Where’s the boundary between science and religion?
It’s not where you think.
Re-Assembling Reality #1, by Mike Brownnutt and David A. Palmer
When we talk about science and religion, there is often an implicit assumption that we know — more or less — what we are talking about. Maybe not in the details, but we imagine that, in broad outline, we at least know what science is and what religion is. And even if we cannot put that understanding into words exactly, we have a feeling that we would at least recognise science if we saw it, and recognise religion if we saw it. If the people involved in the practice have test tubes and lab-coats, for example, that would be science. If they have prayer beads and incense, that is religion.
Such a rule of thumb gets us quite a long way. But sometimes it hits a road bump. Consider acupuncture: Is this practice scientific or is it religious? Is it both? Is it neither? The simultaneous presence of lab-coats and incense makes it harder to call.
Four Models
Much discussion of science and religion — particularly discussion about how science and religion relate to each other — is framed by Ian Barbour’s four models. In his 1989 Gifford Lectures, Barbour (1923–2013), a physicist and theologian at Cambridge University, outlined four ways of thinking about the interactions of science and religion:
- Conflict: science and religion are opposed.
- Independence: science and religion have nothing to do with each other.
- Dialogue: science and religion can fruitfully engage with each other.
- Integration: science and religion can be brought into synthesis.
These are sometimes referred to by the more catchy name of “The Four Cs”:
- Conflict,
- Compartmentalization,
- Conversation, and
- Convergence.[1]
The conflict thesis is one that most people are familiar with: science is born out of a clash with religion. Religion is always fighting a rear-guard battle against science, and it will ultimately lose. Science will bring full enlightenment, knowledge, technology, and prosperity to humanity. Or, alternatively viewed, science is responsible for irreligion and leads to our lives being controlled by a godless elite intent on using technology to rule the world without being restrained by any moral principles.
Compartmentalization refers to a situation where science and religion are not at war, but rather respect each other, provided they do not step on each other’s territories. Each is responsible for different domains; what the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) called “non-overlapping magisteria.”[2] Under this approach, while science and religion each have authority within their own respective areas, or “magisteria”, they shouldn’t overstep their bounds. Religion has no authority to make claims about the age and structure of the physical universe, for example, while science has no authority to make claims about how we should live a good life. Significantly, being separate, they have nothing to say to each other; indeed, under this view, nothing they can say to each other.
Conversation between science and religion respects the distinctive domain and authority of each, but considers that each can fruitfully engage with the other on some issues, notably at the points of contact or boundary between the two domains. For example, whether one is able to create a critical mass of plutonium required for run-away nuclear fission is a scientific question on which religion is mute. Whether it is ever morally acceptable to destroy an entire city at the touch of a button is a religious question on which science is mute. Despite these distinct magisteria, the scientists working at Los Alamos were acutely aware that their scientific work had implications beyond science. Similarly, religious leaders were acutely aware that religious positions had implications for the work at Los Alamos. Within the framework of conversation, it is viewed as possible, beneficial, and even necessary for science (on occasion) to engage with religious questions, and for religion to engage (on occasion) with scientific questions.[3]
Convergence refers to attempts to unify science and religion, either by incorporating scientific knowledge into religious systems, or vice versa, or to create a new synthesis that transcends conventional science and religion. For example, the French paleontologist and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin developed a philosophy of evolution based on the emergence of ever-higher forms of consciousness and integration, from the geosphere to the biosphere, and now, the “noosphere”, which is the layer of human communication and consciousness covering the planet.[4] Teilhard saw this emerging consciousness as a sign of the gradual realization of the Divine on our planet, leading to the future union of God and Creation at the ultimate “Omega point”. God reveals Himself itself through evolution, and evolution is the expression of the divine coming into the world.
The “Four Cs” show us that there are many ways of looking at the relationships between science and religion. There is quite a diversity of approaches and attitudes and, indeed, an entire academic field has emerged to study these different perspectives, which draws on people from numerous disciplines including physicists, biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, theologians, historians, philosophers, and so on.
