Is Conflict the Only Way?

Professor Kirk Wegter-McNelly
Boston University

Originally delivered on October 28, 2008, as part of the 29th Annual “Seven Sisters Alumnae Seminar” in Stamford, Connecticut.

Several years ago I attended a revival meeting. The preacher’s rousing sermon whipped the audience into an emotional frenzy. His understated and well placed jabs at unbelievers—the preacher was British and knew how to turn a phrase—were met with whoops and hollers by the boisterous American crowd. At the end of the evening, after several heartfelt testimonials, a number of people made their way down to the altar to receive the preacher’s blessing.

What made this revival so unusual was not the preacher’s use of PowerPoint or even the fact that it took place on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, but rather that it was sponsored by a group called SANE, “Students Advocating a Nonreligious Ethos,” and that the preacher was the famed apostle of evolutionary atheism, Richard Dawkins. The thoroughly religious ethos of this event was lost on most of the previously converted who came that night, but to a skeptic like myself it was both amusing and unmistakable.

Dawkins’ strategy was, cleverly, to make fun of religion. He deftly substituted humor and rhetorical punch for serious analysis, knowing that people would go along with him just because his lampooning performance was so enjoyable (and reassuring to those in doubt). Fundamentalist evangelists, it bears noting, often use the same strategy to dismiss the claims of other religions. I did not respond to the altar call that night, but I was struck by how well Nietzsche’s image of the “herd” described what I had witnessed, despite repeated invocations of a more skeptical mindset. Yes, there is religious fundamentalism. But there is scientific fundamentalism, too.

Religious and scientific fundamentalists are united in their view that religion and science are locked in mortal combat, that they have been vying for humanity’s ultimate allegiance since the birth of modern science—an idea commonly referred to as the “conflict” thesis. These two fundamentalisms disagree about who is right and wrong, but in another sense they are opposite sides of the same coin: both presume that the only right way to read the Bible is literally. As epistemological perspectives, they are regrettably narrow and wooden: narrow because they are unwilling to allow that texts can express truths nonliterally (even intentionally so!), and wooden because they are unwilling to entertain the possibility that truth is a many-layered thing with aspects that lie beyond the reach of any particular competency. Debates between religious and scientific fundamentalists are often what pass for “religion and science” in today’s popular media, and they make for good headlines. But they also do a disservice to both religion and science because fundamentalism in whatever guise cuts short the human quest for understanding by presuming certainty, when in fact all human knowledge, including scientific and religious knowledge, is fallible.

Three distinct issues relevant to the conflict thesis are worth pondering: first, the recent vintage of this thesis; second, the impossibility of avoiding conflict by isolating religion and science from one another; and third, the possibility and even perhaps desirability of constructive engagement between the two. All three of these issues, especially the last, will require a significant shift in the way our culture understands the nature of religion and the nature of science.

Galileo is commonly lifted up as a poster child for the conflict thesis. “See?” say the detractors, “From the very beginning the church opposed scientific advance!” There are some obvious problems with this example, not least of which is that the church was actually quite supportive of scientific inquiry prior to and during Galileo’s time. Many cathedrals in Italy, for example, functioned as solar observatories throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. Scientists in the church’s employ used these observatories to track with great precision the motions of the sun for the sake of determining the exact date upon which Easter should be observed (see Robert Heilbron, The Sun in the Church). Additionally, the church’s objections to the Copernican view advocated by Galileo were not primarily religious but scientific: the earth’s motion could not be felt directly; Copernicus’s system was, at the time, no better at predicting the motions of the planets than was Ptolemy’s; and the church’s scientists were suspicious that what Galileo saw in his telescope—a new instrument whose principles were not yet widely understood—was somehow altered by the telescope itself. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the church was still reeling from the Reformation. Central to the reformers’ concerns was the matter of scriptural interpretation: Who has the authority to interpret the Bible? Galileo claimed for himself this authority and found himself squarely in the middle of a much larger conflict (see Annibale Fantoli, Galileo: For Copernicanism and for the Church). He did not help matters any, by the way, by putting the pope’s words into the mouth of one of the Dialogues’ characters he called “Simplicio,” the Simpleton. In light of recent scholarship, the idea that the Galileo affair somehow proves that the religion is and always was anti-science simply doesn’t stand up. The story is far more ambiguous and interesting than a simple science-vs.-religion picture allows.

