The relationship between science and religion: a thesis

[James Hannam]

Hi all,

I've been struggling to understand the relationship between science and religion for many years. The old theories of conflict and harmony are too simple, while the current academic consensus of "it's complicated" is hardly satisfactory either. Here's a crack at where I've got to with other people's ideas freely plundered.

Religion, Christianity in particular, has supported science for much of its history. It did this because theologians believed that science advanced the Christian agenda. Only in the nineteenth century did it become clear that this was not the case. At that point, modern science emerged as an autonomous worldview and faith has retreating from most of the areas where there might be a clash. That the western world was, by then, largely secular, was a substantial help to this process.

The relationship between science and various religions is not between two different ways of seeing the world. Unlike science, religions are more like an ideology such as liberalism or environmentalism. Ideologies are visions of how the world ought to be rather than how it is. ‘Ideology’ should not be understood pejoratively. It is simply a neutral term to describe the various ways, good and not so good, that human beings have wanted to organise their lives and the lives of others.

Throughout history, ideologies adapted or invented a philosophy of nature as a foundation of their views. This was as much the case for ancient Stoics as it has been for eighteenth-century Christians. As it happened, western science was a Christian invention. It is just that Christians had the misfortune of finding that their variety of science actually works.
When, western science broke free of religious patronage and became a worldview and a method in its own right that demanded near-universal assent, the relationship between science and all ideologies changed. No one could invent their own worldview anymore (Marxism was probably the last ideology to try). Nowadays they must adopt science but all try to pick and choose the bits they like. A great deal of the present dispute between some religious people and mainstream science revolves around the work of Darwin. But nowadays, the reputation of science as the arbiter of truth has become so great that even those attempting to thwart it, must adopt its clothing. There was a notable, if unsuccessful, attempt at this ploy by creationists in Dover, Tennessee in 2004.

If conservative Christians have a problem with evolution, other modern ideologies also refuse to accept some aspects of science. For example, libertarians have issues with climate change while environmentalists reject the consensus that genetically modified food can be safe. Liberals are discomforted by behavioural genetics that shows there are underlying differences between the sexes and that intelligence has a major heritable element. But like modern creationists, all other ideologies have to dress up their objections in scientific clothing. Simply rejecting modern science and inventing your own is no longer an option.

This means that the “conflict between science and religion” is false dichotomy. The thesis that they have been at war was a symptom of the nineteenth-century struggle of science to throw off its Christian parentage and stand on its own two feet. The shop stewards of the new profession of scientist, like TH Huxley, wanted to assert the independence of modern science from any ideology. Meanwhile, the most influential expression of the conflict thesis, Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, was the first of many examples of rival ideologies using the prestige of science to advance their own agendas. Ideologically, White was a secular liberal who wanted to combat the influence to conservative Christianity.

In summary, until the nineteenth-century ideologies were free to create their own philosophies of nature to act as a foundation for their ethical and political beliefs. But Christianity’s natural philosophy became so successful that it slipped its moorings and became the dominant worldview in its own right. Ideologies lost their freedom to have their own ideas about nature and had to accept, or at least pay lip service to, the edifice of modern science. The idea of a conflict between science and religion was a result of western science breaking from its parent and becoming a weapon in struggles between ideologies keen to co-opt science to their cause. By science continues to thwart attempts to pigeonhole it for the benefit of any one ideology.

Best wishes

James

[himself]

I think part of the problem with this "relationship" is that both "religion" and "science" are too inchoate. Natural science is the study of the metrical properties of material being, and its methodology is such as to ensure the objectivity of the measurements [observations]. Problems generally arise when conclusions are pushed beyond scientific bounds into metaphysics, politics, and so forth; as when in the early 1900s, Darwinian fanboys (including top scientists) hopped on the eugenics bandwagon. But while {species interrelatedness/diversity}→Darwinian theory is a scientific conclusion, Darwinian theory→eugenics is a political policy decision.

[James Hannam]

I don't think science as you described it existed until the nineteenth century. Before that, there were lots of sciences all of various degrees of uselessness. But I agree that the eugenicists were pursuing what I'd call an ideology and trying to use science for their own ends, distorting it as necessary.

What I am trying to get across is that science is not an ideology, and never has been. Even though its nature changed in the nineteenth century, it has always been just a way of seeing the world. Religion is more than that, more like rationalism or liberalism or Marxism.

J

[wraggy]

Nov 22, 2014 9:50:46 GMT James Hannam said:

I don't think science as you described it existed until the nineteenth century. Before that, there were lots of sciences all of various degrees of uselessness. But I agree that the eugenicists were pursuing what I'd call an ideology and trying to use science for their own ends, distorting it as necessary.

