Science and Religion 2M

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We have looked at the major areas of science and at the range of the world’s religious traditions. In the next chapter we will be turning to ‘applied religion and science.’ It’s the right time, then, to step back from the details and ask some broader questions. For example, did ‘religion’ and ‘science’ always mean what they mean today? If not, how have they been understood in different ways across the centuries, and how did they interact differently as a result?

Many of the issues that arise at the intersections of religion and science are philosophical issues. The philosophy of science has been one of the main contributors to new understandings of science. These two disciplines, then, will lead us during this short respite before we move back to the closing chapters of the book.

THE HISTORY OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE Up to this point we have explored global religions and the range of contemporary science. If anything will make you a relativ- ist about contemporary talk of religion and science, however, it’s surveying the full history of their interactions.1 Across the

RELIGION AND SCIENCE IN HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE

Clayton, Philip. <i>Religion and Science: the Basics</i>, Routledge, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5583047. Created from lehman-ebooks on 2019-06-11 12:21:36.

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centuries everything seems to change: cultures and societies, ideas about what religion should be, stages in the development of science, and the politics of their interactions. Even the mean- ings of the terms ‘religion’ and ‘science’ vary greatly in different languages and at different times.

Greeks and Romans Consider the Greeks. Arguably, Western science can trace its history back to the first Greek philosopher, Thales. We know almost nothing about him: he hypothesized that ‘all is water’; and he is said to have died by falling into a ditch while he was star- ing up at the stars. (Philosophy can be a dangerous profession.) Thales was the first in a series of Greek philosophers who wanted to know what is the archē , the fundamental principle that underlies all things. The theory of the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) was born out of the same quest, as was the idea that everything is composed of atoms. It is intriguing to see how close this quest to know fundamental principles is to the religious sense of encountering ultimate reality and reorienting one’s life around it.

Many of the basic ideas about science can be traced back to the ‘big 4’ of Greek philosophy. Parmenides proposed that logos, or what we might today call the unchanging law of nature, is the basis of all knowledge. His opponent Heraclitus retorted that it’s actually change that pervades everything we see in the world, so we should be skeptical about whether natural laws could ever capture and explain our ever-changing world. Against Heracli- tus, Plato argued that the appearances around us are like illusions, not fully real; what’s really real are the timeless forms on which all existing things are modeled. Aristotle, finally, was the quint- essential empiricist; he carefully studied the data in each field and then inferred the principles that would best explain them. For him the forms or principles are in the objects, expressed in their functions and behaviors, rather than in some pure realm of Platonic forms. Aristotle is credited with founding more than a dozen sciences (physics, biology, psychology, political science, and numerous others).

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On the one hand, some of the core commitments of mod- ern science were already present among the Greeks. These proto-scientists rejected the idea of human-like gods who could intervene in the natural order whenever they wanted. Instead, like scientists today, they sought independent, rational principles to explain the world as we observe it, going beneath appearances to what is ultimately real. Plato was more like a mathematical physicist who views the universe as manifesting a set of under- lying laws, and Aristotle more like the biologist who looks for the patterns and structures within organisms themselves in order to explain them. On the other hand, many of the foundations of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theology can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle.

How can both of these things be true? The line between philosophy and religion was more fluid for the Greeks. Plato may have been inspired by mathematics, but he could intro- duce into his philosophy a sort of world-soul, a ‘Demiurge,’ who works to bring order into the world; he also affirmed the immortality of the soul. Even Aristotle, the arch-empiricist, also developed a kind of theology, including a sort of god that he called ‘the unmoved mover’ or ‘thought thinking itself.’ Per- haps one could say that the Greek and Hellenistic philosophers were ‘spiritual but not religious,’ to use a popular phrase from our own age.

The Romans did not do as much metaphysics, though they did develop the political principles on which the Roman Cath- olic church was originally based. Many of the Hellenistic schools of philosophy sound a lot like Western reactions to the late mod- ern age. There were cynics and skeptics (Pyrrhonism), Stoics and Epicureans, Sophists and pluralists (Eclecticism) – all schools of thought that one might call anti-religious or post-religious. One famous exception to the pattern is the philosopher and mystic Plotinus (205–270 C.E.). He held that there is one ultimate real- ity from which all things emanate. The ultimate reality is beyond all distinctions, so it is strictly unknowable; what we call gods and souls only emerged later. Plotinus became a model for later mystics with his idea that we could gradually ascend up through the various emanations to some sort of intuitive insight into the source of all things.