In fact, the conflict thesis didn’t really blossom until the second half of the nineteenth century, after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. This period saw, for example, the publication of influential books with titles like History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (John William Draper, 1874) and A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (Andrew Dickson White, 1896). And, of course, Christian fundamentalism did not really coalesce as a movement until the early twentieth century (witness the Scopes trial of 1925). Many of the first theological responses to Darwin were quite appreciative. This was true, for instance, of Calvinists who had regarded Lamarcke’s theory with suspicion for its support of the view that humans can control their own destiny by passing on acquired traits. The Darwinian picture of random variation seemed more compatible with a world in which God is in control and we are not. In brief, the conflict thesis is a recent development, relative to the rise of modern science, and one that belies a richer, more complex set of historical interactions (see John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives).

There is an easy but ultimately unsatisfactory way of resolving the conflict that has emerged over the past century. It is often called the “separation” or “independence” view (for the most well known way of mapping out the variety of views, see Ian Barbour, Religion and Science). Galileo advanced a separationist view when he quoted one of the Catholic Church’s own historians, Cardinal Baronius, who said that “The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” The German philosopher Immanuel Kant later endorsed this view when he linked religion, on the one hand, to an inner sense of right and wrong and science, on the other, to our attempt to know the world around us. In our own time, Harvard biologist Steven J. Gould advocated a principle of separation he called NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisterial Authorities).

As every parent knows, if two siblings aren’t getting along, separating them is sometimes the only solution. While this may be good parenting, it is a poor way to solve the present troubles between science and religion. Admittedly, the idea of isolating these two realms from one another is motivated by a desire to preserve the integrity and authority of each: religion gets to be about trust, spirit, and value, while science gets to be about reason, matter, and fact. The problem with this dichotomous picture is that it is clearly inadequate on both counts. Religious thinkers and communities invariably need to reason out the claims of their own traditions, just as scientific thinkers and communities invariably need to trust one another and the broader scientific community as they pursue their own research. Religious thinkers and communities are part of the material world, just as much as scientific thinkers and communities depend upon the human spirit and its thirst for knowledge. And religious thinkers and communities must rely on particular facts about the world as they try to live out their values, just as much as scientific thinkers and communities must rely on particular values as they try to broaden the realm of scientific knowledge. False generalizations lead to false dichotomies. This in turn leads to a false sense of the need for (and possibility of) compartmentalization. The separation of science and religion is not the answer to their conflict, any more than conflict is essential to their relationship.

So what might constitute an alternative to conflict and separation? Let me begin with a definition of religion. Religion, I take it, is a set of beliefs and practices that provides and supports the broadest and most basic frameworks of meaning by which we live our lives. This is why religion-bashing events like the one Dawkins presided over so often look and feel like that which they purport to reject. Revivals, whether religious or scientific, aim to win our consent to an overarching worldview by providing and supporting particular frameworks of meaning, and they do so by engaging the whole person—not just the intellect, but the emotions; not just the emotions, but the whole body. Given this, it is naïve to suppose that religion will fade away in the face of scientific advance. Religion is evolving, no doubt, but it is not disappearing. Just ask sociologists. The central prediction coming out of the sociology of religion during the 1960s and 70s was that the ever increasing modernization of the world had sent religion into irreversible decline. But religion hasn’t gone away. In fact, the world—especially the global South—has become not less but more religious in recent decades. Why? In part, because for all that science does provide, it cannot provide or support basic frameworks of meaning. Science and religion work with distinct sets of tools. Each has its own limited realm of competency, and each needs ever to be mindful of its limitations even as it strives to do well what it does best.

