileo accepted
his sentence, swore complete obedience to the ‘Holy Catholic and
Apostolic Church’, and declared that he cursed and detested the
‘errors and heresies’ of which he had been suspected – namely
belief in a sun-centred cosmos and in the movement of the earth.
It is hardly surprising that this humiliation of the most celebrated
scientific thinker of his day by the Catholic Inquisition on the
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Science and Religion
grounds of his beliefs about astronomy and their contradiction
of the Bible should have been interpreted by some as evidence
of an inevitable conflict between science and religion. The
modern encounter between evolutionists and creationists has
also seemed to reveal an ongoing antagonism, although this time
with science, rather than the church, in the ascendancy. The
Victorian agnostic Thomas Huxley expressed this idea vividly in
his review of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859).
‘Extinguished theologians,’ Huxley wrote, ‘lie about the cradle of
every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and
history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been
fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists,
bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain.’
The image of conflict has also been attractive to some religious
believers, who use it to portray themselves as members of an
embattled but righteous minority struggling heroically to protect
their faith against the oppressive and intolerant forces of science
and materialism.
Although the idea of warfare between science and religion
remains widespread and popular, recent academic writing on the
subject has been devoted primarily to undermining the notion of
an inevitable conflict. As we shall see, there are good historical
reasons for rejecting simple conflict stories. From Galileo’s trial
in 17th-century Rome to modern American struggles over the
latest form of anti-evolutionism, known as ‘Intelligent Design’,
there has been more to the relationship between science and
religion than meets the eye, and certainly more than just conflict.
Pioneers of early modern science such as Isaac Newton and
Robert Boyle saw their work as part of a religious enterprise
devoted to understanding God’s creation. Galileo too thought
that science and religion could exist in mutual harmony. The
goal of a constructive and collaborative dialogue between science
and religion has been endorsed by many Jews, Christians, and
Muslims in the modern world. The idea that scientific and
religious views are inevitably in tension is also contradicted by
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the large numbers of religious scientists who continue to see their
research as a complement rather than a challenge to their faith,
including the theoretical physicist John Polkinghorne, the former
director of the Human Genome Project Francis S. Collins, and the
astronomer Owen Gingerich, to name just a few.
The leading historian of science and religion John Hedley
Brooke writes that serious historical study has ‘revealed so
extraordinarily rich and complex a relationship between science
and religion in the past that general theses are difficult to
sustain. The real lesson turns out to be the complexity.’ Some
of that historical complexity will be explored in subsequent
chapters. There has certainly not been a single and unchanging
relationship between two entities called ‘science’ and ‘religion’.
There are, nonetheless, some central philosophical and political
questions that have frequently recurred in this context: What are
the most authoritative sources of knowledge? What is the most
fundamental reality? What kind of creatures are human beings?
What is the proper relationship between church and state? Who
should control education? Can either scripture or nature serve as
a reliable ethical guide?
Debates about science and religion are, on the face of it, about
the intellectual compatibility or incompatibility of some
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What are science–religion debates about?
Does that mean that conflict needs to be written out of our story
altogether? Certainly not. The only thing to avoid is too narrow
an idea of the kinds of conflicts one might expect to find between
science and religion. The story is not always one of a heroic and
open-minded scientist clashing with a reactionary and bigoted
church. The bigotry, like the open-mindedness, is shared around
on all sides – as are the quest for understanding, the love of truth,
the use of rhetoric, and the compromising entanglements with
the power of the state. Individuals, ideas, and institutions can
and have come into conflict, or been resolved into harmony, in an
endless array of different combinations.
Science and Religion
particular religious belief with some particular aspect of scientific
knowledge. Does belief in life after death conflict with the findings
of modern brain science? Is belief in the Bible incompatible
with believing that humans and chimpanzees evolved from a
common ancestor? Does belief in miracles conflict with the
strictly law-governed world revealed by the physical sciences? Or
can belief in free will and divine action, conversely, be supported
and substantiated by the theories of quantum mechanics? One of
the answers to the question that is the title of this chapter – What
are science–religion debates really about? – is that they are about
these issues of intellectual compatibility.
