Science and Christianity

An Introduction to the Issues

J. B. Stump

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118625132
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

Science and Christianity is an accessible, engaging introduction to topics at the intersection of science and Christian theology.

• A philosophically orientated treatment that introduces the relationship of science to Christianity and explores to what extent the findings of science affect traditional Christian theology
• Addresses important theological topics in light of contemporary science, including divine action, the problem of natural evil, and eschatology
• Historically oriented chapters and chapters covering methodological principles for both science and theology provide the reader with a strong foundational understanding of the issues
• Includes feature boxes highlighting quotations, biographies of major scientists and theologians, key terms, and other helpful information
• Issues are presented as fairly and objectively as possible, with strengths and weaknesses of particular interpretations fully discussed

CHAPTER 1
Conflict and Independence

In 1633, at the age of 70, Galileo Galilei—the famed mathematician and scientist from Pisa—was forced on threat of excommunication and possible execution to kneel before the Inquisitors of the Roman Catholic Church. He was given a prepared statement to read aloud which disavowed the work he had done the previous two decades. Of what heinous heresy was he suspected? Simply that the earth moved around the sun each year and turned on its axis every day.

When most people consider the way science and religion—or more specifically for this book, science and Christianity—have interacted, it is this story of Galileo and the Church that is taken as the paradigm. Over the centuries Christianity had developed a geocentric worldview that included the belief that the earth was immobile at the center of the universe, and all of the celestial objects circled it. This cosmological picture was primarily informed by Aristotle's physics and Ptolemy's astronomy, but the Church could also appeal to verses in the Bible that were most naturally interpreted as supporting the earth-centered cosmos. That led to some fireworks.

Today, the popular understanding is that the Galileo episode was a straightforward conflict between science and Christianity in which the Church was more concerned with protecting its tradition and authority than with discovering the truth. As might be expected, the real story is more complicated than this. We consider it further in this chapter, along with several other episodes that illustrate the complex relationship between science and Christianity.

The aim here is not to provide a full-blown history of science and Christianity, nor is it to prescribe how these two influential enterprises in society should interact today. More modestly, this chapter aims to illustrate and explain some of the ways that science and Christianity have in fact interacted. Before looking at these, it will be helpful to discuss a few of the classification systems that have been used to organize the topic.

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Questions to be addressed in this chapter:

1. What are the ways that scholars organize the relationship between science and Christianity?
2. What was the conflict between Galileo and the Church?
3. How can science and Christianity be seen as independent forms of inquiry?
4. What is the Two Books metaphor?

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1. Ways that science and Christianity might be related

As long as science and Christianity have been around, people have written about them and their relationship, but systematic reflection on these topics by a community of scholars is a fairly recent phenomenon. It has only been for the last generation or so that “Science and Religion” has been a distinct academic discipline with its own journals and university degree programs. The godfather of this movement has been Ian Barbour (1923–2013). His book Issues in Science and Religion (1966) is a thorough overview of the relevant topics, and it set the agenda for subsequent thinkers in the field. In that book and his Myths, Models and Paradigms (1974), he began developing a classification system for how science and religion can be related to each other. But it was his Gifford Lectures of 1989–1990 (Barbour 1990) where this typology was defended systematically.

Barbour's four categories are conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration. The first assumes that either the scientific or the religious way of acquiring knowledge is correct, and not both; thus, they are in conflict with each other. At the other end of the spectrum—the independence thesis—science and religion are completely separate and self-contained ways of knowing; as such, they operate in different spheres, and their claims neither conflict nor agree with each other. The dialogue model assumes that science and religion do impinge on each other at certain points, such as the origin of the universe, and so they ought to recognize the insights that each brings to these questions. Finally, the integration model pushes beyond mere dialogue between distinct disciplines and tries to effect a synthesis of science and religion; this can be seen in attempts to develop a theology of nature or in process theology where explanations are developed that draw from both the sciences and theology.