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The medieval period Roman civilization collapsed, and Christianity came to dominate thought, society, and politics in the ‘medieval age’ that followed. Knowledge of the Greek and Hellenistic philosophers was lost for some centuries, and theology became the dominant form of knowledge. In order to be understood, the medieval theologians insisted, everything had to be correctly ordered; and right order meant a hierarchy in which God was at the top, angels second, humans third, and all other living and non-living things in their proper places below them. What passed as science in this age was usually a kind of natural theology, where God was understood (in part) through the world and the world fully through God.

Something unexpected eventually grew out of this period. The Scholastics – the Christian theologians who were writing at the high point of medieval culture – became less interested in mysticism; they wanted to provide the most rational possi- ble explanation of the world around them. A good explanation, they insisted, had to be a systematic explanation, one that could account for everything, both the seen and the unseen. Looking back, one recognizes that it was this commitment that birthed modern science. Almost all the necessary components for mod- ern science were now present: the late medieval thinkers valued the details of the world around them (since it was created by God); they knew it was ordered in a rational and comprehensible way (since that is the nature of God); and they knew that behind the appearances must lie more fundamental laws and principles (which are manifestations of the divine nature). Gradually the theological scaffolding fell away (that is, the phrases in parenthe- ses in the previous sentence), leaving the research program that we now call modern science.

Modern science Soon the external conditions necessary for the practice of sci- ence fell into place. Economic changes gave rise to an educated middle class, and political changes produced nations not under the control of the Roman church. New telescopes allowed accu- rate observations of the heavens, and printing presses dissemi- nated knowledge quickly. As the traditional dogmas lost their

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hold, early scientists began to replace them with more empirical generalizations and laws that they derived from the wealth of new data that they were now able to obtain. Galileo, in his early work, rolled balls down an inclined plane, looking for orderly mathematical patterns in speed and acceleration; and the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe recorded increasingly accurate mea- surements of the positions of stars and planets.

It was inevitable that at some point scientists would begin fighting for firmer boundaries between science and theology – a process that continues to the present day. One of the early dec- larations of independence came from the famous British empir- icist Francis Bacon, who in 1620 castigated theology as one of the ‘Idols of the Theatre’:

Lastly, there are idols which have immigrated into men’s minds from the various dogmas of philosophies. . . . These I call Idols of the The- atre; because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion. . . . And there is yet a third class, consisting of those who out of faith and veneration mix their philosophy and theology and traditions; among whom the vanity of some has gone so far aside as to seek the origin of science among spirits and genii.2

Of course, boundary-drawing is rarely the activity of one side alone. While science fought for the space to pursue its investiga- tions on its own, unencumbered by any theological constraints, the church fought just as hard to preserve the importance and relevance of God to this new scientific age. Beginning with the birth of the Protestant church in the early sixteenth century, many religious thinkers have worked to formulate theological standards and criteria of truth that are immune from attacks by the sciences. More recently fundamentalists have become the master boundary-builders, insisting that there can be no point of contact whatsoever between theological proclamation and sci- entific reflection.

ARE SCIENCE AND RELIGION INTRINSICALLY AT WAR? At its strongest, the animosity between the two sides became an all-out ‘war between science and religion.’ This proclamation

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gained a good amount of attention in the nineteenth century, particularly through the historical studies of Draper and White. John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) fired a broadside against the anti-intellectualism of Catholic and Protestant theologians, though his animosity against Islam was a close second. White’s thesis statement in his preface has become one of the most famous formulations of the warfare model:

The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discov- eries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.3

Andrew Dickson White’s related work A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) was no less influen- tial. But White went even further. Draper, he said, ‘regarded the struggle as one between Science and Religion. I believed then, and am convinced now, that it was a struggle between Science and Dogmatic Theology . . . More and more I saw that it was the conflict between two epochs in the evolution of human thought – the theological and the scientific.’ As a result, White called for a separation of the two powers:

In all modern history, interference with science in the supposed inter- est of religion, no matter how conscientious such interference may have been, has resulted in the direst evils both to religion and science, and invariably; and, on the other hand, all untrammeled scientific investigation, no matter how dangerous to religion some of its stages may have seemed for the time to be, has invariably resulted in the highest good both of religion and science.4

In many ways, the conclusions of these two thinkers have not stood the test of time. They were not, after all, professional historians; they headed back into history looking for evidence to support what they already believed. Not surprisingly, they found it. Cases of theologians and religious leaders blocking sci- ence definitely exist. But are the cases of conflict the rule or the exception? I am not convinced that one should conclude from

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such cases, however ignominious they were, that religion and science are essentially at war.

