Inventing Conflict, Science, and Religion

In a recent study released by the Pew Research Centre, it was found that approximately 59% of Americans believe science and religion are often in a state of conflict. This supports other national surveys, such as the study released by the Public Religion Research Institute and the American Academy of Religion, in concluding that the majority of Americans perceive the relationship between the two disciplines to be characterised by conflict. This idea, that science and religion are locked in a state of perennial warfare, is not a new one; yet, only going back to the late nineteenth century, it is much younger than is often thought. Indeed, it is important to note that the very notion of science, as it is currently understood, did not exist before the nineteenth century. In a similar fashion, the picture that we have of religion, at least in the Western world, is profoundly different to the way that religion was portrayed before the enlightenment. It is definitely possible for conflict to exist between these two disciplines. There are ways of interpreting religion that are irreconcilable with science. Equally so, science can be understood in many ways, some of which will come into conflict with religion. However, neither science nor religion are objective concepts. By closely examining the development of these two disciplines, I will argue that the relationship they share is defined by how science and religion are interpreted. Conflict may be understood to exist between the two disciplines, but a far better approach will see mutual consonance between science and religion.

Defining Religion

Although it may at first seem simple, defining "religion" is a notoriously difficult task. Perhaps the most common approach to understanding religion sees it simply as being a belief in a god or some form of deity. However, upon closer examination, such an approach to understanding the nature of religion is clearly deficient for a number of reasons. The nineteenth century anthropologist, Edward Burnett Tylor, touches on one of these reasons when he argues that such approaches “[have] the fault of identifying religion rather with particular developments than with the deeper motive which underlies them.” Thus, Tylor extended his definition of religion to include “the belief in spiritual beings.” For nineteenth century anthropologists, and indeed for us today, it is crucial that our definition of religion should encompass the variety of beliefs, expressions, and practices performed by all people. Following this principle, Emile Durkheim expanded on Tylor's definition, arguing that religion should be understood as a “unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things.” Durkheim did not limit religion to being just the belief in supernatural beings; instead, he argued that religion could even involve believing that things are sacred. From the common definition of simply being a belief in a deity, religion has been defined in an increasingly inclusive way. But it should be noted that, from Tylor to Durkheim, religion is still understood in this context as being primarily concerned with belief.

William James, a contemporary of Tylor and Durkheim, did not identify religion in this fashion. Instead, he argued that religion was best understood as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” Religion, for James, was not primarily about belief; rather, it was about experience. Similarly, Rudolf Otto emphasised the experiential aspect of religion, describing the experience as being "beyond our apprehension and comprehension, not only because our knowledge has certain irremovable limits, but because in it we come upon something inherently 'wholly other', whose kind and character are incommensurable with our own, and before which we therefore recoil in a wonder that strikes us chill and numb." Although James and Otto considered belief to be an important aspect of religion, they both asserted that, fundamentally, religion was something that was to be experienced.

Significantly, both of these approaches to examining religion were developed in the late nineteenth century, through a close examination of the different cultures of the time. More recently, however, scholars have begun to emphasise the historical development of religion. It is argued that, yes, religion does take a number of different forms among various cultures; but, equally so, the very concept of religion has changed and developed over time. At least in the West, there was no general approach to understanding or comparing religion before the fragmentation of Christendom during the reformation period. As has been pointed out by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, "the concept 'religion', then, in the West has evolved. Its evolution has included a long-range development that we may term as a process of reification: mentally making religion into a thing, gradually coming to conceive it as an objective systematic entity." 

During the Middle Ages, the Christian religion was expressed in the West through inner faith and piety. It was not to be found in something tangible like a ritual or a creed but instead, as Peter Harrison has observed, it was found in the "inner dynamic of the heart". Nowhere is this more obvious than in Augustine of Hippo's, 'Retractions', where he argues that "true religion means the worship of the one true God." He elaborates upon this further in 'Six Questions in Answer to the Pagans', arguing that while Christianity was a form of true religion, it was not to be regarded as the true religion. He argued that this was because true religion had existed since the creation of the world and therefore a long time before the birth of Christ and the inception of Christianity. Yet, for Augustine, true religion united all people. "It makes no difference," he writes, "that people worship with different ceremonies, in accord with the different requirements of times and places, if what is worshiped is holy." Thus, Augustine argued that true religion was to be seen as existing apart from the culturally bound forms of Catholic worship and ritual, writing that "different rites are celebrated in different peoples bound together by one and the  same religion." Religion, therefore, was not to be understood as a doctrinal belief, a ritual, or an experience; instead, for Augustine, true religion was an invisible and spiritual virtue .

