Election Turns and Comment Wars: Science and Religion
What is Science and Religion?
Take a casual scroll through an “I F****** Love Science” post, or any site similarly impassioned about its content, and you’ll find the comment section follows a familiar pattern: someone hard-core agrees or disagrees with the post’s claim, someone hard-core takes the opposite stance and insinuates the initial commenter’s lack of intelligence or morality, and the comments devolve into a mess of “ethical” and “scientific” arguments spiraling into tangential discussions that have little to do with the content of the post that started it all. I could give you an example of such a comment page, but I don’t have to. We all see it. We all deal with it. The field of Science and Religion is a response to it.
"Go extreme or go home." - The Internet
The Field and The Familiar
It was physicist-theologian Ian Barbour who kicked off Science and Religion as an academic field in 1966, and by “science” we mean all the various scientific disciplines as a really generalized whole and “religion” as mainly Christianity since that’s what we the authors, our audience, and the field as a whole have focused on most. His book, Issues in Science and Religion, clarified the state of science and religion in important ways so that he and other scholars, mostly scientists who became pastors and priests, could start making real progress in figuring out what is going on with the two disciplines. There are philosophers, physicists, theologians, sociologists, and academics of every kind contributing their expertise to a vast interdisciplinary problem. It’s a hard thing to pull off, but they’ve built a large body of extremely insightful and helpful scholarship.
Those academic insights aren’t always so evident outside the ivory tower (or inside, for that matter). Consider our current political discourse: reality seems so obvious and so opposite to dissenting groups that conversations between them are non-starters. Each side uses their own “facts” and attributes different levels of credibility to each discipline, making common ground even harder to find. And so it is with science and religion--it’s hard to tell what science and religion really are (if you can even say they are two distinct or coherent disciplines), much less develop an agreed-upon shared “facts” with which to begin conversation. Add the personal and important nature of the issues to this tension and it’s easy to see how conversations get very heated very quickly. It makes you wonder how the conflict between science and religion ever got this far...
The History of the Conflict
You may have heard legends of how the Pope locked up Galileo for disproving the Bible or how Christians lost the debate over Darwin’s Origin of Species as kinds of origin stories of the conflict between science and religion. While these stories contain more myth than truth, it’s undeniable that tension between the roles of faith and reason has thrived since even before “science” or “religion” became actualized concepts and the progression of scientific scholarship has escalated that tension, changing our very understanding of religion.
Before the 1800s, science and religion were not distinct categories. That means that when Newton began his famous physics experiments in the 1600s, he wasn’t a scientist. He was a natural philosopher. "Science" wasn't separate from religion or philosophy, neither for Newton nor for the rest of the world at the time. In fact, it is argued that the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s, with its demand for critical, examined reading of the Bible, contributed significantly to the development of science. The word “science” wouldn’t come around until the 1830s, two hundred years later.
As the scientific method grew, its insights led to burgeoning academic fields and physics, chemistry, biology, and math became separated from philosophy, the arts, and theology, which had been known as the “Queen of the Sciences”. The entirety of human knowledge had become too great for each student to study it all, so specialization became a requirement for the advancement of knowledge. This specialization and the rise of the university made way for the creation of “two cultures” of sciences and humanities.
As the separation between the two cultures increased, the idea of secularization became quite popular in many corners of society. Secularization theory generally suggests that under religion, people lived in fear and ignorance, but now science gives us power via falsifiable truth. In order to maintain that power, falsifiable truth must be pursued and blind faith rejected. So the idea is that science can,should, and will replace religion.
But despite the separation in academic disciplines and the wider culture, science still can’t quite eclipse religion. In fact, the leading secularization scholar, Peter Berger, said in 1968 that “The assumption that we live in a secularized world is false. The world today, with some exceptions…, is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever.” With the persistence of sciences and religions, then, has come a proliferation of perspectives on their relationship and, in some cases, a greater awareness of the historical and subjective underpinnings that are always involved in science, leading us to present-day discussions.
Four Perspectives
In that book, Issues in Science and Religion, Ian Barbour gives four helpful categorizations of how people tend to view the relationship between science and religion: conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration. All four are held by the religious and anti-religious alike; understanding them can help you see where people are coming from. They can be summarized in the following ways:
Conflict – either science or religion is right or wrong on any particular issue. This view includes certain New Atheists and Christians alike who share a “God of the gaps” mentality that science can disprove religion and force God out of existence by filling the gaps in our knowledge. This leads to fights as the two try to disprove each other.
Independence – science and religion are both legitimate but address different territories. This model is championed by scholar Stephen J. Gould who says that science and religion can co-exist peacefully if they simply stick to their “separate magisteria” of (roughly) ethics and natural fact.
Dialogue – both science and religion can contribute to one another. Both are legitimate and share some overlap with potential to lend helpful insights to the other. How this works exactly can be tricky to define.
Integration – science and religion are essentially the same and should be compatible on every front.
You may have seen these views used by both Christians and atheists as they discuss science and religion, though some may be more familiar than others. They may all seem correct and incorrect in some ways. And, needless to say, they do not exhaust the abundance of views on science and religion. But these models are helpful in the way that they show how people can come to issues like climate change, abortion, or Biblical interpretation with very different expectations. And truthfully, people jump from model to model, maybe without even realizing it, depending on the situation. It’s difficult, maybe impossible even, to pin down how exactly one “should” view science and religion issues as if one simple description could apply to every cause of tension.
Our Suggestion
Barbour leaves the reader and the field of Science and Religion with a philosophical stance that serves as an important guide in considering science and religion issues: critical realism. Critical realism says that human theories are more useful and trustworthy than personal, mental constructs, but also acknowledges that our theories are provisional, not perfect. It basically allows confidence and humility in our religious and scientific beliefs alike as we all try to figure out the facts of reality. When applied to science, we may accept its tested theories and trust in things like gravity, combustible engines, and medicine to perform as science predicts they will even as we strive to understand and further develop these ideas and technologies. When applied to God, we may accept religion and its body of tradition, scripture, and theology and trust what we believe about God even while we strive to know God better and develop our understanding further.
Critical realism doesn’t resolve every problem, but it is a helpful starting point for dissenting groups trying to find common conversation ground. It acknowledges the strengths and weaknesses of human reason in both science and religion. And more personally, it allows you to develop your beliefs (both scientific and religious) without shattering your soul. Critical realism says that there is a reality to be known and that we do know, even if we are not always aware which of our ideas are right or wrong.
Thank you for reading. Look for our take on miracles in two weeks! And please, comment or send us your questions, thoughts, and feedback!
For Further Reading (ask us for the sources if you like)
Historical conflicts between science and religion
Brooke, John Hedley and Geoffrey Cantor. Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement Of Science And Religion. A&C Black, 2000.
The role of Christianity in the rise of science
Harrison, Peter. “The Bible and the Emergence of Modern Science.” Science & Christian Belief 18, no. 2 (October 2006): 115–32.
How to approach the issues
Reeves, Josh A., and Steve Donaldson. A Little Book for New Scientists: Why and How to Study Science. Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2016.
Ward, Keith. The Big Questions in Science and Religion. West Conshohocken, Pa: Templeton Foundation Press, 2008.
How science and religion were once studied
Reeves, Josh. “The Field of Science and Religion as Natural Philosophy.” Theology and Science 6, no. 4 (November 2008): 403–19.
The division of sciences and humanities
Snow, Charles Percy, and Stefan Collini. The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008.