What I am trying to get across is that science is not an ideology, and never has been. Even though its nature changed in the nineteenth century, it has always been just a way of seeing the world. Religion is more than that, more like rationalism or liberalism or Marxism.

J

James can you elaborate in the bold above? I am having trouble understanding exactly what you are saying and I think that it may be that I am confused by the expression that science is a way of "seeing the world". The problem for me is that I think that things like religion, rationalism, Marxism and atheism etc are ways of seeing the world too. Can you clarify this for me please?

[jonkon]

A common weakness in histories of science is the failure to consider an investigator’s view of religion and of science, thus conflating the issues of literal vs. allegorical interpretation of Biblical texts and of Platonic Idealism vs. Aristotelian Realism in natural philosophy. Thus Draper’s conflict thesis was a straw man argument equating “Christianity” with the doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church. Accounting for this flaw makes his book read like Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.

Of particular importance to the history of science is the Historical-Grammatical Method of Interpretation, originating in Antioch, as opposed to the Allegorical Method of Alexandria. The Historical-Grammatical Method recognizes that word meanings can change with historical context, therefore proper understanding of Biblical texts requires preservation of the historical and cultural context of Scripture. The most notable example of this is John 1:1’s identification of Christ as the personification of the Greek philosophical principle of Logos. However the preservation of Greek natural philosophical works places the theologian into conflict with the clear teaching of Scripture. What we therefore find is that advocates of the Historical-Grammatical Method of Biblical Interpretation are also involved in the preservation and critical analysis of Greek scientific works

The break between scientific activity and the defense of historic Christian doctrine can be traced directly to Newton’s failure to account for God’s provisional grace in his system of mechanics. This failure unfortunately occurred simultaneously with the collapse of Cromwell’s Commonwealth and with the rise of the French Revolution. Members of the Royal Society couldn’t distance themselves fast enough from their Puritan backgrounds to preserve what was left of their respectability. French Enlightenment philosophers on the other hand recognized this failure as an opportunity to eliminate both of the two power structures in French politics: the Roman Catholic Church and the Monarchy. Rejecting the corruption of the Monarchy justified the existence of the Church, while asserting superior force justified the existence of the Monarchy. To eliminate this dichotomy, Lamarck proposed that all of nature was evolving to a greater state of perfection and that both the Church and the Monarchy were in the way of this process and thus must be eliminated. Curiously enough Lamarck’s pioneering work in invertebrate anatomy and physiology forced him to conclude that evolution was not occurring among the invertebrates. Different invertebrates exhibited different forms of symmetry, which were manifested in the earliest stages of their embryological development.

[fortigurn]

Nov 23, 2014 5:31:29 GMT jonkon said:

Of particular importance to the history of science is the Historical-Grammatical Method of Interpretation, originating in Antioch, as opposed to the Allegorical Method of Alexandria.

Is there any historical evidence for this?

[James Hannam]

Nov 22, 2014 23:49:30 GMT wraggy said:

James can you elaborate in the bold above? I am having trouble understanding exactly what you are saying and I think that it may be that I am confused by the expression that science is a way of "seeing the world". The problem for me is that I think that things like religion, rationalism, Marxism and atheism etc are ways of seeing the world too. Can you clarify this for me please?

I’m sorry for being imprecise when I said sciences or natural philosophies are ways of seeing the world. What I meant by “world” is just the narrow sense of the workings of nature. I think religions and other ideologies do a lot more than that. They look at the “world” in the broad sense of human interactions, ethics and organisations. And for ideologies, this is what comes first. This is the reason they exist. They are systems of living such as Stoicism or Epicureanism, or systems of politics like liberalism or conservatism. They can be religions but don’t have to be.

Now, many ideologies have natural philosophies attached to them. In the past, these were often expressly intended to support the ethical and political elements of the ideology. So, stoics believed nature was following a divine plan which accorded with their philosophy. Epicureans were pure materialists which suited their ethical theories too. Likewise, Marxism’s Hegelian materialism or Aristotelian ethics and his teleological nature. None of these natural philosophies had much going for them except that they helped the ideology of which they were part. They certainly didn’t describe or explain nature in any useful way. But that was fine, because natural philosophies were never intended to do that. Their science had no practical use and precious little objective theoretical success. If the Greeks were actually doing science to discover about nature for its own sake, they would have done it a hell of a lot better than they did.

We often misread old natural philosophies because we see them as porto-modern science whose practitioners were doing the same thing as our men in white coats, just not as well. This is the temptation for students of Christian natural philosophers as well. Whether they be Thomists or Plutonists or whatever, they were doing natural philosophy simply to support the ideology of their flavour of Christianity. No wonder the church supported science.