What I especially want to emphasize in this Very Short
Introduction to the subject, however, is that these contemporary
contests of ideas are the visible tips of much larger and
deeper-lying structures. My aim throughout this book will be to
look historically at how we came to think as we do about science
and religion, to explore philosophically what preconceptions
about knowledge are involved, and to reflect on the political and
ethical questions that often set the unspoken agenda for these
intellectual debates. In the rest of this introductory chapter, I
indicate the kinds of questions I think we should be asking about
science and religion, both as sources of individuals’ beliefs and as
social and political entities, before also briefly introducing ‘science
and religion’ as an academic field.
Encountering nature
Scientific knowledge is based on observations of the natural world.
But observing the natural world is neither as simple nor as solitary
an activity as it might sound. Take the moon, for instance. When
you look up at the sky on a clear night, what do you see? You see
the moon and the stars. But what do you actually observe? There
are a lot of small bright lights and then a larger whitish circular
object. If you had never learned any science, what would you think
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this white object was? Is it a flat disc, like a kind of giant aspirin?
Or is it a sphere? If the latter, then why do we always see the same
side of it? And why does its shape change from a thin crescent
to a full disc and back again? Is it an object like the earth? If so,
how big is it? And how close? And do people live there? Or is it a
smaller night-time equivalent of the sun? Finally, perhaps it is like
one of the little bright lights but larger or closer? In any case, how
and why does it move across the sky like that? Is something else
pushing it? Is it attached to an invisible mechanism of some kind?
Is it a supernatural being?
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What are science–religion debates about?
Now, if you are well informed about modern science, you will
know that the moon is a large spherical rocky satellite which
orbits the earth completely about once a month and which rotates
once on its own axis in the same time (which explains why we
always see the same side of it). The changing relative positions
of the sun, earth, and moon also explain why the moon displays
‘phases’ – with either the entirety or only a small crescent of the
illuminated half of the moon visible at a particular time. You may
also know that all physical bodies are attracted to each other by
a gravitational force in proportion to the product of their masses
and in inverse proportion to the square of the distance between
them, and that this helps to explain the regular motions of the
moon around the earth and of the earth around the sun. You will
probably also know that the bright little lights in the night sky
are stars, similar to our sun; that the ones visible to the naked eye
are thousands of light years away and those observable through
telescopes are millions or even billions of light years away; so
that to look up at the night sky is to look into the distant past
of our universe. But however much of all this you know, you
did not find it out by observation. You were told it. You possibly
learned it from your parents or a science teacher or a television
programme or an online encyclopaedia. Even professional
astronomers will not generally have checked the truth of any of
the statements made in this paragraph by their own empirical
Science and Religion
1. The moon as engraved by the artist Claude Mellan from early
17th-century telescopic observations
observations. The reason for this is not that astronomers are lazy
or incompetent, but simply that they can rely on the amassed
authoritative observations and theoretical reasonings of the
scientific community which, over a period of many centuries, have
established these facts as fundamental physical truths.
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We should also notice, by the way, that what science often aims
to show is that things in themselves are not as they initially seem
to us – that appearances can be deceptive. The earth beneath
our feet certainly seems to be solid and stable, and the sun and
the other stars appear to move around us. But science eventually
showed that, despite all the sensory evidence to the contrary,
the earth is not only spinning on its own axis but is also hurtling
around the sun at great speed. Indeed, one of the characters
in Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
(1632) expresses his admiration on just these grounds for those
who, like Aristarchus and Copernicus, had been able to believe
in the sun-centred system before the advent of the telescope:
‘I cannot sufficiently admire the intellectual eminence of those
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What are science–religion debates about?