The Four Models Wobble
When laying out these models, Barbour made numerous caveats and provisos which tend to be ignored in the simple four-point summaries (including, we confess, the summary given here). One major assumption which is necessary for this formulation is that there is something called ‘science,’ and something else called ‘religion’. Barbour’s key question was how science and religion relate to each other, not whether science and religion are meaningful — or meaningfully distinct — terms. When Barbour gave his lectures, in 1980s Scotland, the culture was sufficiently homogeneous that most of his audience could agree, more or less, on what science looked like, and on what religion looked like. But we are not in 1980s Scotland, and it is not obvious that we can make the same assumptions that Barbour did.
Peter Harrison, in his 2016 Gifford Lectures,[5] highlighted the fact that the categories of science and religion that we have in the post-Enlightenment West are inventions of the Enlightenment. As such, they may variously be inappropriate, unhelpful, irrelevant, or meaningless when put to use in contexts other than the post-Enlightenment West. By way of analogy, Harrison notes that we cannot speak of the relationship between Israel and Egypt in the 16th century, because Israel and Egypt didn’t exist in the 16th century. To be sure, the Jordan and Nile rivers were there, as were Jerusalem and Alexandria. There were people who lived and worked there. But there was nothing that corresponded to a modern understanding of Egypt or Israel. There were simply different parts of the Ottoman Empire.
As a historian, Harrison goes on to consider the issue of then and now: can we talk about non-Modern contexts without forcing them into Modern categories?
Being based in Hong Kong, we want to take the same basic idea, but consider the issue of here and there: can we talk about non-Western contexts without forcing them into Western categories?
The Enlightenment never happened in Asia. Modernist conceptions of the world, when they do arise in Asia, arise in their own ways, following their own contingent promptings of history, and expressing themselves with scant regard for following Western concerns. As such, the categories common in the Modern West might not apply in Asia. Furthermore, even if such categories do seem on the surface to be broadly applicable in Asia, we might anticipate that they do not quite carve people’s thinking at the joints [6].
Once we have had our eyes opened to the shortcomings of the standard Western categories, which do not carve Asian practices of science and religion at the joints, we can turn the question back on the West: do Western categories carve Western practices of science and religion at the joints? At the risk of spoilers, we can tell you upfront: they do not [7]. On reflection, we are forced to rethink matters entirely. Not just for Asia and the West, but for any instantiation of something that we might call science, or religion, or science-religion-interactions, wherever and whenever it occurs.
In following this reasoning where it leads, we are writing the Re-assembling Reality series of essays,in which we shall unpack science and religion; what they do mean and what they could mean. We will take out the ingredients, and we will look at what people actually do when they do science or when they do religion. We will notice that some of the things that people usually consider to be essential ingredients of science, are essential components of what people call religion too. And we will see that some things which people consider to be core characteristics of religion happen to be essential to science as well. We will notice some ingredients that most people overlook, and some ingredients that are often assumed to be present but which turn out to be missing entirely. When we eventually put the ingredients all back together, we will keep the words science and religion — but they will mean something different. They will also have different relationships — and different kinds of relationships — with each other.
Grouping and un-grouping ideas
Modernism seems to live for dichotomies: Body — Mind. Bad–Good. Sinner–Saint. Temporal–Eternal. There are two things that might be noted about these pairings. First, they are exclusive: a person cannot be bad and good; a thing is temporal or it is eternal. Second, the first items of all the pairs can be grouped together, as can the second items of all the pairs: Saints are good because they have their minds set on the eternal. By contrast, sinners are bad because they pursue with their bodies that which is what is temporal. One can create extensive lists of such dichotomies. Consider, for example,
These example lists are, of course, in no way exhaustive. You should feel free to add items as they occur to you.
The pairs listed here are commonly thought of as being mutually exclusive, often necessarily so [8]. Natural and supernatural are separate: one deals with apples, the other deals with angels. Things are either testable or they are untestable: the law of the excluded middle sees to that. Obviously, facts and values are distinct: why else would moral philosophers establish something as fundamental as the ‘fact-value distinction’? Without the public sphere and the private sphere being demonstrably different and separate, society would collapse. Self-evidently, knowledge and faith are different: the more faith you have the less knowledge you need (or vice versa).
