From the introduction
(to view a footnote,
click on its number)
The scientific enterprise is full of experts on specialist
areas but woefully short of people with a unified worldview. This state of
affairs can only inhibit progress, and could threaten political and financial
support for research.
Nature Commentary, 14 August 1997, p.
619 Contemporary Western societies are profoundly
ambivalent about science. On the one hand, science is invested with exaggerated
expectations and inflated hopes. The vision is for a high-tech universe whose
powers we manipulate to serve our own ends. At the other extreme, a vigorous
anti-science lobby perceives science to be the source of all our current woes.
Scientists are viewed as dangerous meddlers, wresting secrets from nature that
are best left well alone, playing God as they pry into the sequence of the human
genome and uncover the fundamental forces that hold the universe
together.
The rapid advances in science that are predicted for the
21st century, particularly in the biological sciences, will certainly
bring increasing pressure to bear on our notions of human identity and value.
Scientific advances are continually throwing up questions which science itself
is poorly equipped to address. We will need to draw on all the resources we can
lay our hands on if we are to maintain human justice, dignity and worth in the
face of scientific disciplines, such as neuroscience and the new genetics, which
increasingly lay bare our own biological constitutions. It is for this reason
that a significant proportion of science funding is now routinely being made
available to ethicists, philosophers and theologians--in order to tackle the
ever more pressing moral and ethical questions raised by scientific advances.
Without serious public understanding, discussion and debate there is a real
danger that science will continue to appear threatening and dehumanizing to many
people. | |
In this context it is a matter for regret that science
is often associated in popular culture--and even within some segments of the
scientific community--with hostility to religious faith. In the rosy optimistic
glow which marked the end of the 19th century many thought that, as
science and education spread, religious belief would decline automatically. Now,
more than a century later, we know that this expectation was mistaken. For good
or ill, religious belief continues to exert a dominant influence over the great
majority of the world's population: 87 percent of the population at the start of
the 21st century consider themselves to be 'part of a religion'.1 While in some
technologically advanced areas of the world, such as Europe, the late
20th century saw a decline in commitment to institutional religion,
in the USA, by any criteria the nation which currently leads the world in
science, the reverse happened and religion boomed. All the evidence suggest that
both science and religion are with us for a very long time to come. Yet, rather
than drawing on the resources of religion to affirm human values, a small but
vocal group of scientists has insisted on using science as a weapon for
attacking religious belief. At the same time, and at the opposite extreme,
creationists have carried out a vigorous campaign to ban the teaching of
evolution in American schools. The result has been an unnecessary polarization
between science and religion in which more moderate voices have often been
drowned out by the media attention given to extremist positions.
This
book is an attempt to address this issue from the perspective of a working
scientist who is tired of the rhetoric of the extremists and who wishes to
present the views of that silent majority of scientists who, though the
pressures of their professional lives rarely allow them time to contribute to
the debate, would nevertheless dissociate themselves from such
extremes. | |
I have tried to write a multidisciplinary overview of
the subject covering a wide range of topics, although my own bent towards the
biological sciences will be apparent. There seem to be many specialized works on
the market, focusing on particular aspects of the debate, but not so many books
that can introduce the general reader to a broad overview. I am very aware of
the kind of analogy which Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) wrote in his
introduction to What Is Life in 1944: 'A scientist is supposed to have a
complete and thorough knowledge, at first hand, of some subjects, and therefore
is usually expected not to write on any topic of which he is not a master.'2 Drawing on so
many different disciplines is a dangerous business for the non-specialist and I
apologize in advance to those whose specialized fields have been distilled down
to alarmingly condensed summaries. This book utilizes the resources of
sociologists, historians of science, philosophers, scientists and theologians,
and it is therefore inevitable that the broad brush will distort the picture on
occasion. Nevertheless, sufficient references are provided, I hope, for those
who wish to follow up individual topics in greater detail and obtain a more
nuanced view. In order not to overburden the text with citations I have, in some
chapters, bunched them into groups of references on which I have been dependent
for a particular section.
I have largely allowed those hostile to
religious belief to set the agenda, and the book assumes no particular religious
commitment on the part of its reader nor, for that matter, any specialist
scientific background. The greatest space has been given to topics such as
evolution and evolutionary psychology (sociobiology), which are often perceived
as inimical to faith. I myself write from a Christian perspective because
Christianity is the religion I know most about, and it is also the one which has
been most involved in the emergence of modern science since the 17th
century. I have made no attempt to incorporate the beliefs of other world
religions into the discussion; if I had the book would have increased in length
several-fold. However, I spent fifteen years of my career lecturing and carrying
out scientific research (latterly in human genetics) in the Middle East and am
therefore well aware of the substantial contributions made to the history of
science by Islamic scholars. In fact the first drafts of the earlier chapters
were written in West Beirut, the rigours of the Lebanese civil war ensuring that
many evenings were spent at home, allowing time for writing. I have left some
allusions to this violent environment in the text because of their usefulness as
illustrations. They remain as vestiges of past evolutionary stages of earlier
sections of the book. | |
Most chapters can, I hope, be read as stand-alone
essays so that topics can be browsed according to inclination. Nevertheless,
there is a unifying thread of argument through the book as a whole, which is
best summarized by giving some idea of the questions addressed by each
chapter.
Chapter 1 sets the scene by asking how we come to adopt the
overarching paradigms within which we carry out our thinking about science,
faith and the relationship between them.
Chapter 2 provides a vivid
example from the 19th century--when racism was integrated into the
scientific worldview--of how science can be misused for ideological
purposes.