In fact, historians have been discovering that some of the clas- sic examples of warfare are in fact more myth than reality. In each chapter of his book Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, Ronald Numbers debunks one of the myths about the history of science and religion, such as the claim ‘that Galileo was imprisoned and tortured for advocating Copernicanism’ or the claim ‘that evolution destroyed Darwin’s faith in Christianity.’ In A Chosen Calling: Jews in Science in the Twentieth Century, the Jewish historian Noah Efron shows the central role that Jewish scientists have played in the growth of scientific knowledge.

There is another issue at stake here, however. Draper and White expressed a deeper belief about the pattern of history as a whole: that the trend is essentially from an age of religion to an age of science. They claim evidence that the ‘age of superstition’ – the early history of our species – is gradually being left behind and replaced by reason, whose most influential offspring are the empirical sciences. Are we witnessing a long progression from religion to science across human history? One might think so, since there has clearly been an increase in the status of science and its authority as a source of knowledge. What’s interesting, though, is that the growth of science has not meant a death to religious belief, as many had predicted; in some ways, religion is growing more rapidly around the world than ever before. The data certainly don’t support the idea that human history is a zero-sum game, such that, for every point science scores, reli- gion loses one. Instead, there seems to be some sort of broader complementarity at work. Part of our task in this book is to understand where these areas of overlap and support are most clearly found.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE No less important than the history of science and religion is recent work in the philosophy of science. ‘Philosophy of science’ stands for the process of thinking about scientific methods and conclusions from a more philosophical perspective. Philosophy

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can’t dictate to scientists what they should do in the lab any more than theology can – which is why I have waited until this point to step back, let the dust settle, and reflect on where our explorations have taken us so far.

It’s not hard to say what is the first thing that the philosopher of science wants to figure out: What is it that distinguishes science from other human activities? Almost since the birth of modern sci- ence, scientists have defined scientific success in similar terms: theories should count as scientific only if they make empirically testable predictions that, when actually tested against indepen- dent data, can be verified or falsified. Different theories in dif- ferent scientific disciplines will of course be verified in different ways. Still, the same goal applies: there must be an agreed-upon way to test the theories that are proposed – ideally one that is specified in advance – and anyone with enough training to do the testing must be able to run the same experiment and get the same results. This is the requirement of replicability.

In some religious traditions, by contrast, testing God’s Word is considered to be a sin. Think of Jesus quoting the verse, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test’ (Luke 4:12). Even if religious experiments were encouraged, the outcomes would generally not be replicable. For example, you may have a reli- gious experience during Friday Prayer ( Jumu’ah) in the mosque, but the persons on either side of you are probably not having the same experience; and if they do experience something sim- ilar, they are likely to interpret it differently than you. By con- trast, the Oxford glycobiologist Pauline Rudd once described a conference in Beijing where the scientists from around the world could not understand each other’s language and customs. But when a speaker showed equations in her PowerPoint slides, 800 biochemists could immediately tell whether they contained errors or not.

Part of what sets it apart is that much science is quantitative; you can measure outcomes to determine whether they match the predicted values. Certain predictions in physics can be ver- ified to an accuracy of nine digits.5 No laws in any other field of science, from biology to the neurosciences, come close. Only where one can write down very accurate laws can one make, and test, such precise predictions. By contrast, in religion, and

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in human relations more generally, we would not actually want there to be laws that predict our future behavior. Imagine that you showed your friend that you are able to accurately predict her next behavior, and the one after that, and the one after that – well, the friendship probably wouldn’t last very long.

These examples lead us to the claim made by philosophers of science over a number of centuries: science is objective, whereas religion is subjective. Just look at the differences between scien- tific measurement on the one hand, and religious devotion on the other, they argued; what other conclusion could one draw? And yet – not to put too fine a point on it – I believe this global either/or claim is both false and deeply misleading. One should think instead of a continuum, I will argue, where most of what scientists do falls more toward the ‘objective’ side and most of what religious people do, more toward the ‘subjective’ side. Most, but not all.