Also, working down each column, it is often thought that the things in Column 1 are related, and things in Column 2 are related. Facts are objective because they can be tested. Values are subjective exactly because they cannot be tested. We believe in the supernatural by faith. Religion belongs in the private sphere. It is not OK to teach it in public schools, where only science should be taught. These categories are all interlinked.
Within this framework of thinking, any attempt to relate science and religion is an attempt to bridge these two columns. We ask questions like, “Can we prove that God exists?” Because what we really want to know is “Can we have objective knowledge of the supernatural?” Can we bridge the two columns? Can things in the same column as science have anything to do with things in the same column as religion?
This is all very neat. However, when we look at what practitioners of science and of religion actually do, we are forced to shake off this framework. We are forced to accept two conclusions:
The first is that these columns get thoroughly mixed. Religions make natural claims. Science makes untestable claims. Science cannot be divorced from values, any more than religion can be divorced from facts.
The second is that these dichotomies are not nearly as separate as we often think. The distinction between natural and supernatural is surprisingly problematic. Objectivity and subjectivity blur into one another. Facts inhere values.
Science is often thought of by appeal (explicitly or implicitly) to ideas and properties relating to Column 1. Religion is often thought of by appeal (explicitly or implicitly) to ideas and properties relating to Column 2. But when we look at how science and religion are actually practiced (rather than how they justify themselves to the world, or at how they are described by ideologists, polemicists, outside observers, or — indeed — inside observers), we find that the two columns get jumbled up.
While it is consideration of an Asian context that initially provokes us to dig into this, the issues that arise are no less present in Western contexts. Generations of attempts to force science and religion into a Procrustean Modernist bed may have dulled us to the reality of the situation before us, but the world remains incorrigibly interconnected. Ultimately, the surprise should not be that science and religion can meaningfully relate to each other, or that we can, on occasion, seem to bridge the gap between our two lists. The surprise, rather, should be that we ever found situations in which we imagined that science and religion did not relate.
By getting to grips with the implications of this mixing, we will have a deeper understanding of the terms in both columns. We will discover other terms; ones that don’t fit neatly into two dichotomous columns. We will be able to apply the terms better. Ultimately, this will help us to do science better, to do religion better, and to better handle the overlaps between them.
Does this sound abstract? Do you want examples? Read on to essay #2 in this series: Acupuncture: Science? Religion? Both? Neither?
This essay and the Re-Assembling Reality Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9061 Science and Religion: Questioning Truth, Knowledge and Life, with the support of the Faith and Science Collaborative Research Forum and the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Footnotes
[1] Barbour first put forward his four models in the 1989 Gifford Lectures on Religion in an Age of Science (Published in 1990 by HarperCollins). A revised and expanded edition was published by HarperOne in 1997 under the title Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues. In this he still uses his original terms, but credits John Haught’s Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation (Paulist Press, 1995) with the alliterative Conflict, Contrast, Contact, Confirmation, often referred to as the “4Cs”. The same four basic ideas get reformulated in all manner of ways, with the four listed here (Conflict, Compartmentalization, Conversation, and Convergence) being commonly used in recent literature.
[2] Stephen Jay Gould, “Noneverlapping Magisteria.” Natural History 106 (March 1997) 16‑22; Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion and the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine, 1999).
[3] Alarmed by people’s failure to engage in such conversations during the cold war, the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (https://pugwash.org/) was set up by scientists to foster ‘dialogue across divides’. Just how intertwined things become can be seen in, for example, Stephen Kierulff’s “Belief in ‘Armageddon Theology’ and Willingness to Risk Nuclear War.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 30 (March 1991) 81‑93.
[4] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man. Trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Harper Perennial, 1976).
[5] Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
[6] See Talal Assad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993; Donald S. Lopez, Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed, University of Chicago Press, 2008; Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China, University of Chicago Press, 2011; Jason A. Josephston-Storm, The Invention of Religion in Japan. University of Chicago Press, 2012.
[7] For some studies that undermine dichotomies of science and religion in the history of the modern West, see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Harvard University Press, 1993; Jason A. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. University of Chicago Press, 2017; John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America. University of Chicago Press, 2011.
[8] See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Harvard University Press, 2007; Midgeley, Mary. Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears. Routledge, 2002.
