Gingras - Science and religion: an impossible dialogue

Yves Gingras

Translated by Peter Keating

polity

First published in French as LImpossible dialogue. Sciences et religions ditions du Boral, 2016

This English edition Polity Press, 2017

Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1896-8

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gingras, Yves, 1954- author.
Title: Science and religion : an impossible dialogue / Yves Gingras.
Other titles: Impossible dialogue. English
Description: Malden, MA : Polity, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017010097 (print) | LCCN 2017011427 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509518920 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509518937 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781509518951
(Mobi) | ISBN 9781509518968 (Epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Religion and science--History.
Classification: LCC BL240.3 G56413 2017 (print) | LCC BL240.3 (ebook) | DDC 201/.6509--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010097

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

If there is one truth that history has incontrovertibly settled, it is that religion extends over an ever diminishing area of social life. Originally, it extended to everything; everything social was religious the two words were synonymous. Then gradually political, economic and scientific functions broke free from the religious function, becoming separate entities and taking on more and more a markedly temporal character.

Emile Durkheim

While religions divide men,
Reason brings them closer.

Ernest Renan

This book attempts to explain how the question of the relations between science and religion and calls for a dialogue between these two areas of activity, so distinct in their objects and methods, came to occupy a significant place in public discussion in the course of the 1980s. For it was not always so. Until quite recently, the scientific consensus was, as a botanist and Brother of Christian Schools expressed it clearly in the mid-1920s, that science and religion follow parallel paths, towards their own goals, and that there was no need to search for a necessary harmony between scientific discoveries and religious beliefs. As a student in physics during the 1970s, I recall that neither students nor professors spent much time discussing the supposed relations between science and religion nor was there any spirited public debate or a plethora of books on the topic. Even during the 1980s, when studying the history and sociology of science, such discussions were still rare and largely limited to the counter-culture and followers of New Age syncretic philosophies. Thus the question: how did this renewed interest for a dialogue between science and religion come about?

As will be seen in , is how some scientific discoveries are used to justify religious and theological positions that have little to do with science. Instead, sciences prestige is used to suggest to religious readers that modern science is in fact compatible with their preferred beliefs. Moreover, faced with the rise of fundamentalist religious sects often highly critical of research that questions their beliefs a number of scientists and their organizations, seeking appeasement, have come to support these dubious associations that suggest that believers need no longer be wary of modern science. Far from leading the innocent down the road to atheism, as is often thought, science leads instead, they surmise, to a belief in a nature created by a superior being.

Another important factor in the exponential growth of studies devoted to the study of the relationship between science and religion over the past twenty years has been the work of John Templeton (19122008) and his Foundation. As we will see in chapters 5 and 6, this Foundation, endowed with more than a billion dollars, distributes millions yearly to researchers who seek links between science, religion and spirituality. Since the mid-1990s, the Templeton Prize has frequently been bestowed upon astrophysicists who offer directly or indirectly religious or spiritual interpretations of modern physics and cosmology. The Foundation has also played a major role in that these so-called dialogues are little more than a modern version of natural theology, employing arguments that have barely changed since the end of the seventeenth century.

But before analysing the rise of the discourse on the relationship between science and religion, we will examine the long history of their conflicting relations. For despite the recent trend among many historians of science to say that the conflict between science and religion has been largely exaggerated, it remains the case that many scientific theories have historically been perceived as incompatible with certain religious beliefs that are based on the literal reading of sacred texts. While it is true that these clashes of world views are in some respects contingent and become open conflicts only when organized social groups or institutions confront the offending science, it is also true that the clashes are often predictable and even inevitable when a given science takes on issues and problems that resonate with those discussed in sacred religious writings. In sum, if mathematics or taxonomy pose few problems for organized religion, the same cannot be said for cosmology, geology, evolutionary biology and the social and human sciences, especially those that deal with the history of religion and the origins of humanity. As noted by the sociologist Max Weber at the beginning of the twentieth century, the tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore wherever rational, empirical knowledge has consistently worked to the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism. For then science encounters claims of the ethical postulate that the world is a God-ordained and hence somehow meaningfully and ethically oriented cosmos. He added, moreover, that the extent of consciousness or of consistency in the experience of this contrast, however, varies widely.

The undeniable historical conflicts between different sciences and various religions participated in a struggle for power between institutions and groups with divergent and often opposed interests. At the dawn of the development of modern science in the seventeenth century, the power and prestige of scientific institutions paled in comparison to that of the Christian Church that dominated the intellectual world. Having become a symbol of the history of the relationship between science and religion, the condemnation of Galileo in 1633 merits special attention in the first two chapters. that although cosmology was long the source of many a bone of contention between science and Christian theology, it was replaced at the beginning of the nineteenth century by natural history and geology. Subsequently institutionalized, these sciences applied a naturalist methodology to the whole of nature with the result that invocations of the divine (or of miracles) no longer had a place in science by the middle of the nineteenth century. This long process of autonomization thus accompanied the relegation of God to the periphery of scientific discourse, even for scientists who, as individuals, remained fervent Christians.