But something went differently this time. Through no fault of their own, Christian natural philosophers actually were doing proto-science and by the nineteenth century it was so successful that it outgrew its status as an adjunct of Christianity. Any “conflict” was just science and Christianity working out the consequences of their new relationship.
Anyway, I hope it is a little clearer what I am getting at.

I think a history of science and religion is a history of how all religions and other ideologies had, to a greater or lesser extent, their own sciences. But one religion’s science outgrew its status as handmaiden by being successful in its own right.

Best wishes

James

[jonkon]

The evidence of this impact is first that advocates of the Historical-Grammatical Method engaged in scientific activity and second the nature of this activity. Rather than treating mathematics as a “description” summarizing observations, the objective of understanding the “meaning” behind the words of the text led to the belief that the mathematical relations themselves possessed a reality independent of the existence of any observations. The history of the Historical-Grammatical Method is detailed in Henry A. Virkler’s Hermeneutics. The role of Nestorians in preserving Greek texts is detailed in De Lacy O'Leary’s How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs, Henry Chadwick’s The Early Church, Bernard Lewis’s The Arabs in History, and Philip K. Hitti’s History of the Arabs.

Because of their opposition to the revival of the cult of Isis under the guise of veneration of the Virgin Mary under Cyril of Hypatia infamy, followers of Nestor, Bishop of Antioch, were forced to flee to Persia. There they moved the school and library from Edessa to Nisibis and established a medical school at Jundi-Shapur. After the Muslim conquest, Nestorians, uder the leadership of Hunayn ibn Ishaq, translated Greek scientific works into Arabic, while the Nestorian family of Bukhtyishu' served as physicians to the Baghdad court.

Medieval Jews in Spain and the Middle East found that the Historical-Grammatical Method resolved the dilemma of reconciling the cessation of Temple sacrifice with maintaining the authority of scripture. These Jews were to serve as translators in the subsequent revival of learning in Western Europe, as is the case of the Spanish Jew, John of Seville (fl. 1133-42), who translated the Arabic into vernacular Castilian which was then rendered into Latin by Dominicus Gundissalinus. The Jewish trading colony of Oxford, because of its access to the new translations, became a center of scientific activity as well as an intellectual center for the Lollards.

Robert Grosseteste, first chancellor of Oxford University and one of the translators, along with his student Roger Bacon, advocated the study of the original languages to properly understand the texts being translated and also criticized Thomas Aquinas’s Great Compromise of Christian doctrine with the teachings of Aristotle. Grosseteste criticized Aristotle’s teaching that observation was the basis of knowledge, pointing out that light was necessary for observation and that geometry governed the propagation of light. Therefore mathematics was the true basis of knowledge. Furthermore many possible causes may account for any particular observation, therefore he introduced the argument form Reducio ad Absurdum to discern the true cause of an observation. Bacon, in turn, criticized Aristotle’s teaching on the nature of matter, asserting that “horses and asses are not different forms of matter, but are composed of entirely different matter.” Gassendi applied Bacon’s insight to Democrites’s atoms. Dalton’s contribution was to determine how to weigh Gassendi’s atoms to make quantitative predictions in chemical reactions. Thomas Bradwardine applied Grosseteste’s mathematical approach to criticize Aristotle’s teaching on motion, thus introducing the exponential function to mathematics. He also asserted that even the Pope can go to Hell, inspiring John Wycliffe to undertake the first translation of the Bible into English. A crackdown on the Lollards, in the aftermath of Wycliffe’s ministry, forced scientific activity to move to Padua, which came under the control of Venice and thus protected from papal influence.

[jonkon]

Nov 22, 2014 9:50:46 GMT James Hannam said:

What I am trying to get across is that science is not an ideology

Actually “science” becomes an ideology, if not an outright religion, when conflated with “Naturalism,” defined as the belief that nothing exists apart from the physical world. “Naturalism” arises from an abuse of the legitimate scientific methodology of avoiding ad hoc hypotheses. This abuse is common to both Evolutionists and Creationists, as evidenced by the ease with which “Christian” textbook publishers convert conventional textbooks into “Christian” textbooks by replacing the “nature evolved”’s with “God created”’s.

[James Hannam]

I'm not sure that is right, jonkon. Modern science doesn't change its nature because of what people do with it or think about it. Of course, ideologues can say what they like about science and even use it as an argument for their own assumptions. But that doesn't make science an ideology.

Of course, before modern science became independent of Christianity, there were lots of different natural philosophies which ideologies used for their own purposes. These natural philosophies could change just on the basis of the ideology that was using them at the time. But even then, natural philosophies were not, on their own, ideologies. They were just foundations for the ethical and political content of the particular ideologies that used them.