A common objection to this view of the Medieval Church would be that creeds such as the Nicene Creed and doctrines such as the doctrine of grace and of the trinity were actually quite central to the formation of the early Church. Indeed, this is quite true. However, it is important to acknowledge the significant difference between the Christian religion of the early Church Fathers and the Christianity of today. A common approach to Christianity in recent years has been to define the religion by what its adherents believe and practice, to value Christianity first and foremost as a belief system to be compared alongside other belief systems. Yet, while the formation of doctrines and the routine recitation of creeds did give rise to a greater awareness of the rational grounding of the Christian religion, this was not their main goal. For the Church Fathers, belief was not understood to be an assertion of the existence of God, nor was it the lending of assent to propositional truths. Primarily, belief was seen to be an expression of trust. Doctrinal understanding and the recitation of creeds were not pursued in order to promote an intellectual understanding of the Christian religion, they were pursued to support upright religious living. "Look at yourself," Augustine urged, "treat your creed as your own personal mirror." In this way, the creeds were an exercise in self-examination, that through believing the creeds, a person would be living rightly. For the Church Fathers, therefore, belief meant something far more than it does today. "To believe in God is to seek him in faith," wrote Faustus of Riez, "to hope piously in him, and to pass into him by a movement of choice. When I say that I believe in him, I confess him, offer him worship, adore him, give myself over to him wholly and transfer to him all my affection." 

When did this change? When did the transformation of religion occur, that this once personal commitment of trust came to be understood as being primarily an epistemological commitment? The transformation of religion in the West, namely Christianity, from an invisible and spiritual virtue into something tangible as we encounter it today was not immediate, nevertheless by the end of the seventeenth century a noticeable change had occurred. A significant reason for this change is due to the influence of the sixteenth century religious reformers. Prior to the reformation, the laity had been excluded from certain parts of the Christian religion that were deemed too complicated. The Protestant Reformers, however, insisted that all believers should possess the ability to articulate the doctrines of the faith they professed, and to be able to do so in propositional terms. John Calvin criticised those who had gone before him, who saw little to gain in studying the doctrines of Christianity. He writes that "the true religion which is delivered in the Scriptures, and which all ought to hold, they readily permit both themselves and others to be ignorant of, to neglect and despise; and they deem it of little moment what each man believes concerning God and Christ, or disbelieves, provided he submits to the judgment of the Church with implicit faith." In response to this Protestant emphasis on the importance of explicitly defining the doctrines of the Christian faith, Catholic theologians tightened their own approach towards doctrine. Due to this greater emphasis on the importance of doctrinal knowledge, Christianity increasingly came to be viewed as primarily being concerned with propositional beliefs.

Examining how different cultures have understood religion opens up a whole new way of understanding the relationship between science and religion. People in different times and places have often held wildly disparate beliefs regarding what does and does not constitute religion. For some, religion is primarily a cognitive activity, while for others it is something to be experienced or acted upon. Nevertheless, whether religion is something that is believed, lived, or experienced, to define the relationship between science and religion as being characterised by conflict, without attending to these readily apparent differences, is to significantly overstep the bounds of scholarly authority. That being said, it remains to be seen whether religion can, despite all this diversity, conflict with science. In order to answer this question, the nature of the scientific enterprise must be examined in more detail.

Examining Science

There is a popular chart that has been circulated widely on the internet showing the supposed exponential advancement of scientific progress up to the year 2000 CE. According to this chart, science is an objective entity. Having been discovered around three thousand years ago, it led to the advancement of society until "The Christian Dark Ages". Supposedly, scientific knowledge was suppressed during this dark period until, at last, science was freed from the grip of religion during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods. This chart is an example of the widespread misunderstanding that, typically, religion has impeded the progress of science. Richard Carrier, perhaps the only authority close to being considered a historian who subscribes to this view, has even made the point that, "had Christianity not interrupted the intellectual advance of mankind and put the progress for science on hold for a thousand years, the Scientific Revolution might have occurred a thousand years ago, and our science and technology today would be a thousand years more advanced." Yet, there are a number of fundamental erroneous assumptions upon which this argument is supported. Firstly, the question of whether a significant decline in scientific activity occurred during the Middle Ages is intensely debated [1]. Second, even if such a decline did take place, it is highly unlikely that religion was a significant factor [2]. But, I will not attend to these issues here, for they have been thoroughly addressed elsewhere. Instead, I will focus on the third assumption, that "scientific advancement" represents an objective measure upon which cultures throughout history can be measured against. This assumption maintains that science is a value-free and objective discipline; that it is autonomous and based on our universal principles of rationality and that, as time goes on, science will continue to build upon our knowledge of the world. I will now turn to addressing the assumption that Richard Carrier makes, that science is a discipline that is just waiting to be discovered by society as it advances, relentlessly, into the future.

