by Thomas Dixon
List of illustrations
1 Claude Mellan’s moon engraving
Otto van de Vijver, Lunar Maps of the XVIIth Century, Vatican Observatory Publications, vol. 1, no. 2 (Vatican City, 1971)
2 Geocentric view of the universe
Oxford Science Archive/HIP/TopFoto
3 Maffeo Barberini, Pope Urban VIII, by Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Palazzo Barberini Rome/Alfredo Dagli Orti/The Art Archive
4 Francesco Stelluti’s
Melissographia (1625) National Library of Scotland
5 St Agatha, by Francisco de Zurbaran
Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France/Lauros-Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library
6 Lourdes
Wellcome Library, London
7 The Incredulity of St Thomas, by Caravaggio
Schloss Sanssouci, Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany/Alinari/The Bridgeman Art Library
8 Charles Darwin
Print Collector/HIP/TopFoto
9 Parasitic wasp laying eggs
Albert Mans/Foto Natura/FLPA
10 Giant Galapagos tortoise
TopFoto
11 Darwin’s finches
World History Archive/TopFoto
12 Darwin’s tree of life sketch
Cambridge University Library
13 Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce
World History Archive/TopFoto and the British Library Board
14 Charles Darwin cartoon
TopFoto
15 Scopes trial
TopFoto
16 Pied Piper cartoon
Billy Graham Centre Archives and Museum
17 Evolution tree
R. G. Elmendorf/Pittsburgh Creation Society
18 Phineas Gage
Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine
19 Onania pamphlet
Wellcome Library, London
The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.
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 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 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.
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.
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 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 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?
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 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.
1. The moon as engraved by the artist Claude Mellan from early 17th-century telescopic observations
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.
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 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 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
Among historians of science and religion there have been two interestingly different kinds of attack on the ‘conflict narrative’ favoured by Enlightenment rationalists, Vi
ctorian 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’.