IS SCIENCE REALLY OBJECTIVE? A revolutionary debate on the nature of science played out in the second half of the twentieth century. Although parts of it are rather technical, the high points are not difficult to understand:

If a theory is scientific, it can be conclusively falsified. I believe that all swans are white, and after I have counted hundreds of white swans in different continents I proclaim my theory to be verified. Not so. There clearly are black swans, for example, in Australia, but it just happens that I never saw one. Real science forms risky hypotheses, wrote the philosopher of science Karl Popper, and tries to falsify them. The scientific thing to do would be to formulate the hypothesis ‘All swans are white,’ and then research, travel, and inquire in the hopes of finding a black swan. When I actually succeed in falsifying my hypothesis, I have helped to move science forward.

The physicist Bill Phillips tells a great story about how he and his colleagues won the Nobel Prize for their new method ‘to cool and trap atoms with laser light.’ When it looked like the method was working, they immediately called the best research team in the world and asked to visit. For three days they presented their results, asking the physicists to show them where they had made

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a mistake. Failing to falsify their claim, they arranged to visit the number two team (who just happened to live in Paris). Only after the best specialists in the world were unable to find an error did they publish the research for which the Nobel Prize was eventually awarded. It’s hard to imagine a religious practitioner taking this approach toward her own beliefs. Certainly in some traditions, Christianity and Islam, for example, such an attitude would be considered sinful.

Genuine falsification is impossible, even in science. An explosive book in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn challenged the attempts to demarcate science from religion. The history of science, Kuhn argued, actually consists of a series of paradigms. Each paradigm has its own core assumptions and its own criteria for whether a theory is good or not. Indeed, they are incommensurable, that is, none of them can really be understood using the language of another paradigm, but only from the inside.

Scientific paradigms are not falsified but abandoned, Kuhn argued with numerous historical examples. That is, insiders become aware of more and more problems that they cannot solve using their paradigm. In the end, however, they give up on their paradigm only when another comes along that is more attractive. At some point they just jump ship, as it were, and start working within the new way of thinking. Kuhn actually uses the religious term “conversion” to describe the shift: a scientist gives up on her old way of thinking and converts to a new one, like a person might convert to Islam.

All is relative, even science. Some philosophers took the paradigms idea even further. Nelson Goodman argued that philosophies, religions, and sciences are just so many ‘ways of worldmaking.’ Paul Feyerabend went even further by endorsing an ‘anything goes’ philosophy that he called ‘epistemological anarchism.’6 There is no distinction between science and non-science. We should view the Bible as an alternate cosmology (47n1); voodoo can enrich our physiology (50); acupuncture may be preferable to modern medicine (51); we should break our methodological rules whenever possible, as Galileo did (app. 2); and finding a satisfactory theory depends, for instance, on having a satisfactory sex life (174). (One wonders whether living in Berkeley in the early 1970s had anything to do with his conclusions.)

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A golden mean? Scientific research programs. Not surprisingly, many philosophers of science began to look for a position between strict falsification and ‘anything goes.’ The response from a Hungarian-born philosopher, Imre Lakatos, won wide- spread support. (Warning to the reader: I published my first book7 to defend this view, so I can’t claim neutrality here.) All scientific work, Lakatos argues, fits into some research program. Each research program has a central core of assumptions on which it is based, but it also develops specific empirical results that are sometimes falsified.

Science is not relativism; over the long run, some research programs prove more fruitful than others. Some are ‘progressive’ and others ‘degenerating.’ But none is conclusively falsified.8 Watch Lakatos trying to find the golden mean between para- digms and falsification: there can be ‘crucial counter evidence’; but it is recognized ‘only with hindsight.’ There is falsification; but it depends on the arrival of new theories that leave the old ones behind (34–36). There is even an objective test of theories; but it lies in the way that different scientific theories fit together, and not in direct falsification through observations. Thus Lakatos writes, ‘It is not that we propose a theory and Nature may shout NO; rather, we propose a maze of theories, and Nature may shout INCONSISTENT’ (45).

Where does this all leave us? The philosophy of science has expanded into many new areas since these early debates. Much of the cutting-edge work today concerns specific areas of sci- ence: how to interpret certain fields within physics, the nature of evolution at different points in biology, the relations between neural firings in the brain and the specific experiences that a per- son has. But when philosophers do return to the core question of what makes science unique, the answers still fall (roughly) into one of the three camps that we have just explored. Some scholars defend a strict demarcation between science and non-science; some argue that in the end the two cannot be clearly distin- guished; and a third group shows that, even though there are crucial distinctions between science and non-science, the two cannot be completely separated. (And yes, even after all these years, I’m still convinced that this third group offers the strongest response.)