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Barbour's four-fold typology of contemporary views for how science and religion may be related

1. Conflict: science or religion can be victorious in their explanations, but not both
2. Independence: science and religion each have their own sphere of inquiry and cannot conflict
3. Dialogue: there is contact between science and religion at boundary questions, like the reason for the orderliness of the universe
4. Integration: theological doctrines and scientific theories might be integrated into one coherent model, like a theology of creation

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As might be expected, other scholars reflected on Barbour's work and offered critiques and modifications to his typology. Ted Peters (1996) expanded the list of categories, identifying eight different ways that science and religion interact. Christian Berg (2004) reorganized the typology completely, believing it more useful to look at the relationship between science and religion under the dimensions of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Stenmark (2012) suggested that we should first consider the kind of jobs science and Christianity do. If they are trying to do the same job, then they are in competition; if they do completely different jobs, then they are independent of each other; and if their jobs are different but they overlap to some extent, then there will be points of contact between science and religion.

After Barbour, it might be argued that the next most influential scholar in framing the discussion of how science and religion are related is John Hedley Brooke. His Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (1991) derives from detailed historical research the many facets of how science and religion have been related. The conclusion of his work is that the relationship between science and religion cannot be described under one general heading. This has come to be known as the Complexity thesis. Another contemporary historian of science, Ronald Numbers, is convinced of the complexity thesis, but sees the need to provide some midscale generalizations or patterns that might prove helpful in organizing and understanding the vast data and literature on the subject. To this end, he describes five trends in the ongoing relationship between science and religion: naturalization, privatization, secularization, globalization, and radicalization (Numbers 2010).

These ways of carving up the conceptual territory at the intersection of science and religion are all helpful. Undoubtedly there are even more ways to get at other nuances of the relationship. For our purposes in this chapter, it will suffice to look more generally at the relationship by considering historical examples of conflict and independence. The next two chapters address examples of influence on each other.

2. Conflict

Today's accepted narrative arc of how historians have understood the relationship between science and Christianity begins with the conflict thesis of John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1896), first published in 1874, and White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1922), first published in 1896, set the tone for how scholars thought about science and Christianity in the first half of the 20th century. On this view, Christianity is cast in the role of the oppressive and stultifying stepmother who held back the young, reasonable, and progressive maiden of science and kept her from flowering throughout the Middle Ages. Then science finally broke free from the oppressive Church, or so the story goes, and steadily added to our accumulated knowledge and quality of life.

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John William Draper (1811–1882)

A chemist and physician, Draper was one of the founders of the New York University School of Medicine. His History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1896), first published in 1874, was widely read and conditioned generations of people to view science and religion as competing explanations.

Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918)

White was a professor of history and English at the University of Michigan until 1863 and then joined with Ezra Cornell to found Cornell University. White became the university's first president. He published A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1922) in 1896, which continued Draper's interpretation.

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This account found sympathetic ears during the heyday of positivism early in the 20th century, and it gained enough traction in the wider culture so that even after the demise of positivism it is still common to hear science and Christianity being pitted against each other in warlike tones. Draper's words gave voice to the feeling that many still share today:

The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; 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. (Draper 1896, vi)

That Draper's and White's historical analyses have been severely criticized by contemporary historians of science is almost beside the point. The rhetoric of this view operates more at the level of talk show discussions, and the sensationalized story plays well within the broader culture.

Of course, even within academia it is not difficult to gather evidence from the pages of history that seems to lend support to the conflict thesis. Indeed, the marquee event of the relationship between science and Christianity appears to illustrate precisely the claim of Draper: Galileo's forced recantation before the Church. The story was introduced at the beginning of the chapter, but now let's look at it more closely.

In the early 17th century, Holland was famous for its industry of grinding glass into lenses. In 1609, Galileo heard that someone there had placed just the right lenses at either end of an enclosed tube and was thereby able to magnify threefold the imag...