Strenuous efforts
From Science and Religion: a historical introduction Gary B Fergren ed.
Chapter 1, “The Conflict of Science and Religion” by Colin Russell, which is an overview of the “conflict thesis” and how it has been displaced by the “complexity thesis.” Page 8:
…the conflict thesis ignores the many documented examples of science and religion operating in close alliance…[He lists examples from 17th century.] Since then, a continuous history of noted individuals making strenuous efforts to integrate their science and religion has testified to the poverty of a conflict model.
Wait. The mask slipped a bit there.
If it took strenuous efforts to integrate their science and religion, then it wasn’t easy, right? It wasn’t just a natural combination. So maybe it’s not quite right to say that such strenuous efforts are evidence of the poverty of a conflict model.
“Strenuous efforts” sounds like the kind of thing Karl Giberson engages in now, and his efforts are not all that convincing. That’s not to say that complexity is not a much better way to describe the relations between science and religion in the past than conflict pure and simple, but it is to say that the more strenuous the efforts are, the more they indicate a difficulty. If the “integration” of science and religion is difficult and strenuous, then maybe there are reasons for that, real reasons, to do with methodology as well as ontology.
Faith is absolutely required for anyone to believe any supernatural claim — because if publicly available empirical evidence were available for them, they would be natural claims — and almost all religious conviction revolves around and depends upon believing various supernatural claims (with rare exceptions, such as some Unitarians and skeptically-inclined Buddhists and Neopagans). By faith, I mean belief in the absence of evidence, and often even in the presence of evidence to the contrary. This is not an idiosyncratic or tendentious definition of faith: People who rely upon some other definition when they talk about religion and faith — especially in the context of the clash between science and religion — are engaged in willfully evasive equivocation.
In contrast, the most fundamental principle of science is that every claim must be supported by evidence. Moreover, scientific “belief” (if that’s even the right word) in the truth of any and every claim is always probabilistic and provisional, subject to revision in the face of new evidence.
Anyone who purports to describe or analyze the conflict between religion and science without focusing specifically on the inevitable clash between faith-based believing and evidence-driven reasoning is engaged in an act of willful intellectual dishonesty. A purely conflict-focused social or historical account of the relationship between science and religion may be oversimplified, but any account which elides or ignores the profound and inescapable opposition between accepting revealed “Truth” and actively searching for new truths can only be massively misleading. There are many other things to say about science and religion, of course; but if you leave out all mention of the fundamental epistemological opposition of the two, your agenda clearly means more to you than your integrity.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Strenuous efforts http://dlvr.it/6vFdm […]
So Science and Religion: a historical introduction is a watered down version of The History of Science and Religion: An Encyclopedia, which has such notable contributors as William A. Dembski, William Lane Craig, Richard Weikart, Robin Collins (this reeks of Intelligent Design propaganda).
I see Alister E. McGrath also has a newish book, Science and Religion: A New Introduction.
Conspiracy much?
And they all concentrate on the same historical figures: Galileo, Newton and Darwin. What a surprise!
If you can’t be taken seriously in scientific academia, well then infect other departments with your propaganda. History is of course soft enough to be infected.
…the conflict thesis ignores the many documented examples of science and religion operating in close alliance…[He lists examples from 17th century.] Since then, a continuous history of noted individuals making strenuous efforts to integrate their science and religion has testified to the overwhelming desire to have one’s cake and eat it, too.
There, fixed that for them.
Put science and religion in amazon.co.uk and you get the following:
Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction by Thomas Dixon; Science and Religion: A New Introduction by Alister E. McGrath; Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives by John Hedley Brooke; The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion editor Peter Harrison; The Big Questions in Science and Religion by Keith Ward; Science Vs. Religion? Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution by Steve Fuller; Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives by Thomas Dixon, Geoffrey Cantor, Stephen Pumfrey; History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science by John William Draper; Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues by Ian G. Barbour
Authors of the above:
Thomas Dixon: ISSR member (Templeton) and ‘Agnostic’.
Alister E. McGrath: Christian theologian funded by Templeton Foundation, former member of of the board of advisors of the Templeton Foundation.
John Hedley Brooke: Awarded John Templeton Prize and current President of ISSR.
Peter Harrison: Board of advisors of John Templeton Foundation.
Keith Ward: Book published by Templeton press and member of the board of advisors of John Templeton Foundation.
Steve Fuller: Advocates Intelligent Design and New Atheist hater, Templeton Lecture in Science and Religion in 1999, presentation of John Templeton Foundation on Science and Religion in the Post-Colonial World in 2003. [I can’t find any other major connections!]
Geoffrey Cantor: ISSR Member (Templeton).
Stephen Pumfrey: ISSR Member (Templeton).
John William Draper: Originator of the Conflict Thesis for which all the above are attempts to discredit!
Ian G. Barbour: Templeton Prize winner 1999.
I think from the above, you can easily conclude that The Templeton Foundation has an agenda to try and discredit the work of John William Draper (History of the Conflict between Religion and Science(1874)) and Andrew Dickson White (History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom(1896)).
The interference of the Templeton Foundation within academia, its considerable resources used in such a biase way is nothing but intellectual dishonest on a grand scale.