The point is that while it is certainly true that scientific knowledge
is based on and tested against observations of the natural
world, there is an awful lot more to it than just pointing your
sense organs in the right direction. As an individual, even an
individual scientist, only the tiniest fraction of what you know is
based directly on your own observations. And even then, those
observations only make sense within a complex framework of
existing facts and theories which have been accumulated and
developed through many centuries. You only know what you do
about the moon and the stars because of a long and complex
cultural history (a small part of which is told in Chapter 2),
which mediates between the light from the night sky and your
thoughts about astronomy and cosmology. That history includes
the successful challenging of the old earth-centred world view by
Galileo Galilei, with the help of Copernicus’s astronomy and the
newly invented telescope in the early 17th century, as well as the
establishment of Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation later
in that century, and more recent developments in physics and
cosmology too. It also includes, crucially, the histories of those
social and political mechanisms that allow for, and control, the
dissemination of scientific knowledge among the people through
books and in classrooms.
Science and Religion
who received it and held it to be true. They have by sheer force of
intellect done such violence to their own senses as to prefer what
reason told them over that which sense experience plainly showed
them to be the case.’ In more recent times, both evolutionary
biology and quantum mechanics have similarly required people
to believe the most implausible things – that we share an ancestor
not only with rabbits but also with carrots, for example, or that
the smallest components of matter are simultaneously both
waves and particles. People sometimes say that science is just a
systematization of empirical observations, or nothing more than
the careful application of common sense. However, it also has the
ambition and the potential to show that our senses deceive us and
that our basic intuitions may lead us astray.
But when you look up at the night sky, you may not be thinking
about astronomy and cosmology at all. You may instead be
gripped by a sense of the power of nature, the beauty and
grandeur of the heavens, the vastness of space and time, and your
own smallness and insignificance. This might even be a religious
experience for you, reinforcing your feeling of awe at the power
of God and the immensity and complexity of his creation, putting
you in mind of the words of Psalm 19: ‘The heavens declare the
glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.’
Such an emotional and religious response to the night sky would,
of course, be every bit as historically and culturally mediated as
the experience of perceiving the moon and the stars in terms of
modern cosmology. Without some kind of religious education
you certainly would not be able to quote from the Bible, and you
would perhaps not even be able to formulate a developed concept
of God. Individual religious experiences, like modern scientific
observations, are made possible by long processes of human
collaboration in a shared quest for understanding. In the religious
case, what intervenes between the light hitting your retina and
your thoughts about the glory of God is the lengthy history of a
particular sacred text, and its reading and interpretation within a
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succession of human communities. And, as in the scientific case,
one of the lessons learned through that communal endeavour is
that things are not as they seem. Religious teachers, as much as
scientific ones, try to show their pupils that there is an unseen
world behind the observed one – and one which might overturn
their most settled intuitions and beliefs.
The political dimension
If this first approach to the conflict narrative is to change the
plot, the second involves recasting the leading characters. This
approach says: yes, there have been conflicts that seem to be
between science and religion, and they are real conflicts, but they
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What are science–religion debates about?
Among historians of science and religion there have been two
interestingly different kinds of attack on the ‘conflict narrative’
favoured by Enlightenment rationalists, Victorian freethinkers,
and modern-day scientific atheists. The first strategy is to replace
the overarching image of conflict with that of complexity, and
to put emphasis on the very different ways that science–religion
interactions have developed at different times, in different places,
and in different local circumstances. Some scientists have been
religious, others atheists. Some religious denominations welcome
modern science, others are suspicious of it. Recognizing that
neither ‘science’ nor ‘religion’ refers to a simple singular entity
is an important part of this approach too, as is acknowledging
the existence of considerable national differences. To take just
the most obvious example, debates about evolution and religion
have, from the beginning of the 20th century and right up to the
present day, developed quite differently in the United States than
they have in Europe and elsewhere. As I will explain in Chapter
5, the debates about the teaching of evolution in schools that go
on in America today emerged through circumstances very specific
to that country, most importantly the interpretation of the First
Amendment to its Constitution, which prohibits the government
from passing any law ‘respecting an establishment of religion’.
Science and Religion
are not between science and religion. The question then is: who or
what are the real antagonists in this story? In a way, we are then
just straight back into the messy details of historical complexity.
There is certainly not a simple recasting that works for all cases,
but the general idea is that the real conflict is a political one about
the production and dissemination of knowledge. The opposition
of science versus religion is then seen to be standing proxy for
some classic modern political conflicts: the individual versus the
state, or secular liberalism versus conservative traditionalism.