The history of science reveals a far more complex picture. "Science", contrary to what Carrier implies, has changed significantly over time. The type of "science" that occurred before the Middle Ages was very different to the "science" that was practiced afterwards. Indeed, the ancient Greeks had no role in their society equivalent to the role we attribute to scientists; rather, those who studied nature were considered to be philosophers of the natural world, or natural philosophers. Because their discipline was actually understood to be a form of philosophy, Greek"scientists" operated with entirely different motivations and assumptions than their modern counterparts. It is important to recognise that the study of philosophy, for the early Greeks, was intended to aid in the pursuit of eudaimonia: the good life.  

Philosophy, then, was primarily concerned with how life was to be lived, and natural philosophy studied the natural world to gain insight into this question. Indeed, it was commonly assumed that a moral order was built into the structure of the cosmos, and it was through an understanding of that order that a person could endure the difficulties faced in life. In the Timaeus, Plato reflects upon this common assumption, writing that "the motions which are naturally akin to the divine principle within us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe. These each man should follow, and by learning the harmonies and revolutions of the universe, should correct the courses of the head which were corrupted at our birth, and should assimilate the thinking being to the thought, renewing his original nature, so that having assimilated them he may attain to that best life which the gods have set before mankind, both for the present and the future." Thus, the study of nature primarily represented, to the Greek natural philosophers, not an attempt to understand the universe, but a means of aligning oneself with the rational and moral order that pervaded it. Understanding the natural world may have been a part of the process, but it was subservient to the art of living. As the Stoic philosopher Epictetus explains, the good life lies "in contemplation and understanding, and in a scheme of life conformable to nature." Epicurus, even went so far as to suggest that tenets of natural philosophy should be memorised and rehearsed, similar to the way catechisms have been recited in religious ceremonies, so as to align oneself more fully with the natural world. Thus, for the Greeks, a greater understanding the natural world was understood to be important, but only insofar as it could act as a buffer against the vicissitudes of life. 

It is worth noting that, although this approach understood the study of nature to be primarily a moral enterprise, a great deal was discovered about the natural world during this period. The chart mentioned above is correct to suppose that knowledge of the natural world increased during this time. The question, however, of whether this constitutes "Scientific Advancement" depends upon whether the activity that Greek natural philosophers were participating in is the same kind of discipline that scientists practiced during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. History reveals a complex picture linking these two periods. Contrary to the aforementioned chart, unlike the Greeks, the Romans did not display an active interest in studying nature. "Scientific Advancement" did not continue to exponentially increase during this period, as is claimed, but instead entered into a time of stasis. Although historians may point to philosophers such as the mathematician and astronomer Hypatia, as examples of Roman engagement with the natural world, such figures were incredibly rare. The intellectual landscape that came out of this period, greeting the growing Christian faith, was one that showed little to no interest in studying the natural world. When, at least in the first few centuries of the middle ages, Christian thinkers showed little attention to the study of nature, they were not consciously suppressing the growth of science; instead, they were deferring to the dominant attitudes that they inherited from the Romans before them.

It would not be reasonable to claim, as the chart implies, that the study of the natural world was actively suppressed by Christianity during this period, it wasn't. Equally so, it would be unreasonable to claim that the first part of the middle ages was a climactic time of scientific fervour. Nevertheless, the attitude of ambivalence towards the natural world that is displayed during the first few centuries of the common era began to change during the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. With the development of universities in Europe and an increasing emphasis on translating Greek and Arabic scientific texts into Latin, scholars began to study the natural world with a renewed interest. In this endeavour they were often motivated by the radical idea that God had created two books in which his character could be discerned: the book of God's word (the Bible) and the book of God's works (nature). Due to this idea, they established an approach to studying the natural world that would most definitely not qualify as science in the modern sense of the term. Indeed, having been steeped in a culture where religious scriptures were commonly read allegorically, nature was thought to be fraught with meaning. For those who understood nature in this way, plants and animals taught spiritual and moral lessons. An example of this can be found in the third century work, the Physiologus, which was very popular during the Middle Ages. It reads that the fox should be understood as "a figure of the devil", while the owl is a "figure of the Jewish people," and the phoenix is "the person of the saviour". This view understands the natural world primarily in terms of how it is useful to humans. Radically anthropocentric, this approach understands every feature of the natural world to play some special role in the moral and theological development of humanity. Even during the sixteenth century, this approach is implicit in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queen, where he describes animals as being representative of various vices such as pride, wrath, envy, lust, and gluttony.