Andrew B., I tend to use that expression – having one’s cake and eating it too – when describing the religious viewpoint on, well, a lot of things, e.g. they like to have an interventionist god when they need their prayers answered but they demand that that god is outside of science whenever a Gnu Atheist mentions the word ‘evidence’.
G – hmmmmmm.
The thing is, the second article in this book really does read to me like classic historiography. I couldn’t detect an agenda. Clearly that is very much the exception in this field, but it’s possible that there are some exceptions…I think.
I’m tempted to email him and ask him, if I can find an email address.
I did it, I emailed him. His name is David B Wilson, he teaches at Iowa State. He doesn’t seem to have any Templeton connections.
His article is an interesting bit of intellectual history, and I love intellectual history.
Does anyone know of even a single example of “individuals making strenuous efforts to integrate their science and religion”? I can think of plenty of examples of individuals who have made strenuous efforts to proclaim that their science and religion are integrated (mostly on the basis of both concepts residing simultaneously in one noggin). But I don’t know of anyone who has actually integrated them in any meaningful way. For someone to carry out good science, they must put aside their religion, and only take it up again when they leave the laboratory and start making speeches.
Jacobi, you might want to look at Kepler, who was original even in his religiousness (finding much good in Luther, Calvin and Catholicism, which made life difficult for him in Austria). His earliest astronomical speculations included explaining planetary orbits in terms of nested Platonic solids. What he wound up doing with Tycho’s meticulous records doesn’t seem to owe much if anything to religious inspiration, but it seems he found the handiwork of God in his laws of motion. (I’m relying on “Tycho & Kepler” by Kitty Ferguson.)
I’m contesting your point only in that some sciences hardly ever conflict with religion, like mathematics or chemistry, and others were quite compatible before the twentieth century, like physics and astronomy*. Biology’s been the redheaded stepchild since Linnaeus classified humans as primates in the 1740’s.
* Geocentrism wasn’t particularly central to Christianity, but at the time the church couldn’t countenance any alternative authority.
I am reading AC Grayling’s biography of Descartes – lots of interesting intersections with the current debates.
Jim, I’m not trying to say that there have never been any good scientists who were motivated by the goal of Revealing the Glory of God through a Study of His Works (or at least made public proclamations to this effect). I’m only saying that, insofar as they succeeded in their scientific efforts, they did so by laying down the bible and rolling up their sleeves.
There are also plenty of people even today (e.g., Michael Behe) who attempt to reconcile the bare facts discovered by science with the precepts of their religion. I don’t view that as integrating science with religion, because science is not a set of dry facts. For someone to truly integrate science with religion, they need to integrate the scientific method of skeptical evidence-based inquiry with the dogmatic assertions of religion. That doesn’t mean using religious texts as a source of possible ideas that can be tested and then discarded; it means simultaneously holding that religious dogma is infallible and that hypotheses about the nature of the world must be discarded or modified if they are not supported by empirical evidence. I’ve never seen anyone do that, and I don’t think it can be done. All the religious scientists I’ve ever seen either build up mental walls to keep science and religion in their “proper” domains, or close their eyes to certain facts (often outside their area of expertise) that contradict their religious beliefs. That’s not what I call integrating.
Back when Kepler was working there wasn’t any such thing as science, and it’s worth noting that Kepler treated religion rather flexibly, taking what he found valuable from everything on offer. Now it’s about as hard to understand his attitude toward theology as his exposition of planetary motion: the radius vector sweeps out equal areas through equal times. Newton’s notation is far more compact, and as Laplace noted it doesn’t leave room for God.
Mathematics, my major, is inherently neutral on the subject, though it could be argued either that God didn’t understand prime numbers or that He had a really nasty sense of humor. An old FORTRAN joke: GOD is real, unless declared integer.
It’s a tricky one. You might make “strenuous” – and still studious! – attempts to test a hypothesis but, yes, if you’re working so hard to prove one – without, perhaps, good reason to imagine that it’s true – it suggests you need to check your premises. It’s also a mystery why the very effort – regardless of the conclusions – shows there is “no conflict model“. If I made a strenuous attempt to integrate modern astronomy with my notion of a doughnut shaped universe would the theory gain respect?
bad Jim: Unfortunately for the “accomodationists” Kepler (like virtually every other great thinker of the Scientific Revolution) was heterodox. This is often papered over in histories; read his own words (even in translation) and it seems that he was basically a Pythagorean.
Descartes is a good example of someone who is totally misrepresented by the earlier histories and legends. Devout catholic, suuuuuuuuuure. (What sort of Catholic only goes to church *once* as an adult?)
History should be history, following the historical method. Having Marxist history or Buddhist history, theological history, liberal history are all forms of bias that should be eliminated. Preferably history could go the route of peer-review, and argue whether something is historical because it satisfies the historical method rather than choosing and selecting views that correspond to bias. If there are multiple narratives then include each one with a measure of probability.
Otherwise, history must therefore be rejected as scholarly and coherent subject.
The claim isn’t that there was never any conflict, it’s that it was more complicated than just conflict and nothing else. The passage doesn’t say no conflict, it says “the poverty of a conflict model.”
But the particular passage I quoted does seem to overlook the implications of that sentence.