Science, Belief and Society

International Perspectives on Religion, Non-Religion and the Public Understanding of Science

Jones, Stephen,Catto, Rebecca

• Publisher: Bristol University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781529206975
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie de la religion

The relationship between science and belief has been a prominent subject of public debate for many years, one that has relevance to everything from science communication, health and education to immigration and national values. Yet, sociological analysis of these subjects remains surprisingly scarce. This wide-ranging book critically reviews the ways in which religious and non-religious belief systems interact with scientific theories and practices. Contributors explore how, for some secularists, 'science' forms an important part of social identity. Others examine how many contemporary religious movements justify their beliefs by making a claim upon science. Moving beyond the traditional focus on the United States, the book shows how debates about science and belief are firmly embedded in political conflict, class, community and culture.

PART I

Methodological Challenges in the Study of Science and Belief

1

The Sociological Study of Science and Religion in Context

Fern Elsdon-Baker and Will Mason-Wilkes

Science and religion: a disciplinary blind spot?

The growing interest in the social study of science and religion, to which this volume speaks, is opening up new avenues of qualitative study in an area where there has been a surprising paucity of such research. The chapters in this collection bring together for the first time a range of empirical sites, focusing attention on a variety of religious and non-religious interactions with, and uses of, science. This relative lack of social research on ‘science and religion’ is surprising given the comparative wealth of research conducted in a variety of disciplines concerning ‘religion’ and ‘science’ as separate social and cultural phenomena. This lacuna has led to some issues and problematic assumptions, especially in the way that social-scientific research regarding the relationship between science and religion has framed this relationship (Elsdon-Baker, 2015, 2018). Given the relatively recent emergence of this mode and subject of research, it is both important and timely to engage with the theoretical and methodological backdrop to this growing area of study.

One of the rather unique and exciting facets of this field is that, by its very nature, it draws on expertise and research traditions that do not always ordinarily intersect in the academy. This not only means – as the editors observe in the Introduction to this volume – intellectual traditions within sociology, such as the sociology of religion and the sociology of science and technology, but also those beyond it, such as the history and philosophy of science. This presents some problems that, in part, relate to any multidisciplinary research – significantly, the need to be aware of the norms, traditions, language use and pitfalls to be avoided within each discipline or sub-discipline involved in the research. However, there are also some challenges that are specific to the study of science and religion in society; in this case, the intersection is between two subjects of research that are often perceived to be incommensurable, or, at worst, seen to be in direct and destructive opposition to one another. Thus, any researcher starting out their voyage into what have hitherto been the uncharted waters of the social study of science and religion in society needs to be aware of some of the underlying assumptions that may turn what appears to be plain sailing into a perfect storm of both academic and public criticism. In this chapter, then, we will reflect on some of the cross-disciplinary, historical and philosophical issues that we need to consider in order to peel away some of the core assumptions at play when conducting research into science and religion in their historical, social and cultural contexts.

Conflict or compatibility narratives

While a more comprehensive research picture of public perceptions, and some of the processes underlying them, is beginning to form, there is still a significant gap in data relating to the perceptions and lived experience of issues around science and religion of wider publics – and, perhaps more importantly, diverse or international publics. To date, a significant proportion of the social science research examining public perceptions of the relationship between science and personal faith, outside of the US, has adopted survey-based or quantitative approaches. While this research has been valuable in serving to highlight the complexity of public attitudes, very little work has been done to understand how these data relate to individual lived experience across different cultural contexts, or the processes by which these attitudes or viewpoints may be formed or reaffirmed. This has inevitably led to some problematic assumptions, especially in relation to the way in which social science research regarding the relationship between science and religion has either overtly or covertly framed this relationship in a binary way as necessarily negative and/or mutually exclusive (Elsdon-Baker, 2015, 2018). On an international scale, this links into broader geopolitical narratives concerning secularization, societal progress and development. Publics’ rejection of aspects of science (eg evolution) is still, in some sections of academic or policy-based research, seen to be a measure of either religiosity or a lack of civilizational development (see Carlisle et al, Chapter 7, this volume).

The rather pervasive idea of a necessary clash or conflict between science and religion is referred to by historians of science as the ‘conflict thesis’. Its roots are relatively recent (in the historical sense) and can really be traced back to the publication in 1874 of John William Draper’s History of the conflict between religion and science (Draper, 1874). In the preface to this work, Draper (1874: vi) declared: ‘[T]he antagonism we thus witness between Religion and Science is the continuation of a struggle that commenced when Christianity began to attain political power’. Draper gives a potted intellectual history from the Greeks onwards in order to evidence that this conflict had its roots in the foundations of ‘Roman Christianity’ and that the two contending parties had been warring ever since. It is important to note that his main target was not the ‘Protestant and Greek churches’, which he saw as ‘moderate’, but rather the Catholic Church, whose leaders he implies are ‘extremists’. To Draper, the Protestant principle of individual judgement, if fully embraced, avoided conflict between science and religion. In doing this, he set up what is perhaps now a rather common trope in this discourse that paints science as a value-free enterprise and, conversely, religion (specifically here, Catholicism) as the root of all evil. This trope echo’s down the years to the work of perhaps more familiar contemporary commentators like Richard Dawkins¹:

As to Science, she has never sought to ally herself to civil power. She has never attempted to throw odium or inflict social ruin on any human being. She has never subjected any one to mental torment, physical torture, least of all to death, for the purpose of upholding or promoting her ideas. She presents herself unstained by cruelties and crimes. But in the Vatican – we have only to recall the Inquisition – the hands that are now raised in appeals to the Most Merciful are crimsoned. They have been steeped in blood! (Draper, 1874: xi)

It is perhaps more understandable for Draper in the late 19th century to take such an uncritical and romanticized view of science as an enterprise. It is, however, less understandable for any modern scholar to adopt such a position, not least given the recognition of the application of scientific discoveries in some of the horrors of the 20th century. It is vitally important to remember that these debates do not occur in a (geo)political or social vacuum. Both Draper and Dawkins, in their respective positing of a conflict between science and religion, have focused on what they perceive to be more extreme forms of religion, in places, tapping into wider social concerns of the day. For Draper, it was Catholicism, and for Dawkins, today, it has increasingly become Islam (see Unsworth, Chapter 12, this volume). It is important, therefore, to understand the historical work undertaken by Draper within its own historical context and the political or social lens through which it was written.

Following on from Draper, in 1896, Andrew Dickson White published A history of the warfare of science with theology in Christendom, which is seen as the second canonical text in terms of setting forward a history of perpetual and necessary conflict between Christianity and science (Lightman et al, forthcoming). These two works by Draper and White have set the tenor and tone for a variety of rather ‘Whiggish’ accounts of a perpetual clash between two warring systems of thought. There are, along the way, commonly referred to examples of what are seen to be key moments of antagonism, from Galileo through to Darwin.² Historians of science have rightly challenged the historical validity or perspicacity of Draper’s and White’s work, as well as subsequent histories or popular tomes that plough a similar furrow (Lightman et al, forthcoming). The recurring myth that, historically at least, there is a necessary conflict between science and religion has been extensively and successfully deconstructed. Most historians who work in this area of study argue instead for what has become known as the ‘complexity thesis’, most notable among them John Hedley Brooke and Peter Harrison (Brooke, 1991; Harrison, 2015). However, the conflict model has proved very popular and persistent in both popular and scholarly discourse. Uncritical acceptance of this conflict or warfare model has had a profound influence and has no doubt contributed to the idea that science, secularism and atheism go hand in hand. This has also, until recently, tended to pervade the way in which the interaction between science and religion is studied socially, where it has been studied at all.

In the late 20th century, attempts were made to move away from a solely conflict thesis-focused approach and to expand the categorization of positions in regard to the relationship between science and religion. Perhaps, the most well known of these is physicist and scholar of religion Ian Barbour’s typology of the possible relationships between science and religion. Barbour famously identified four models or ways in which science and religion might (inter)relate with each other: conflict, independence, dialogue and integration (Barbour, 1990; see also, and revised, Barbour, 1997):

1.Conflict, here, is very much the science versus religion (or vice versa) model, or, in Barbour’s case, a juxtaposition of scientific materialism (here articulated as a form of scientism) versus biblical literalism. Again, this version of conflict is, in part, introduced through the usual historical instances, for example, the Galileo affair, Darwin and the more recent biblical literalism of modern creationist groups.

2.Interdependence is perhaps more widely recognized today as a version of the non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) model, which was popularized by Stephen Jay Gould (1999). Under this model, science and religion are viewed as independent or autonomous spheres of knowledge, which are largely unproblematic as long as they stick to their own domains. This is sometimes articulated in popular parlance as science answering the ‘how’ questions and religion answering the ‘why’ questions – though, of course, demarcating ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions is often far trickier than might be assumed.

3.Dialogue, for Barbour, covers a range of positions. This could include points at which methodological parallels might exist between science and theology or where their suppositions may be similar. Barbour argues that if science is now understood not to be wholly objective (in the light of the work of Thomas Kuhn: eg Kuhn, 1962), and religion can be viewed to be subject to some paradigmatic behaviours, then there may be methodological parallels. However, he is careful to highlight that the data subject to religious study are vastly different from what we might consider to be scientific data, and it is therefore less possible to test them.

4.Integration can, under Barbour’s model, be either partial or total, and it implies a commonality of concepts. This could include the re-imagining or reformulation of doctrinal stances to encompass new theories in science, for example, creation doctrine, or it could be a latter-day form of natural theology – whereby evidence for God’s word is found by studying God’s works, that is, the natural world. The third option given is a fully integrated metaphysical model for which Barbour gives examples from process philosophy, whereby God is both the source of not only order, but also novelty – so God would, in essence, be subject to change over time – a position into which evolutionary thinking can easily be integrated. As Barbour (1990) suggests, this w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Editors’ Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Editors’ Introduction: Science, Belief and the Sociological Tradition
• Part I: Methodological Challenges in the Study of Science and Belief
• Part II: Belief in the Study of Science and Technology
• Part III: Science, Culture and Non-religion
• Part IV: Religion, Conflict and Moderation
• Conclusion: Future Directions in the Sociological Study of Science and Belief