It is interesting to note that in modern America, for example,
campaigners both for and against the teaching of evolution in
schools have portrayed themselves as representing the rights and
freedoms of the people against an intolerant and authoritarian
establishment which is controlling the educational agenda. In
the 1920s that establishment was portrayed by defenders of
evolution as Christian and conservative, but to some religious
groups today it seems that a secular liberal elite have taken control
of the education system. Debates about science and religion give
certain groups an opportunity to argue their case for greater
social influence, and greater control over the mechanisms of
state education, a case that rests on quite independent political
grounds.
These questions about the politics of knowledge will arise
repeatedly in subsequent chapters. For the moment, let
us consider just one other example – the philosopher and
firebrand Thomas Paine. An unsuccessful corset-maker, sacked
tax-collector, and occasional political writer, Paine left his native
England to start a new life in America in 1774. On his arrival in
Philadelphia, he found work as the editor of the Pennsylvania
Magazine. A couple of years later, his polemical pamphlet
Common Sense (1776) was a key factor in persuading the
American colonists to go to war against the British government,
and established Paine as the bestselling author of the age. An
associate of Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson, and others of
the founding fathers of the United States of America, Paine’s
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Paine’s version of the conflict narrative makes most sense when
seen in its political context. Paine was, indeed, a scientific thinker
who was opposed to Christianity. He denounced the Bible,
especially the Old Testament, with its stories of ‘voluptuous
debaucheries’ among the Israelites and the ‘unrelenting
vindictiveness’ of their God. To the shock of his friends, Paine
wrote of the Bible: ‘I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything
that is cruel.’ Paine also lambasted the ‘priestcraft’ at work in the
‘adulterous’ relationship between the Church of England and
the British state. What he hoped for, though, was not an end to
religion but the replacement of Christian religion by a rational
religion based on the study of nature – one which recognized the
existence of God, the importance of morality, and the hope for a
future life, but did away with scriptures, priests, and the authority
of the state. His reasons for this were democratic ones. National
churches lorded illegitimate power over the people by claiming
special access to divine truths and revelations. But everyone can
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What are science–religion debates about?
democratic and anti-monarchical political philosophy shaped the
Declaration of Independence. After politics, Paine’s other great
passions were science and engineering. He had attended popular
lectures on Newton and astronomy back in England, and he spent
many years of his life working on a design for a single-span iron
bridge, inspired by the delicacy and strength of one of the great
works of nature – the spider’s web. His whole philosophy was
a scientific one. He saw revolutions in governments paralleling
the revolutions of celestial bodies in the heavens. Each was an
inevitable, natural, and law-governed process. Later in his life,
having had a hand in both the American and French revolutions,
he turned his sights from monarchy to Christianity. The
institutions of Christianity were as offensive to his enlightened
and Newtonian sensibilities as were those of monarchical
government. In his Age of Reason (1794), Paine complained of
‘the continual persecution carried on by the Church, for several
hundred years, against the sciences and against the professors
of science’.
Science and Religion
read the book of nature and understand the goodness, power, and
generosity of its author. In the religion of Deism recommended
by Paine, there was no need for the people to be in thrall either to
priests or to the state. Science could help to replace Christianity
by showing that every individual could find God by looking
at the night sky rather than by reading the Bible or going to
church. ‘That which is now called natural philosophy’, Paine
wrote, ‘embracing the whole circle of science of which astronomy
occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and
of the power and wisdom of God and his works, and is the true
theology.’
Paine’s democratic ideals, including the separation of church and
state, are enshrined in the founding documents of the United
States. And in modern America too, it is competing political
visions that come into conflict in debates about science and
religion. American politicians who deny the truth of the theory
of evolution and advocate the teaching of a religiously motivated
concept of ‘Intelligent Design’ in schools do not do so for scientific
reasons. They do so, rather, to send a signal – to indicate their
general support for Christianity, their opposition to excessively
secularist interpretations of the Constitution, and their hostility
to naturalistic and materialistic world views.
