Yves 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

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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

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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.

While religions divide men,
Reason brings them closer.

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?

, 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.

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.

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.

of the Index and the Inquisition) from the beginning of the seventeenth to the middle of the twentieth century. It will also be seen that although the many Protestant sects were less organized than the Catholic Church, they were also able to prohibit publications and to dismiss or silence scientists whose scientific views contradicted their religious credos.

, it is this very power that often obliges promoters of religious beliefs to seek legitimacy through science. Indeed, just as some scientific theories may be refused in the name of religion, others can be used to lend credibility to a given religious enterprise.

It should be obvious that under the stability of a word, there is often a variable content over the centuries. But that does not entail that there was no distinction between the two terms at any given time.

acred. Containing the words of God, they have given rise to literal interpretations that conflict with modern scientific discoveries.

* * *

to understand the behaviour of a gas in a container by focusing on the trajectory of a single molecule. At this scale, it is clear that the molecule moves randomly in reaction to unexpected collisions with other molecules. But this microscopic chaos gives way, at a larger scale, to the relatively simple Boyles law that relates the pressure to the volume and temperature of the gas.

This kind of reasoning is obviously spurious. Under the guise of the complexity of events, looked at from the limited point of view of an abstract history of pure ideas, we are in fact asked to consider the positive side of censorship. According to this way of thinking, we should thank the Catholic Church for having sentenced Galileo to house arrest for the remainder of his life, because it has allowed him to write his Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences, published in 1638, five years after his condemnation by the Inquisition. As usual, analyses such as these reduce everything to individuals beliefs and ideas and ignore institutions and the relative autonomy of science with regard to other social spheres.

.

Though one can indeed say he was under house arrest, that is not incompatible with his feeling of being in a prison.

The question of the conflict between science and religion, recurrent since the first third of the nineteenth century (as will be seen in

whoever casts a brief glance at the waves striking a beach does not see the tide mount; but under the superficial to-and-fro motion, another movement is produced, deeper, slower, imperceptible to the casual observer; it is a progressive movement continuing steadily in the same direction and by virtue of it the sea constantly rises.