The interpretation of both the book of God's word and the book of God's works went hand in hand. Thus, because the dominant approach to understanding the scriptures during the Middle Ages was allegorical, the natural world was understood in such terms. This changed during the early modern period, however, as reformation movements encouraged an increasingly literal approach to the Bible. The Bible, they argued, was not full of complicated signs and symbols; instead, it was written for everyone, and could be faithfully interpreted by all. Just as the book of God's word increasingly came to be viewed as a literal historical account, a literal approach to studying nature was gradually emphasised more and more. This shift is seen clearly by contrasting the way that animals were understood during the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century. As has already been referred to above, scholars in the Middle Ages understood the natural world to be composed of cyphers. Rather than study animals for themselves, on a biological level, this anthropocentric approach sought to understand animals for their symbolic significance. In contrast to this approach there developed, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, two polarised alternatives on how best to understand animal nature. The first was that of the sixteenth century French essayist Michel de Montaigne who argued that, like humans, animals possessed rationality, morality, and emotions. Through his study of animals he concluded that "we ought, from like effects, to conclude like faculties, and from greater effects greater faculties, and consequently confess that the same reason, the same method by which we operate, are common with them, or that they have others that are better." On the other side of the spectrum, the French philosopher Rene Descartes argued that animals were not like humans, being neither rational nor moral, and, beyond that, not even conscious. He based this assertion on the belief that the world was made of two types of fundamental elements, described as thinking and material substances. The philosopher Michael Ruse has observed that this approach led Descartes to assert that "God is pure thinking substance; the physical world is pure material substance; we humans (and perhaps angels) are uniquely in the middle, both thinking and material substance." Thus, for Descartes, animals were understood as merely material beings, for unlike humans they (apparently) did not possess the ability to reason. Now, evidently, these views still stand in stark contrast to modern science, yet they do represent a significant shift from the approaches to the natural world that were developed during the Middle Ages. As Peter Harrison has observed, the science of the seventeenth century "concentrated on tracing causes from physical effects, rather than seeing effects as signs. The natural world had come to be regarded as a complex web of cause and effect rather than [a] book of signs which had moral or transcendental meanings."

Science is a developing discipline. It is not some autonomous, universal key to unlocking the deepest secrets of the universe. Rather, it is an entirely social enterprise, grounded in the ever-changing assumptions of everyday people throughout history. Just as the science of the fifteenth century may seem antiquated to those living in the twenty-first century, it is likely that those living 500 years from now will make similar judgements about our own scientific perspectives. This does not mean that we do not study science today, nor does it mean that scholars living in the Middle Ages did not engage in science; rather, it means that science is an ever changing discipline. Our talk of conflict between science and religion should reflect this fact.

Reconsidering Conflict

Science and religion are not objective concepts; they have altered over time and changed from culture to culture. Consequently, it is not possible to talk about the relationship between science and religion as if it is some fixed and immutable notion. It is definitely possible for conflict to exist between science and religion, but this comes down to the way in which the categories of science and religion are interpreted! I have sought to argue here that the concepts of science and religion that have been developed in the twenty-first century are relatively recent ideas, having been increasingly shaped by historical contingencies. It is due to the categories of science and religion, as we understand them (rather than their underlying ideas), that conflict is so commonly understood to exist between science and religion. As the scholar of science and religion Alister McGrath has observed: 

Science and religion are two of the greatest cultural forces in today's world. When rightly framed, a mutual conversation can be enriching and elevating. When rightly constructed, a 'bigger narrative' of reality creates intellectual space for divergence and disagreement, while affirming the intelligibility and coherence of our world.

Notes:

1. See James Hannam, God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science, (London: Icon Books, 2009).

2. See David C. Lindberg, "Medieval Science and Religion," in Science & Religion: A Historical Introduction, ed. Gary B. Ferngren (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2002); Michael H. Shank, "Myth 2: That the Medieval Christian Church Suppressed the Growth of Science," in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, ed. Ronald L. Numbers (London: Harvard University Press, 2010); Michael H. Shank, "Myth 1: That There Was No Scientific Activity between Greek Antiquity and the Scientific Revolution," in Newton's Apple and Other Myths about Science, ed. Ronald L. Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis (London: Harvard University Press, 2015).

*Much of this post is a reflection of Peter Harrison's recent work, The Territories of Science and Religion. For a far more comprehensive analysis of much of what has been argued here, one should read his book.

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