Best wishes

James

[jonkon]

Nov 27, 2014 11:45:40 GMT James Hannam said:

Modern science doesn't change its nature because of what people do with it or think about it.

However its nature can be obscured by the baggage attached to it, making the term "science" useless as a means of communicating its true nature.  This is made evident in the appallingly incompetent Dover ruling.  As a design engineer for over 30 years, I cringe at Dover's clueless references to "design."  For this reason Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell refused to be labeled as "scientists," choosing instead the term "philosopher."  The true nature of science is obscured by its conflation with Naturalism and its curriculum being defined by the entertainment value, rather than scientific significance, of its demonstration experiments (ref: J.L. Heilbron's Elements of Early Modern Physics). 

[wraggy]

A blog by James Ungereanu which Explores the Relations between Science, Religion, and Culture.
He has a number of articles that may be of interest to some here.

This blog is...dedicated to book reviews and research interests... These posts are also drafts, works in progress; they require reviewing, revising, and ultimately rewriting. They are notes to myself that I’ve decided to share with the public.

James C. Ungureanu
PhD Student
School of History, Philosophy, Religion & Classics
University of Queensland, St Lucia
Queensland, Australia

jamescungureanu.wordpress.com/

[chavoux]

I think modern science is mostly defined by the scientific method... which is a direct result of the Christian world-view (combined with a Greek philosophical mind-set?). At least the idea of a single Creator God who put the laws of nature in place which can be learned and studied by human beings. But the scientific method explicitly restricts itself to observable and repeatable events... as a reliable way to learn the permanent "laws of God" for nature. It never claimed to be able to determine truth absolutely, nor to be able to judge once-off or non-repeatable events. It is a next step ("Scientism/naturalism") to claim that only facts that can be tested scientifically are true.

[jonkon]

Jul 25, 2015 22:19:08 GMT chavoux said:

I think modern science is mostly defined by the scientific method... which is a direct result of the Christian world-view (combined with a Greek philosophical mind-set?).

Agreed, with the stipulation that the Hypothetical-Deductive Method of experimental science practiced by Galileo, Newton, and Faraday is a fusion of Platonic Idealism with Aristotelian Realism grounded in the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation - Christ as the embodiment of True God and True Man. This fusion is manifested in the distinction and relationship between scientific "Law" and scientific "Principle." This distinction can be confused since the same expression, i.e. F = m*a, depending upon the context, can be either a "law" - Newton's Second Law of Motion, "principle" - D'Alembert's principle, or a "definition" - "mass". Properly speaking, a "law" is an empirical generalization, while a "principle" is a mathematical relationship between physical events. Because of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, a "law" cannot be regarded as a valid empirical generalization without being supported theoretically by a scientific principle, while conversely the reasoning behind a scientific "principle" cannot be assumed to be valid without empirical evidence.

"Repeatability" comes into play because the function of science is to "predict" future events, consequently science's focus on the relationship between individual events. Conversely, because an "anomalistic" event can validly disprove a scientific relationship, whether such an "anomaly" is scientifically possible is not a relevant issue, the central issue being instead to determine whether such an event actually has occurred.

[edwardtbabinski]

"western science was a Christian invention"  

Yes, science developed and advanced greatly in the west and the west consisted mainly of Christians. But all one can honestly say is that "western science was a western invention." Let me explain further... 

"Christianity," the religion and its specific beliefs and dogmas and reliance on specific holy books and spiritual experiences for its inspiration has nothing directly to do with developing and advancing science and the scientific method. A wide variety of features found in the west did aid the development and advance of science. 

The west does not appear to have been more advanced than other cultures in shipbuilding, navigation, and mathematics prior to the west's landing on the New World, which ignited curiosity and greed. Here was a whole new world that expanded people's minds and brought great wealth to Europe. And wealth means more funding for special projects, and more leisure time to pursue them. The invention of finely ground clear glass lenses also expanded greatly the vision of the micro and macro cosmos and increased curiosity and study in a plethora of new directions. And the development of the printing press allowed the new data being gathered to be disseminated, setting off an arms race in study of nature. 

I agree that Christianity was not necessarily at war with science, but some Christians did resist developments and discoveries in science that disagreed with earlier interpretations of holy writ when it came to the age and special creation of humanity, the age of the earth and cosmos, even the stability of the earth. So when long held theological interpretations and new discoveries in science disagreed, conflicts arose. 

And yes, science has outgrown it's western nest. Today anyone of all religions or none can pursue scientific investigations of nature. And there is far more money and genius devoted to studying nature today than studying Christian theology. 

For more read  edward-t-babinski.blogspot.com/2015/07/how-and-why-did-scientific-revolution.html