A final interesting piece of support for the suggestion that what
is really at stake in science–religion encounters is politics, is to
be found in two mid-20th-century stage plays. Each dramatizes
a famous clash between a heroic scientific individual and a
reactionary and authoritarian religious establishment, and does so
to make primarily political points. Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo
was composed during the 1930s and early 1940s. Brecht was a
German communist, opposed to fascism, and living in exile in
Denmark and subsequently the United States. The play uses the
story of Galileo to investigate the dilemmas faced by a dissident
intellectual living under a repressive regime, and also to suggest
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the importance of pursuing scientific knowledge for moral and
social ends rather than purely for its own sake. Brecht saw in the
well-known Galileo affair political lessons which could be applied
to a world struggling against authoritarian fascism and, in the
later version of the play, living in the shadow of the dropping of
atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
‘Science and religion’ as an academic field
So far we have looked at science and religion in general terms as
two cultural enterprises which encounter each other both in the
mind of the individual and in the political domain. There is an
important further dimension to add to this preliminary picture,
which is the recent development of ‘science and religion’ as an
academic field in its own right.
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What are science–religion debates about?
Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s play Inherit the Wind,
first performed in 1955, and made into a famous film in 1960,
was a dramatization of the Scopes ‘monkey trial’ of 1925. The
historical events on which the play was based are discussed in
Chapter 5; they centre on the prosecution of a Tennessee school
teacher, John Scopes, for teaching evolution in contravention
of state law. Inherit the Wind used the Scopes case to attack
the anti-communist purges of the McCarthy era. Scopes, the
heroic evolutionist standing up against a repressive Christian
establishment in 1920s Tennessee, stood for the struggle for
freedom of opinion, association, and expression by communist
sympathizers in the face of a repressive American government
machine. Among those sympathizers, incidentally, was Bertolt
Brecht, who had been called to testify before the House
Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947. In the case both
of Brecht’s Galileo and Lawrence and Lee’s Inherit the Wind, it
was questions of intellectual freedom, political power, and human
morality that gave the conflict between science and religion its
drama and its interest. The same is true in real life.
Science and Religion
Of course theologians, philosophers, and scientists have been
writing treatises about the relationship between natural
knowledge and revelation for centuries. Many of these works were
very popular, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. The most
famous was Natural Theology (1802) by the Anglican clergyman
William Paley, which argued from the complex adaptations of
plants and animals to the existence of an intelligent designer.
However, from the 1960s onwards ‘science and religion’ took on a
more distinct existence as an academic discipline. In 1966 the first
specialist journal in the field was founded in Chicago – Zygon:
Journal of Religion and Science. The same year saw the
publication of a very widely used textbook, Issues in Science and
Religion by the British physicist and theologian Ian Barbour.
Since that time, various organizations have been set up to foster
this kind of work, including a European Society for the Study of
Science and Theology, and an International Society for Science
and Religion. There are established academic posts devoted
specifically to the study of science and religion at several major
institutions, including the universities of Oxford and Cambridge
in the UK, and Princeton Theological Seminary in the US.
Academic work by scientists and theologians seeking to develop
a harmonious interdisciplinary dialogue has been supported by
a range of institutions, including the Roman Catholic Church,
through the work of the Vatican Observatory, and also the John
Templeton Foundation in America – a philanthropic organization
particularly committed to supporting research that harmonizes
science with religion. A recent large Templeton-funded project
has been devoted to research on altruism and ‘unlimited love’,
for example. One outcome of this has been a book explaining the
improved physical health and mental well-being enjoyed by those
who live an altruistic and compassionate life.
The John Templeton Foundation spends millions of dollars on
research grants each year, including an annual Templeton Prize,
currently valued at about $1.5 million, given to an individual
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I have already mentioned that much academic work in this area
has been concerned with the plausibility (or lack of it) of the
idea of an inevitable conflict between science and religion. This
concern is partly driven by apologetic motives. Many of those
involved in the field are religious believers committed to showing
that science need not undermine faith. But the denial of conflict
(or of any other one-dimensional relationship) is also motivated
by more purely academic considerations, several of which will
emerge in subsequent chapters.
