Kenneth W. Kemp - The War That Never Was: Evolution and Christian Theology

The War That Never Was

Evolution and Christian Theology

Kenneth W. Kemp

Chapter

T his book is a partial account of the history of the relations between theology and science, two of the central projects in the intellectual history of Western civilization, from the seventeenth century until today. Such accounts sometimes meet with the objection that science , in particular, has been understood variously over the course of the centuries. The term was understood differently by Aristotelians such as St. Robert Bellarmine (and St. Albert the Great before him) and by the founders of the modern sciences (Galileo Galilei, Ren Descartes, Isaac Newton, Charles Lyell, and Charles Darwin, who would have differed with one another). Nevertheless, we can characterize science ( natural philosophy before about 1800 ) broadly, if somewhat vaguely, as the attempt to offer a descriptive and explanatory account of natural phenomena by reference to natural causes. Scientific inquiry is rational and empirical, or in other words it is based on the human powers of observation and inference. Theology, by contrast, is the attempt to offer an account of the existence and nature of God and of the world (both natural and spiritual) by reference to him. Christian (as well as Jewish and Muslim) theological inquiry, whatever role it gives to reason and observation, gives pride of place to revelation. In this it is distinct from deistic theology, which does not recognize revealed truth as a possible source of knowledge.

This book is a partial account in having as its subject only one part of science, the part which (following nineteenth-century philosopher of science William Whewell) I will call the paleoetiological sciences, the science of ancient causes. It will focus also on only one part of theology, the doctrines at the center of what might broadly be called the theology of naturecreation, providence, and anthropology. The history of these ideas, taken separately, and their eventual logical relations, I am leaving for another book. In this book I will focus on the historical relations between the paleoetiological sciences and the theology of nature.

One of the enduring myths of our age is that Western intellectual history includes a long-running war between science and theology (or sometimes religion generally)a war in which the fight was once over the sphericity of the earth and its place in relation to the sun, planets, and stars; a war in which the fight is at present not over the structure of the universe but over its origin and history. It is, according to that myth, a war that has also included battles on other fronts, ranging from the obstetric use of anesthesia to the destruction of human embryos in medical research.

Its renarration is a standard weapon in the arsenal of militant atheists and is the first resort of any journalist struggling to formulate a lede. But what is it that the purveyors of the idea of a war between science and theology have on offer? Is it a thesis, an interpretive lens, or just a metaphor? Who or what is it that is at war? Are the belligerents groups of peoplescientists, on the one hand, and theologians, or religious people generally, on the other? Is the idea only that there has in fact been a war, or that such warfare is inevitable? Is the war perhaps just between actual groups of people, or is it somehow between two disciplinesperhaps between two mutually inconsistent approaches to the study of the same subject matter? Or is the war a logical contradiction between the content of science and of theology? Is there something in the stories of Galileo and Pope Urban VIII, of John T. Scopes and William Jennings Bryan, that provides some insight into the nature of the relationship between science and theology? Something that will show that that relationship is essentially conflictual? Most generally, is it grounded just in the contingencies of history, or does it show us something about the essential nature of science and theology?

Colin Russell, not himself a defender of what I will call the Warfare Thesis, has suggested that we can distinguish four kinds of putative conflictmoral, institutional, methodological, and substantive. Grouping the latter two as variants of epistemic conflict, we can organize these possibilities as in the diagram.

Non-epistemic Conflict

For some people, the idea of a conflict (or war) between science and religion calls first to mind questions of ethics, so let us begin there. Andrew Dickson White, in his History of the Warfare of Science and Theology in Christendom , about which much more will be said in chapter below, presented alleged religious objections to the obstetric use of anesthesia as evidence for his thesis. but the fact that he included the matter in his History at all does show that what I will call the Warfare Thesis is sometimes extended to what are really moral controversies.

Engineers, physicians, and policymakers must, after all, address moral questions about the development of certain technologies and techniques and about the use of others already available. Questions about research into new biological weapons would be an example of the former type. Eugenics presents an example of the latter. George William Hunters Civic Biology , one of the most popular biology texts in early twentieth-century America and one that will figure prominently in chapter below, only went as far as recommending the prevention of the marriage of the immoral and the feeble-minded, but his contemporaries were already using putatively scientific insights to justify forced sterilization in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere.

Scientists must also address questions of what might, in a narrower sense, be called research ethics. Although questions might sometimes be raised about whether certain kinds of knowledge should be sought at all, the more common kind of question is about the moral permissibility of certain research methods. A prominent recent example is, of course, the destruction of human embryos in order to obtain stem cells for medical research. Objection to this practice is sometimes cited as an example of intrusion ab extra into scientific matters. These sufficiently canvas the range, though they do not exhaust the list, of experiments now universally condemned.

Whether it is permissible to conduct a certain kind of experiment, however, is fundamentally a moral question, not a scientific one. It is surely possible to address these issues in a purely philosophical (i.e., in a nonreligious) way, though of course many people find it more natural to bring theological resources to the resolution of such questions. Seldom, if ever, do theologians doing research ethics argue for conclusions that cannot also be defended philosophically. Nevertheless, when objections to certain lines of research come from moral theologians or bishops, those who chafe at the proposed moral constraints on their research work often complain about religious objections against the proposed research. If there is, in those cases, something to the idea that religion is one of the participants in a conflict with science, it is a conflict with science only contingently, and even then only in the institutional sense. Why a certain segment of the community seems to consider appeal to religious principles to be acceptable in the moral evaluation of immigration policy, capital punishment, and war, but not of scientific research, remains one of the mysteries of contemporary political liberalism.