Science and Religion

An Impossible Dialogue

Yves Gingras, Peter Keating

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781509518937, 9781509518920
• eBook ISBN: 9781509518968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

Today we hear renewed calls for a dialogue between science and religion: why has the old question of the relations between science and religion now returned to the public domain and what is at stake in this debate?

To answer these questions, historian and sociologist of science Yves Gingras retraces the long history of the troubled relationship between science and religion, from the condemnation of Galileo for heresy in 1633 until his rehabilitation by John Paul II in 1992. He reconstructs the process of the gradual separation of science from theology and religion, showing how God and natural theology became marginalized in the scientific field in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In contrast to the dominant trend among historians of science, Gingras argues that science and religion are social institutions that give rise to incompatible ways of knowing, rooted in different methodologies and forms of knowledge, and that there never was, and cannot be, a genuine dialogue between them.

Wide-ranging and authoritative, this new book on one of the fundamental questions of Western thought will be of great interest to students and scholars of the history of science and of religion as well as to general readers who are intrigued by the new and much-publicized conversations about the alleged links between science and religion.

1
THE THEOLOGICAL LIMITS OF THE AUTONOMY OF SCIENCE

Lost in an immense forest at night, I have only a small light to find my way; come a stranger who tells me: ‘my friend, blow your candle to better find your way’. This stranger is a theologian.

Diderot¹

Modern science, institutionalized in the seventeenth century, gradually emancipated itself from philosophy – the original source of all reflection on the physical, psychological and social worlds – and gave birth, in the course of the nineteenth century, to an increasingly fragmented domain populated with specialized and technical scientific disciplines. During this process, ‘philosophers of nature’, generalists who were often self-taught and who cultivated several areas of knowledge at the same time, gave way to more specialized ‘scientists’ often dedicated to full-time research on a particular subject matter. The invention of the term scientist to replace natural philosopher by mathematician, philosopher, and Anglican clergyman William Whewell at the beginning of the 1830s, stands as a linguistic signpost of this social transformation.

This chapter describes the progressive autonomization of science in relation to other spheres of society and the extension of its specific mode of thought to the whole of the natural and social world. This process also generated conflicts with theologians, specialists in rational discourse on the gods, as the Greek word Theologos, first found in Plato, indicates. The Christian Church took up this tradition of Greek philosophy and applied it to the interpretation of a single God. Spokespersons for the monotheistic religions (Christian, Muslim and Jewish) are thus the guardians of a long-dominant interpretation of nature, wherein profane knowledge was subjugated to a divine knowledge revealed in texts considered sacred (the Christian and Jewish Bibles, and the Koran). Of course, only scientists working in areas likely to contradict a religious view of the world struggled with these authorities. For it is never science in general that enters into conflict with a given religion, but only particular sciences when they raise an issue that is already the subject of a particular theological interpretation. It is therefore not surprising that physics and astronomy were the first sciences to become problematic within the Christian context since these disciplines deal with questions that confront Christian cosmology head-on.

The confrontation between faith and reason goes back to the roots of Christianity, the first debates having drawn philosophers from the Greek polytheistic tradition into opposition with theologians and the fathers of the Christian Church. The latter were obliged to justify the tenets of their ‘cult’ to the cultivated followers of the Ancients and argue that their religion was indeed a true ‘philosophy’ in the Greek sense of the word and that the proponents of this new philosophy had rational arguments that would demonstrate the existence of a single God as opposed to the polytheism maintained by the hitherto dominant elites.² It was not, however, until the rediscovery of Aristotle’s works on nature in the Middle Ages that these conflicts took on a clear institutional form. The question of the relationship between faith and reason also arose in the Muslim world in the famous (posthumous) confrontation between al-Ghazali (1058–1111) – for whom philosophy must submit to theology – and the great jurist and Aristotle commentator, Ibn Rushd, latinized as Averroes (1126–1198) – who defended the autonomy of philosophy.³ In the Christian world, the teaching of Aristotle’s natural philosophy in the university Faculties of Arts at the beginning of the thirteenth century also generated a jurisdictional dispute with the Faculties of Theology, who saw philosophy as a propaedeutic discipline subject to their control.⁴ Public confrontations between philosophy, the rational discourse on nature, and theology, the rational discourse on a revealed God, gained importance only after theology had become a social institution that sought to control and sanction any and all discourse calling into question the dogmas and the teachings of the Church.

These multiple and recurrent struggles between science and religion are not simple confrontations between individuals of varying degrees of stubbornness, as is too often suggested, but an expression of institutional power relations. At issue is the autonomy and freedom of science vis-à-vis the pretensions of the churches to rule over science through its theologians.

Aristotle: the first conflict of the faculties

In 1798, the German protestant philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), then seventy-five years old, published his last book: The Conflict of the Faculties. Coming from the author of the famous three ‘Critiques’ (of pure reason, of practical reason and of the faculty of judgment), one might assume that the book dealt with the intellectual faculties, but it did not. The topic was the freedom of thought within university faculties. Kant called for nothing less than the absolute independence and complete freedom of thought and public speech for professors in the faculty of philosophy and, especially, the end of the guardianship of theology over philosophy. The Faculty of Philosophy, he says, ‘must be free to examine in public and to evaluate with cold reason the source and content of this alleged basis of doctrine, unintimidated by the sacredness of the object which has supposedly been experienced and determined to bring this alleged feeling to concepts’.⁵ Moreover, when ‘the source of a sanctioned teaching is historical, then – no matter how highly it may be recommended as sacred to the unhesitating obedience of faith – the philosophy faculty is entitled and indeed obligated to investigate its origins with critical scrupulosity’.⁶ Since philosophy sought truth, it must be free and ‘subject only to laws given by reason, not by the government’.⁷ Notice that, in Kant’s time, philosophy included natural philosophy and therefore the sciences.

As a philosopher, Kant had himself suffered from the limits imposed on the freedom of expression when he had, four years earlier, published an essay on Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason. He had then received an admonishing letter from the King of Prussia, Frederic William II, who accused him of misusing his ‘philosophy to distort and disparage many of the cardinal and basic teachings of the Holy Scriptures and of Christianity’.⁸ Kant had accepted his monarch’s censorship and promised to no longer speak publicly about natural or revealed religion during the King’s reign. Kant did not write again until after the King’s death in 1797. As the new king, Frederic William III, had disposed of the theologian who dictated the religious policy of his father, Kant felt free to publicly expose the foundation of the problem: the guardianship of theology over philosophy within the universities. Kant remained the bugbear of Catholic theologians. As if to remind him posthumously of the limits of his critical discourse, his famous Critique of Pure Reason, even though published in 1781, was placed on the Index by the Catholic Church in 1827.

Eighty years later, with the Church in full anti-modernist crisis, Cardinal Mercier would even declare that Kant and Darwin were the sources of the ‘modernism’ that Catholics must resist.⁹ Again in 2006, Pope Benedict XVI launched a similar charge describing the German philosopher as the theorist of the ‘self-limitation of reason’, a thesis that had subsequently been ‘radicalized by the impact of the natural sciences’ and should now be called into question.¹⁰

Theology’s guardianship of philosophy in the Christian world, publicly denounced by Kant, dates back t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Introduction
• 1 The Theological Limits of the Autonomy of Science
• 2 Copernicus and Galileo: Thorns in the Sides of Popes
• 3 God: From the Centre to the Periphery of Science
• 4 Science Censored
• 5 From Conflict to Dialogue?
• 6 What Is a ‘Dialogue’ Between Science and Religion?
• 7 Belief Versus Science
• Conclusion: Betting on Reason
• Index