A friend overheard that I would be writing essays on religion and science and laughed. "What do religion and science have to do with each other?" he asked. He had a good liberal arts education, and had majored in physics. I was surprised that he had not heard that "religion and science" is actually a respected field of study, but I do not blame him for this. He is a thoughtful person who uses his science background in his work and is not himself "allergic to religion" as many well-educated people today are. But his not knowing that "religion and science" is a field of study and his surprise at hearing the two words conjoined together into a single phrase is a tragic manifestation of our epistemological crisis.
We had a good conversation about all of this, but before I describe more of what I mean by "our epistemological crisis," I thought I would give some background about the field of religion and science. My friend is by no means alone in thinking that religion and science have little to do with each other. Much has happened in the history of Western thought to split religion and science apart from each other.
In an earlier time, philosophy, religion, and science were not really separate disciplines. All of these ways of thinking about knowledge and reality were examined from within philosophy. When the focus of philosophical inquiry concerned spiritual matters, it was called "theology," and when it focused on the study of the natural world, it was called "natural philosophy." The term "science" simply referred to the most well-developed domains of thought. It wasn't applied specifically to "natural philosophy" until the 19th century.
But people date the beginnings of what we now call "modern science" a little earlier. Excitement about the "experimental method" began to grow in the 17th century. Prior to this time, natural philosophy was mostly not practiced experimentally, but instead involved carefully observing nature and organizing knowledge about it. But in the "modern period," natural philosophy became both experimental and mathematical. By applying mathematical measurement to the study of nature, knowledge of the natural world now could be represented by equations that were said to express the very laws of nature! The experimental method was a way of engaging in a dialogue with nature to verify and refine the equations and deepen our understanding of the natural world.
The idea of "laws of nature" presupposed the existence of a supreme law-giver, and so it may come as a surprise to many people to learn that the earliest manifestations of modern science were actually theistic rather than naturalistic. (For more on the transition from theistic science to naturalistic science, see Matthew Stanley's book, Huxley's Church and Maxwell's Demon, University of Chicago Press, 2014). This means that the first modern scientists presupposed a theistic worldview instead of a naturalistic one. They regarded reality as infused with divine consciousness, because that was, to them, the simplest and most obvious explanation for the beautiful orderliness and harmony of the natural world that they were discovering as they employed the scientific method to reveal the laws of nature.
How and why did it then happen that religion, science, and philosophy split apart? Why did science become "naturalized"? Why do so many people see them as opposed today?
These are some of the questions explored in the field of "religion and science" today, and we will continue to explore these questions in the essays that follow. But I should also point out that history is always complicated, and the story is not as clear as "once they were together, and now they have split apart," because in fact throughout this history different thinkers have had different perspectives on how to relate religion and science.
One of the most famous scholars of religion and science, Ian Barbour, has identified four ways of relating religion and science (see his book When Science Meets Religion, HarperCollins, 2000): (1) conflict - seeing them as fundamentally opposed, where one is right and the other is wrong; (2) independence - the view that science and religion are about two separate things, and each has its place; (3) dialogue - the view that science and religion are largely separate, but there is some overlap; and (4) integration - the view that it would be best to fully integrate them into one coherent worldview.
The friend I mentioned above probably was implicitly holding the "independence" view, which explains why he thought it was strange to try think about religion and science together. But the popular media tends to emphasize "conflict," especially when discussing the theory of evolution in contrast to creationism or intelligent design. The "new atheists" tend to assume that religion and science are in conflict, and argue that we have outgrown religion and should instead accept a (fully naturalized) scientific worldview. On the other side, some religious thinkers also regard religion and science as being in conflict and argue against science.
Isn't it interesting that "conflict" represents only one of four conceptual possibilities for how to relate religion and science? Many thinkers in and since the modern period have instead regarded both religion and science as having value, and have related them in one of the three other possible ways of relating them. We will explore all of this in future essays.