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SEPARATIONISTS AND INTEGRATIONISTS Knowledge versus faith, objective versus subjective, this-worldly versus other-worldly – it remains tempting to trot out the dichotomies and maximize the differences. As we saw, Nelson Goodman believed that science and religion are just different ‘ways of worldmaking.’9 In the same vein, the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson introduces the picture of a person standing on an ocean beach watching the sunset.10 Everything that she sees can be explained through science; all the available knowledge is sci- entific knowledge. But she also has the experience of beauty and meaning. These feelings exist and may well be of value to her. It’s just that they have nothing to do with knowledge.

These positions have everything to do with ‘the war between science and religion.’ Imagine a spectrum of positions laid out across a long line. At the two endpoints, left and right, are the Separationists. We will call the ones on the left ‘Science Only’ and those on the right ‘Religion Only.’ We met advocates of these two views in Chapter 2. On the far left, remember the ‘new atheist’ Richard Dawkins’ sentence, ‘Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument. . . . Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.’11 On the far right, recall the ‘intelligent design’ claim that science is just an ideology supporting atheism, one that should now be replaced by a new kind of science based instead on the idea of an intelligent designer (read: God).

As Figure 7.1 makes clear, new atheism and intelligent design sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. Now you can see why it is hard to do constructive work at the intersections of religion and science when they are the two major voices: no two positions could be farther apart than these two.

Paradoxically, though, the two do share one thing in common: both are Separationists. It’s just that, in the separation, each one thinks that its team so dominates that the other side should not exist at all. It’s a little like the U.S. Congress, or at least the cynic’s view of it. In the period of great statesmen such as Alexander Hamilton and Daniel Webster, politicians were the leaders who could find common ground and work out compromises. More

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recently, each political issue seems to push the two American parties farther apart, to the point that each has its own core val- ues and worldview, its own media and spokespersons, and even its own ‘alternative facts.’ It’s no surprise that public discourse is failing to thrive; the two sides can hardly sit in the same room together.

The same happens in religion and science. Some years ago the new atheist Daniel Dennett and I held a public discussion at Claremont Graduate University.12 You will have to judge for yourself how each side did. It at least looks like Clayton is looking for points of contact, especially in the philosophy of mind, and that Dennett is rejecting all common ground. The debate continued at the University of Cambridge in 2009, on the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s On the Ori- gin of Species. Well, debate is not quite the right word. Dennett

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Figure 7.1 The spectrum of positions on the religion-science relationship.

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attended the ‘Evolution and Theology’ session at which I was speaking and, standing at the back of the lecture hall, offered his commentary in the form of one-liners. In his commentary on Richard Dawkins’ website the next day, he announced attempts to integrate theology and science could not really be theology; a theology that finds common ground with science has to be a form of de facto atheism.13

In the very middle of Figure 7.1 are the Integrationists. These are the ones who believe there are extensive areas of overlap between science and religion. As the curve suggests, there are many degrees of integration. The ‘theistic evolution’ that we dis- cussed in Chapter 2 might be half way down the curve on the right-hand side, perhaps because it breaks with science on the question of miracles. Half way down the curve on the left might be the view that the laws of physics which express the funda- mental regularities of the universe are reflections of the nature of its Creator, but that God does not intervene to break these patterns once they are established. It’s an interesting question whether it’s possible to score a 100 percent on the integration scale. To do so one would have to argue that religion and science are absolutely identical, and that’s a hard case to make.

The truth is that the majority view tends to move left or right along the spectrum at different times. Take just the last 70 years. In the 1950s it seemed obvious that science was strictly demar- cated from religion; the philosophy of science was dominated by Separationist positions (logical positivism, formalism). A decade later matters were reversed, thanks in part to Kuhn’s paradigms, which we discussed earlier. When the physicist/philosopher Ian Barbour launched the modern field of religion and science around 1970, he faced strong opposition from Separationists. But the Integrationists steadily drew more support over the two decades that followed, especially within Christian thought (e.g., Wolfhart Pannenberg, Arthur Peacocke, John Polkinghorne, Robert J. Russell, Nancey Murphy, and the present author).

After the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, Separationists again took the spotlight. The battle between new atheism and intelligent design exploded into public attention at this time. Scientists began to feel that the very possibility of science was under attack from the Religious Right, while an

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increasing number of religious people became convinced that science was out to destroy their faith. Multiple factors played a role in the more negative view among scientists: having to go to court in order to be allowed to teach evolution in schools (as in the much-publicized 2005 trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, on intelligent design in the classroom), adopting the language of the new atheists, and equating religion with religious funda- mentalism of the kind that motivated the 9/11 attack. Different factors influenced scholars in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, but I think the trends were similar. It is probably most accu- rate to construe the first decade of the twenty-first century as a time of warring factions. And who’s winning now? The last years have seen a moderate resurgence of the Integrationists, but at the moment it’s too close to call.

