Science and Religion

One Planet, Many Possibilities

Lucas F. Johnston, Whitney Bauman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317813408
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

This collection offers new perspectives on the study of science and religion, bringing together articles that highlight the differences between epistemological systems and call into question the dominant narrative of modern science. The volume provides historical context for the contemporary discourse around religion and science, detailing the emergence of modern science from earlier movements related to magic and other esoteric arts, the impact of the Reformation on science, and the dependence of Western science on the so-called Golden Age of Islam. In addition, contributors examine the impacts of Western science and colonialism on the ongoing theft of the biological resources of traditional and indigenous communities in the name of science and medicine. The volume's multi-perspectival approach aims to refocus the terms of the conversation around science and religion, taking into consideration multiple rationalities outside of the dominant discourse.

Section 1
Science and Religion

Historical Overview and Varied Influences

Introduction

Lucas F. Johnston

In his book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman suggested that rather than vacation like other folks, he chose to “vacation” in other academic disciplines, and in one particular instance, he worked the summer in the biology labs at Cal Tech. The religion scholar J. Z. Smith recalled this instance to highlight an important, if subtle, point: what he referred to as “the disciplinary lie.” Feynman claimed to have done some breakthrough work, and said that he had been invited to write up his work for publication and possibly some seminars at Harvard (through his acquaintance the eminent biologist James Watson). When he asked a biologist friend of his to review the written work, his colleague laughed at Feynman. Feynman reported, “It wasn’t in the standard form that biologists use, first procedures and so forth. I spent a lot of time explaining things that all the biologists knew. [The biologist] made a shortened version, but now I couldn’t understand it.”¹ Feynman claimed to have learned much, including the pronunciation of key terms and how to recognize poor laboratory technique. But, according to Smith, “What he could not recognize was the fictive modes of accepted disciplinary discourse. As a result, we have a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who, when he writes up an experiment, is laughed at by his biological colleagues; when they write it up ‘properly,’ he is incapable of understanding his own work.”²

This anecdote illustrates that specific disciplines of the natural sciences (and of course, this is also true of the social sciences and humanities), have their own discursive domains—sciences are always in culture, but they also have their own specific vernaculars. That is, they have their own sets of terms, generally accepted methodological and theoretical presuppositions, oftentimes their own languages and their own intellectual turf (and most scholars think their own discipline or area provides the most adequate explanations). Natural sciences, as much as the disciplines represented by the humanities, are shaped by particular historical contexts, and subject to popular opinion (both within and outside their disciplinary community). And like all human cultures, these are shaped by myriad influences that are not merely scientific. Likewise, religion is always in culture, formed by hands that are not merely divine or religious, but also scientific and popular.

Perhaps because science and religion have both historically been employed as explanatory tools and normative cultural referents, these two realms of human understanding have a complex and variable relationship. The scientist and theologian Ian Barbour generated a typology of relationships between science and religion. Typically, he argued, science and religion exist in a state of either Conflict, Independence, Dialogue, or Integration. This typology is helpful in considering the historical relationship between these two areas, but in some ways it presumes that both religion and science are relatively stable entities that can be held up next to each other to see their entanglement, or lack thereof. Unfortunately for the cultural critic who seeks both description and explanation of historical trends and cultural production, the edges of religion and science bleed into each other, staining the practice and interpretation of the other, politicizing their deployment in rich and often unforeseen ways.

Barbour ultimately suggested that dialogue is a productive relationship between the two, and that integration is possible and even advisable. But importantly, science is now being utilized to provide a better picture of the evolutionary foundations of religion (see Haag’s chapter) by clarifying certain biophysiological predispositions that give rise to religiosity. Many have reacted against such supposedly reductionist positions, arguing that the importance of religion cannot be explained, or at least not exhausted by biological explanations.³ But suggesting that religion is something too rich to be explained by mere biology makes certain presumptions, namely that there is some thing that we call religion that is “out there” beyond biology, and that this thing can be the object of investigation.

Such an essentialist understanding of religion is like the proverbial blind monks who paw at the elephant: the monk introduced to the tail noted that the elephant was similar to a broom, but the monk holding fast to the leg argued that the elephant was rather like a pillar, while the monk attending to the tusk noted that the elephant was like a plough. Such a definition of religion imagines humans as religious beings with limited perspectives, and specific religions as expressions of how the “elephant” (i.e., religion) looks from those perspectives. If, however, we imagine religions not as particular expressions of some enigmatic and unexplained (possibly unexplainable) sacred source, but rather as ecological patterns of psychological things, then we begin to see the various ways in which religion matters to particular people in particular places. This highlights that even within the many so-called world religions there is tremendous local variability, which is traceable to a variety of different ecological and social causal mechanisms. Such complexity begins to illustrate the inherent difficulties with any text that seeks to explore religion and science.

Like religion, science is often imagined as a relatively monolithic entity— one whose primary characteristics are that it is rational in its application and Western in its origin and character. Of course, the notion that the world contains patterns that are discernable through human attention and intellect goes back to the Greeks and beyond. But such ancient inquiries took on a different tenor during the Enlightenment. An increasing preoccupation with particular forms of reasoning showed an elective affinity with empiricism, which manifested in the modern period in a foundationalist understanding of science and the scientific method (see Alvarez, this section). Some of the most important developments that soldered naturalism, empiricism and rationalism together occurred in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, though, was not powered from within, by European innovation. Rather, it was sparked by the re-discovery of Greek and other texts that had been translated, and preserved, in the Islamic world. The scientific and mathematical expertise of Islamic cultures has been instrumental in the development of so-called Western science, but the relationship between science and religion in Islamic cultures is itself an area of some import.⁴

