Religion and Science: Method 1

This begins a series of posts, drawn from parts of my doctoral dissertation, on methodology in the field of religion and science.

1:  Convergence to Conflict

The field of “science and religion” has become an important sub-discipline of modern theology.[1]  This development parallels the rapid ascendancy of “science” as the paradigm of trustworthy authority in modernity and the related development of the “conflict” or “warfare” narrative of the relation between science and religion.[2]  The rise of secularism is intimately related to the social and intellectual authority commanded by “science” in modernity.[3] 

Theology in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim traditions historically interacted fruitfully with the “science” of the day, at least prior to the Seventeenth Century.  The Hebrew creation narratives in the Biblical book of Genesis both absorb and distinguish the ancient near eastern cosmologies of Assyria, Babylon and Egypt.[4]  The Church Fathers adapted and transformed Platonic philosophy and cosmology, and medieval Muslim, Christian, and Jewish theologians adapted the insights of Aristotle after the rediscovery of the Aristotelian corpus by Islamic scholars.[5] 

In 1616, however, the Copernican view of heliocentrism, confirmed and popularized by Galileo, was condemned by the Catholic Church.[6]  Galileo himself was condemned and his works were banned by Papal decree in 1633.[7]  The Papal Decree of Condemnation asserted that

The proposition that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move from its place is absurd and false philosophically and formally heretical, because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scripture.

….

The proposition that the Earth is not the center of the world and immovable but that it moves, and also with a diurnal motion, is equally absurd and false philosophically and theologically considered at least erroneous in faith. [8]

There is considerable scholarly debate about the circumstances of Galileo’s condemnation.  As Charles Hummel describes it, “Galileo’s trial of 1633 was not the simple conflict between science and religion so commonly pictured.  It was a complex power struggle of personal and professional pride, envy, and ambition, affected by pressures of bureaucratic politics.”[9]  Galileo’s own acerbic personality, as well as the crisis of the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Thirty Years’ War, are also often cited by defenders of the Church as contextual factors around Galileo’s condemnation.[10]  Even after Galileo’s condemnation, heliocentrism continued to be taught as a mathematical concept, and by 1835, the heliocentric texts of Copernicus and Galileo were removed from the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books.[11]  In 2000, Pope John Paul II formally apologized for the Church’s treatment of Galileo, along with apologies for historic mistreatment of Jews, the Crusades, and other matters.[12] 

Notwithstanding these qualifications, the Galileo affair represents a touchstone event for the relationship between theology and science.  The heliocentric cosmos challenged not only the interpretation of a few Biblical passages, but also the broader Aristotelian cosmology that informed the medieval synthesis of “science” and theology.[13]  When Newtonianism subsequently questioned Aristotelian causation and the sense of a great chain of being more broadly, Lyellian geology questioned the antiquity of the Earth and the “days” of creation recorded in Genesis 1, and Darwinism questioned anthropocentric biology, theology faced an even more significant challenge.[14]  At the same time, scientific methods of textual analysis, archeology and historiography were being applied to the Biblical texts in ways that questioned the fundamental integrity of the Bible.[15]

Nineteenth Century Christian thinkers reacted to the Newtonian, Lyellian and Darwinian challenges inconsistently.  During the ascendency of Newtonianism, many opted for a kind of mechanistic Deism that was at odds with the Christian view of a God who is intimately providentially involved with creation.[16]  In Christian theology’s first encounters with Darwinism, notwithstanding the perhaps exaggerated accounts of the clash between Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley, the majority responded with cautious appraisal and appropriation of both Lyell and Darwin, while working with notions of providence that attempted to accommodate both the Biblical picture and Newton.[17]  Their efforts sometimes led to theological aberrations such as William Paley’s “watchmaker” natural theology, but they nevertheless worked from a framework that assumed the “book of scripture” and the “book of nature” spoke complementary truths.[18]

The Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy that erupted among American Protestants in the early Twentieth Century, however, ignited a tinderbox of conflict, highlighted in the infamous “Scopes Monkey Trial” of 1925 in Dayton, Tennesee.[19]  Fundamentalists rejected Darwinian science in toto, and further rejected in toto the historical-critical inquiry of the Biblical sources.[20]  The rise of Protestant Fundamentalism supported the development of “creation science,” which asserts that the Bible can be read as an innerant scientific text and that God literally created the universe in six days around 6,500 years ago.[21]  The enormous cultural influence of “creation science,” particularly in North America but increasingly world-wide, is evidenced by the multi-million dollar “Creation Museum” in Kentucky.[22]  In the view of “creation science,” there is a clear conflict between theology and modern evolutionary science. 

A somewhat more sophisticated version of this sort of creationism, is the “Intelligent Design” movement, which attempts to disprove the theory of evolution by through scientific evidences for “design” in creation through statistical gaps and probabilities and information theory.[23]  Although many ID proponents do not identify with scientific creationism’s insistence on reading the book of Genesis literally, they likewise presume that the Biblical revelation must somehow conform to and be confirmed by “science.”[24]  And because of this presumption, ID advocates generally argue that the findings of evolutionary biology fundamentally conflict with Christian theology.[25]

The extraordinary cultural influence of “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins represents another extreme node of this warfare thesis.[26]  Darwinism is here elevated to an all-encompassing worldview.  For example, David Sloan Wilson, Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University, argues that Darwinian evolution fully explains everything, including every aspect of human nature.[27]  Anyone who thinks otherwise, even “intellectuals” who are not religious, is a kind of fundamentalist, an “’academic creationist.’”[28]  Religion, for these ultra-Darwinists, is like a pernicious virus that must be eradicated by science.[29]