CHANGE THE NAMES, SOLVE THE PROBLEM? One last recent trend deserves mention. If the words ‘science’ and ‘religion’ are creating the problem, why not just replace them or redefine them? Many people are leaving the religion of their childhood, for example; they describe themselves as ‘spiri- tual but not religious’ or ‘spiritually independent’ or ‘the Nones’ (as in having no religion). Could the exploration of spirituality and science lead in very different directions than the traditional discussion? There is some evidence that it has.

Others suggest that we should redefine science, rejecting the methods and assumptions that scientists use. This I find more problematic. Of course, one can stand outside science and say that these should not be the norms, the required conditions for something to count as science. And clearly there are gray areas, just as there are numerous cases of scientists breaking these stan- dards.14 But modern science really is a rather widespread institu- tion. Does renaming it change it?

On the one hand, there are no a priori reasons why the word ‘science’ could not be given a different meaning. Culturally and historically there have been many different alternatives: medie- val science (scientia), science as philosophy as in German Ideal- ism (Wissenschaft), Taoist science,15 Buddhist science,16 and many schools within classical Indian thought, such as the ‘science’ of

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reincarnation. On the other hand, over the last few centuries sci- ence has become a clearly defined global institution. Acknowl- edgments of the nature and value of the scientific enterprise have been made by significant numbers, and perhaps even majorities, of people from every culture of the world. Interestingly, even advocates of alternative ways of knowing the world use empir- ical science as the standard, arguing that their activities meet these standards.17

The definition of science as such is not fixed; but could it be opened up in some new ways? Certainly the new theories are revolutionary. It appears that quantum phenomena are indeter- minate, that other mammals and even birds have culture, that incredibly small ‘strings’ might be the foundations of all reality, and that our universe is part of a massively larger ‘multiverse.’ New approaches in the philosophy of science also undercut traditional boundaries and everyday common sense by asking whether mass is solid, whether cells are agents, whether humans are qualitatively distinct from other animals, whether values might exist, whether actions are really free, and whether God and quantum physics are compatible.

With all these changes, the same requirements that we explored earlier still seem to hold. Theories still count as sci- entific when they make empirical predictions that, when actu- ally tested against independent data, can be verified or falsified. There must be agreed-upon ways to test the theories that are proposed, and anyone with enough training to do the testing must be able to run the same experiment and get the same results (replicability). Part of the wonder of science is that these same core requirements can lead to such amazing discoveries in the natural world.

quESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCuSSION 1 The history of religion and science shows how the two

have influenced each other across the centuries, sometimes in productive and sometimes in extremely destructive ways. Describe some things you learned from this account of their historical relations. Do they lead you to see and judge the relationship between science and religion differently?

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2 You saw that the debate about scientific objectivity includes three very different positions. Choose one of the three and make your case against the other two. Then hear (or imagine) their criticisms of the position you just defended and think how you might respond. Who wins?

3 Figure 7.1 shows a variety of positions along the continuum between separation and integration. As sciences develop and religions change, the majority view tends to move more to the right or more to the left along this line. Where on the continuum do you think our society is at this time? Where should we be?

4 Both the history and the philosophy sections show how dif- ferently the term ‘science’ can be and has been interpreted. Should we therefore let the term be wide open, so that ‘Hindu science’ and ‘Taoist science’ and ‘Native American science’ are all on the same level, each one equally as valid as the natural sciences today? What are some of the arguments against this view?

5 Could the exploration of science and spirituality lead in some rather different directions than the science-and-religion dis- cussion? If so, what causes the difference?

NOTES 1 For detailed histories of the interactions between science and religion see

David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science (Berkeley, CA: Uni- versity of California Press, 1986); idem., When Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); John Hedley Brooke, Science and Reli- gion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); John Hedley Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); John Hedley Brooke, Of Scientists and Their Gods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); John Hedley Brooke and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., Science and Religion Around the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Gary B. Ferngren, ed., Science and Religion: An Historical Introduction (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2002).

2 Francis Bacon, ‘Novum Organum,’ in J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath, eds., The Works of Francis Bacon (London: Longman, 1857–74), vol. IV (1868), Part I, sections 41ff.

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