Whether arguing for conflict or for harmony, it could be objected
that any talk about ‘the relationship between science and religion’
obscures the true plurality and complexity of the terms. ‘Science’
and ‘religion’ are both hazy categories with blurry boundaries, and
different sciences and different religions have clearly related to
each other in different ways. Mathematics and astronomy were
both particularly nurtured in Islamic cultures in the Middle Ages,
for example, where they were used to calculate the correct times
of prayer and the direction of Mecca, as well as for many more
secular purposes. Islamic scholars working in academies such as
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What are science–religion debates about?
for ‘Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual
Realities’. Former winners have included Christian evangelists,
leading figures from non-Christian faiths, and also many
individuals who have been prominent in the academic dialogue
between science and religion, such as Ian Barbour, Arthur
Peacocke, John Polkinghorne, Paul Davies, and George Ellis. Like
many of those who have contributed to the creation of ‘science
and religion’ as an academic subject, all of the figures just named
fall into the category of religiously committed professional
scientists (and in some cases ordained ministers). There are
also many historians, philosophers, and theologians who have
contributed significantly to the field. It is a topic that even attracts
impassioned contributions from scientific atheists, such as Oxford
University’s Professor for the Public Understanding of Science,
Richard Dawkins.
Science and Religion
the House of Wisdom in Baghdad preserved, tested, and improved
upon ancient Greek medicine and optics, as well as astronomy
and astrology, between the 9th and the 15th centuries. The motto
of these scholars was: ‘Whoever does not know astronomy and
anatomy is deficient in the knowledge of God.’ Their works were
to be crucial sources for the revival of European learning from the
later Middle Ages onwards.
Excluded from more mainstream European academic institutions,
Jewish communities formed a particularly strong connection with
the science and practice of medicine in early modern Europe.
The Roman Catholic Church, despite the high-profile difficulties
caused by Galileo’s ideas, was one of the most generous sponsors
of scientific research during the Renaissance, especially through
the investment of the Jesuit order in astronomical observatories
and experimental equipment. The relationship between modern
scientific knowledge – a characteristically Western system of
thought – and the religious traditions of the East, is different
again. Here we might think of the interest shown by Buddhists in
neuroscientific studies of the state of the brain during meditation,
or of Fritjof Capra’s 1975 bestseller, The Tao of Physics: An
Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern
Mysticism. There is, finally, a very particular story to be told
about the relationship between evolutionary biology and modern
Protestant Christianity – one which we will return to below. The
point is that none of these particular relationships can serve as
a universal template for understanding engagements between
science and religion.
Some think that the extent of oversimplification, generalization,
and reification involved in even using the phrase ‘science and
religion’ makes it a non-starter as a sensible topic for academic
study. I have some sympathy with this view. It is certainly true that
in this book, as in most contributions to the field, the ‘religion’
under discussion is most often specifically Christianity. However,
at least within the Abrahamic, monotheistic traditions of Judaism,
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The fact that the phrase ‘science and religion’ names an academic
field, as well as conjuring up vivid if historically debatable cultural
stereotypes, is enough, I think, to justify its continued use as
a category of thought (and in the title of this and many other
books). Academics and journalists alike continue to write as if
there were some ongoing general relationship between science
and religion, in terms of which particular contemporary episodes
might be understood. Even if that relationship really exists only in
our imaginations, it is still important to try to understand how it
got there. Since Galileo Galilei and his encounter with the Roman
Inquisition takes centre stage in many popular accounts of that
relationship, his story is an appropriate place to start our inquiry.
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What are science–religion debates about?
Christianity, and Islam, there is enough common ground,
historically, philosophically, and theologically, for a more general
discussion to take place. Whether it is possible or desirable to
extend that discussion still further to include non-theistic or
non-scriptural traditions is another question, and one which I will
not explore further here. The monotheistic faiths, however, are
all united by the idea that God is the author of two books – the
book of nature and the book of scripture – and that the individual
believer will find their understanding and their faith strengthened
through the careful reading of both books. The intellectual,
political, and ethical implications of that shared commitment to
reading God’s words and his works have developed in comparable,
although far from identical, ways in the three major monotheistic
traditions.