Chapter 3 then goes on to address the question as to whether
science has had a secularizing effect on society and considers the popular view
that there is a 'conflict' between science and religion.
The following
four chapters proceed to delve into history to determine where the idea of
conflict between science and religion may have come from.
Chapter 4
tracks the emergence of modern science out of Greek natural philosophy, with a
particular focus on the way in which a Judeo-Christian worldview promoted the
arrival of an empirical and utilitarian stance towards the acquisition of
scientific knowledge.
Chapter 5 discusses some of the early tensions
which occurred between religion and science, using the examples of Galileo and
the church, the supposed hostility of Protestants to Copernicus, the role of the
Bible, and the emphasis by the early modern scientists on generating mechanical
explanations for things.
Chapter 6 recounts the way in which the success
of science led to its increasing use in support of conflicting ideologies after
1700, the French Philosophes, the English Nonconformists and the early
geological controversies providing some highly contrasting
examples.
Chapter 7 looks at the life of Darwin, the introduction of his
theory of evolution and the very mixed reactions that this stimulated. It then
examines how the idea of conflict between science and religion, in Britain at
least, was not due to this ground-breaking theory, as is often thought, but was
a by-product of the professionalization of science that occurred during the
latter part of the 19th century.
Having surveyed some
sociological and historical factors that have influences science-faith
interactions over the centuries, the remainder of the book turns to the
contemporary scene and asks what kind of relationship between these two domains
of human interest and experience is appropriate for the 21st century.
This takes us immediately to the heart of the matter: the nature of scientific
and religious knowledge and the ways in which they interrelate, a subject which
occupies chapter 8. | |
The topic of chapter 9, creation and evolution,
provides an opportunity to illustrate some important distinctions between the
types of questions addressed by science and those addressed by religion. The
argument of this chapter will provide no comfort to creationists nor to those
who view evolutionary theory as a tool to promote particular
ideologies.
Chapter 10 picks up some of these themes in greater detail,
considering some of the reasons why evolution has been supposed to have
religious significance. Topics such as the role of chance, the origin of life
and the concept of 'nature red in tooth and claw' are all given an airing--but
the chapter concludes that the biological theory of evolution is essentially
devoid of any religious significance.
A further evolutionary theme is
critically assessed in chapter 11: the idea that morality can be extracted from
biology by arguments based on evolutionary psychology
(sociobiology).
Chapter 12 focuses on the extent to which knowledge about
God can be inferred from the material structure of the universe, considering
some of the pros and cons of the 'anthropic principle,' particularly as it
relates to physics and cosmology, and the question of multiple
universes.
That old bugbear of the science-faith debate--miracles--is
given a fresh examination in chapter 13, and David Hume's famous arguments
against miracles are worked through in the light of more recent understandings
of the nature of scientific knowledge.
Finally chapter 14 spells out in
detail why 'rebuilding the matrix'--restoring the theistic paradigm that gave
birth to modern science--has more chance of generating a truly humanizing
science than other paradigms. | |
Some definitions may be useful. 'Science' is a
notoriously difficult word to define. It derives from the Latin scientia,
meaning 'knowledge,' and entered the English language in the Middle Ages. At
that time it was synonymous with 'knowledge'. However, it soon came to refer to
an accurate and systematized body of knowledge. I use the word in this book to
refer specifically to modern science, that powerful mixture of theorizing,
observation and testing by experiment that came to be known as the 'empirical
method'. This emerged in Europe from the 17th century onward,
eventually giving rise in the 19th to a professional class known as
'scientists'. The word 'science' in this modern sense only came into common
usage during the 19th century, and even then was synonymous for many
years with the term 'natural philosophy,' a 'natural philosopher' being a person
of science. In its contemporary sense we can define science as 'an intellectual
endeavour to explain the workings of the physical world, informed by empirical
investigation and carried out by a community trained in specialized techniques'.
In general I have tried to use the term 'natural philosophy' for science before
the 19th century and the term 'science' thereafter.
The term
'scientist' is more recent and was invented by a Victorian vicar called William
Whewell. He lived in the earlier part of the 19th century before
specialization became the vogue, and was seemingly good at nearly everything.
Apart from publishing numerous papers on topics ranging from maths, geology and
theology to education, philosophy and the movement of the tides, he also wrote
and translated poetry and Plato. Besides this, Whewell was Master of Trinity
College, Cambridge, and successively held chairs there in both mineralogy and
moral philosophy, as well as inventing numerous scientific words that have
become part of our language, like 'physicist,' 'anode,' 'cathode' and so on.
Whewell introduced the word 'scientist' in the Quarterly Review for March
1834, almost as a joke, but later as a more serious suggestion.3 Though the word
found an immediate home in America, it took about sixty years for the term to
become well accepted in Britain. Many 'scientists' were happier to be called
'natural philosophers' or 'naturalists,' partly because they remained under the
mistaken impression that it was one of those new and vulgar expressions recently
imported from America.
I have already used the words 'religion' and
'faith' without definition. I take the word 'religion' to refer to organized
systems of belief in God as practised by communities and not just by
individuals. However, the purpose of this book is to range more widely than
organized systems of belief, and so I have tended to use the word 'faith' where
appropriate, particularly to incorporate personal systems of
belief. | |
Footnotes
- Gallup International Association Report, 2000. (return
to the text)
- E. Schrödinger, What Is Life?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1944. (return to the text)
- S. Ross, "Scientist: The Story of a Word," Annals of Science 18,
1962, pp. 65-85. (return to the text)
| |