My reference to limits may sound like a veiled attack on science, but this would be to misunderstand my perspective on the matter. I only mean to point out what philosophers of science have been saying for the past eighty years: that science is a human endeavor and as such participates fully in the ambiguities and limitations of human rationality. Science does not live in the realm of pure, disembodied objectivity. It never has, and it never will. This is not to denigrate science but to make its hard won achievements all the more precious. My concern is not with science, but with scientism—the belief that science is the only way to knowledge and truth. Our culture needs to do a much better job of acknowledging and understanding the limits of science so that it can see more clearly the limit-questions posed by science.

In fact, such questions are a good place to start the conversation with religion. Why is the universe orderly and intelligible? Why are our brains capable of plumbing the depths of this order? Why, if tendencies to behave in particular ways are passed on genetically from generation to generation, do people persist in being self-negatingly kind to others who are not their kin? Why is there something rather than nothing at all? How did this something get here? Where is it going? Questions like these call for scientific answers, but religious ones as well. The real issue is whether such answers must necessarily conflict with one another. One of the most tempting strategies for preserving traditional religious answers in the face of modern science has been, at least in the West, to tie them to gaps in the present state of scientific knowledge. The problem with this approach, though, is that when science closes these gaps, religion is either forced to pit itself against science as it continues to insist upon its own point of view or to cede a bit of its turf to science. The “God of the gaps” approach is a losing strategy, a blind alley. The real challenge for (and promise of) religion in a scientific age is instead to learn to engage science constructively rather than defensively. What might this look like?

First and foremost, it will require religions to look inward and re-learn how to engage their sacred texts in nonliteral ways. Religious communities of all persuasions need desperately to learn again how to wrestle with their founding texts precisely as theological texts. Jews, in my experience, are quite good at this, which comes as no surprise given that “Israel” means “one who wrestles with God.” Christians, on the other hand, tend to be much less skillful at this, in part because they too often confuse “faith” with “certainty,” i.e., with the absence of doubt. And one of the meanings of “Islam” is “surrender,” which can undermine a questioning stance (though it must also be noted that the thoroughly hermeneutical art of Koranic jurisprudence occupies a central place within the history of Islam). Belief, it seems to me, is all about doubt, or rather, about knowledge intertwined with doubt. (Religion calls this “faith.” Science calls it “commitment to a hypothesis.” In both cases, there is a necessarily fiduciary aspect to making claims about the world.) Religious believers in various traditions need to find new ways of naming the unfaithfulness of a narrow fixation on the literal meaning of the text. This will involve developing new theological justifications for attempting to understand and engage the literary character of religious texts as well as the interpretive character of science, and then learning to see how these different realms can constrain and inform one another.

Engaging science constructively will also mean that nonscientists must not shy away from calling scientists to account whenever they seek to wrap the mantle of science around their metaphysical or moral pronouncements—whenever they claim, for example, that science leads inevitably to a reductionistic or atheistic worldview. On the other hand, it will mean making common cause with scientists like E.O. Wilson, who several year ago issued a plea to religious believers to work with scientists to undo the ecological havoc we have been wreaking on this planet. Finally, it will mean listening, like the Dalai Lama has done, to neuro- and cognitive scientists about the way the brain works and how this growing area of knowledge can deepen our own understanding of human consciousness and desire.

The conflict view of religion and science is built on false premises, false generalizations about the nature of each realm. Separation aims for a kind of peaceful co-existence between the two, but it does nothing to counter the falsehoods that lie at the root of the problem. On the other hand, if we can begin to correct our misunderstandings of religion and science, we may be surprised at how much overlap exists between these two aspects of human life, both in their concerns and in their methods. Dawkins is not entirely wrong to rely on humor, for it is undeniably an important part being human. But humor alone will not suffice to describe the complex relationship that has emerged between religion and science over the past half millennium. A more careful and considered analysis of their relationship can lead us past the altar of unthinking consent, to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us.