Although Judaism, Christianity and Islam are now often lumped together as Abrahamic traditions, during the Enlightenment and into the nineteenth century Muslims were exoticized others.⁵ Like many others that European explorers encountered during the so-called Age of Discovery, they were imagined as barbaric or primitive peoples. In many cases these cultural others were subjected to an often-unwelcome form of paternalism (which typically required an introduction to Christianity), or were imagined as potentially useful for achieving European ends. In either case, though, such exploitation of humans was justified by supposedly rational, empirical scientific explanations. The first zoos and botanical gardens were the products of these inter-cultural encounters. They provided a more controlled space in which these biological and cultural others could be scientifically probed.⁶ From the time the social sciences became distinct from the natural sciences (a historical separation many would trace to scholars such as Karl Marx, Auguste Comte, and Emile Durkheim), investigations attempted to apply rational empirical methods to understand human cultures. Max Muller’s science of religion, proposed in 1870, offered to “assign to Christianity its rightful place among the religions of the world … [to] show for the first time fully what was meant by the fullness of time; it will restore to the whole history of the world, in its unconscious progress towards Christianity, its true and sacred character.”⁷ This, thought Muller, was an enterprise distinctly different from theology. Scientific approaches to religion during this period were often utilized either to confirm the superiority of one particular religious tradition, to advance some essentialist understanding of religion or to avoid theological explication by focusing on the material outcomes of religious systems (i.e., social coherence, reduction of psychological anxieties, satisfaction of individual desires, etc.).

Perhaps ironically, encounters with unknown lands and animals (including people), along with the well-described emergence of increasingly rationalized and bureaucratized systems of governance, trade and exchange, gave rise to an ostensibly neutral ground upon which these plural cultures could interact: the realm of the secular.⁸ But as Bauman highlights in his contribution to this section, the secular is itself a product of, and depends upon, religious expression that attempts to promote a superficial form of multiculturalism, which re-inscribes Western, and often Protestant, hegemony.

Post-foundational intellectual developments and post-colonial thought have mounted significant challenges to the secularization hypothesis, and in so doing they have also challenged some of the received wisdom about what science and religion are, and how they are related (see Alvarez’s chapter). Just as religion is not some essential thing, Western science is not a monolithic entity; it has a multi-cultural pedigree and contains multitudes of contestations in various disciplines at multiple scales. Just as religion is a cultural phenomenon, so is science. And just as there are many cultures, there are many sciences.⁹

It is this self-reflexive historical awareness of the embeddedness of both religion and science in particular times and places that permeates this volume, and organizes the diverse chapters herein. Why is this important? Because most texts that deal with religion and science imagine these two terms as signifiers for relatively stable “things,” which can be investigated by taking them, turning them over in our students’ hands and having students think about the ways in which they interact. In contrast, this text is imagined as a series of glimpses of particularly problematic or important themes related to religion and science, and related terms like magic. Together, these puzzle pieces begin to hint at the remarkably rich and varied relationships between religion and science. They are meant to be a bricolage, not a detailed portrait. Students and scholars of religion or the natural sciences (or those who study such relationships from a social scientific perspective) can begin to see the outlines of a new perspective on the nexus of important global trends in which such terms are recognized as having political import and material impacts.

Notes

1. Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Necessary Lie: Duplicity in the Disciplines,” accessed July 21, 2013, http://teaching.uchicago.edu/?/ctl-archive/course-design-tutorials/assessing-and-improving/smith; Russell McCutcheon, Studying Religion: An Introduction (London: Equinox Press, 2007).

2. Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Necessary Lie: Duplicity in the Disciplines.”

3. Nathaniel Barrett, “Toward an Alternative Evolutionary Theory of Religion: Looking Past Computational Evolutionary Psychology to a Wider Field of Possibilities,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78, no. 3 (2011): 583–621.

4. See the work of George Saliba, for instance, his book Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

5. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of the World Religions, or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

6. David Chidester, “‘Classify and Conquer:’ Friedrich Max Muller, Indigenous Religious Traditions, and Imperial Comparative Religion,” in Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity, ed. Jacob Olupona (New York: Routledge, 2003), 71–88.

7. Max Muller, “The Science of Religion,” in The Essential Max Muller: Language, Mythology and Religion, ed. Jon R. Stone (1870; New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 74.

8. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing, 2001).

9. See, for example, some of the following: Scott Atran et al., “Folkecology, Cultural Epidemiology, and the Spirit of the Commons: A Garden Experiment in the Maya Lowlands, 1991–2001,” Current Anthropology 43, no. 3 (2002): 421–50; John Richard Stepp, “Introduction: Ethnobiology, Religion, Nature, and Culture,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature & Culture 6, no. 4 (December 2012): 393–7, and the rest of that special issue; Scott Atran, Douglas Medin and Norbert Ross, “The Cultural Mind: Environmental Decision Making and Cultural Modeling Within and Across Populations,” Psychological Review 112, no. 4 (2005): 744–76; Scott Atran and Douglas Medin, The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Janne Hukkinen, Sustainability Networks: Cognitive Tools for Expert Collaboration in Social-Ecological Systems (London: Routledge, 2008).

1
The Scientific Search for Sources of Religion

James W. Haag

Broadly speaking, there are four segments of current religion-and-science research. They include “Religion and Science,” “Social Scientific Study of Religion,” “Scientific Study of Religion” and “Spirituality, Medicine...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: One Planet, Many Possibilities
• SECTION 1 Science and Religion: Historical Overview and Varied Influences
• SECTION 2 Cosmology, Creation and Boundary Questions
• SECTION 3 East Meets West: Holism and Health
• SECTION 4 Understanding Relationality
• SECTION 5 Ethics and Technology: Thinking Through Their Applications
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index