Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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emphasised the inductive nature of scientific work – the way that it produces laws and generalisations only after painstakingly collecting empirical data from which to generalise. On this view, scientific theories can be verified by collecting a sufficient amount of confirmatory empirical evidence. Others, such as Karl Popper, have been less optimistic and argued that the hallmark of science is the quest not for verification but for falsification. No matter how many black ravens you observe, you cannot conclusively prove that all ravens are black simply by accumulating observations. The next one you see could be white. However, the observation of a single white raven is sufficient to falsify conclusively the hypothesis that all ravens are black. Thus the scientist can expect evidence to provide certain falsification of unsuccessful theories but, in the case of apparently successful hypotheses, the best that she can hope for is provisional corroboration. Even very well confirmed theories are sometimes eventually falsified, partially or completely. Imre Lakatos, and the highly influential Thomas Kuhn (1996; first published 1962), subsequently suggested more sophisticated accounts of falsification, which acknowledged that the lack of a match between theory and data more often results in a rejection (or at least reinterpretation) of the data, or a questioning of the competence of the experimenter, than in a rejection of the theory that was being tested. The way that Lakatos put this was to say that every research programme has a ‘hard core’ of assumptions that are never discarded, no matter what the empirical evidence, and a ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary assumptions (about calibration of measuring instruments, possible sources of interference in the experimental set-up, and so on). The latter are more likely to be modified or discarded when experimental observations fail to match up with theoretical predictions.

Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos are just three of many philosophers of science to whom theologians have looked when formulating their arguments about the differences and similarities between theological and scientific methods (Barbour 1966, 1997; Knight 2001; McGrath 1998; Scott and Moore 2007). One of the central issues has been the question of whether science and religion can both be considered rational activities. According to one familiar caricature, scientific theories are rational because they are based on the facts, but religious beliefs represent an irrational sort of wish-fulfilment; science demands strong empirical evidence, but religion encourages blind faith in the complete absence of evidence; the scientist is the very embodiment of objectivity and reason, but the religious practitioner is, by contrast, a creature of irrational emotions and obscure mystical experiences. There are some grains of truth in all this. Certainly there has been a strand of thought within Christian theology that has celebrated the rejection of worldly wisdom, and has emphasised the contrast between the logic of secular reason and the ineffability of religious faith. However, it is unfair to suggest that most religions encourage people to believe things in the absence of any good evidence. Most theologians would see faith and reason as being more closely connected than that.

Writers on ‘religion and science’ have tried to overcome the stereotyped idea that science is supremely rational and religion is the opposite in two ways: talking down the rationality of science, and talking up the rationality of religion. Appealing to post-positivist philosophers of science, including Popper, Lakatos and Kuhn, those following the first strategy have noted that science is not quite the value-free, fact-based, truth-producing machine that it was once thought to be. They point to the fact that scientific observations are more loaded with theoretical assumptions than was previously supposed, that scientists are sometimes prone to be as dogmatic and inflexible in the face of recalcitrant evidence as the most doctrinaire of theologians, and that non-scientific factors (such as social and political concerns) seem to

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have a considerable impact on theory-choice in scientific communities. Writers following the second strategy have tried to draw close analogies between theological and scientific methods. Arthur Peacocke and Nancey Murphy have argued, each in their own way, that theology is very much like a scientific discipline: it makes inferences from the observable realm to the unobservable; it deploys models and metaphors to represent the unobservable, just as the natural sciences do (for instance, when physicists use models of ‘waves’ and ‘particles’ to understand the subatomic realm); and it has a set of hard-core theoretical commitments, which, just as in the natural sciences, are surrounded and supported by a belt of more flexible ‘auxiliary hypotheses’ (see Murphy 1990; Peacocke 1984).

Taken together, these strategies would be self-defeating, since the former questions the superior rationality of science, while the latter takes it for granted. There are problems with each of the strategies taken on its own too. Most religious traditions have a strong commitment to the careful study of nature and the rigorous application of human reason. In such traditions it is important that the rationality and success of the sciences are nurtured and encouraged. Talking down the sciences, in any case, does nothing to enhance the rationality of religion and theology, which are equally vulnerable to critiques that draw attention to hidden assumptions, prejudices and political interests. The problem, on the other hand, with suggesting a close analogy between scientific and theological methods is that it can look too much as though theologians have abandoned the distinctive skills and prophetic voice of religion in an attempt to mimic the high-prestige methods of the sciences. For many, this represents too much of an intellectual and cultural surrender to an anti-theological and scientistic world-view.

Physics and divine action

Early modern debates about the physical sciences (specifically about astronomy and cosmology) provided the centrepiece for one of the most well-known controversies concerning religion and science, namely the Galileo affair. For most of the modern period, however, physical science has frequently provided the basis for a more positive engagement. One of the pre-eminent figures in the history of modern science, Isaac Newton, is a case in point. Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation laid the foundations for modern physics and were taken, by some, to depict a deterministic universe from which God had been banished. Newton himself, however, was devoutly religious and believed that there were many points in the system he described at which divine intervention was not only possible, but absolutely essential. He invoked the hand of the Deity to explain, for example, the rotation of the planets on their own axes, and the fact that matter was spread evenly throughout the universe rather than collapsing into a single great mass through the force of gravity. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, alongside the development of explicitly atheistic and deterministic cosmologies by some French Newtonians, more pious writers on the physical sciences continued to discern divine authorship in the elegant mathematical laws that governed the movements and interactions of terrestrial and celestial bodies. In the later nineteenth century, physicists interested in the ways that different sorts of energy could be converted into one another, and in the role of the ‘ether’ as a vehicle for electromagnetic forces, became fascinated by psychical research, and the controversial idea that the human spirit could be understood as some sort of physical or electromagnetic phenomenon. Physicists in late Victorian Britain accordingly undertook investigations of the fundamental forces of nature in darkened seance rooms as well as in experimental laboratories (Oppenheim 1985).

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The twentieth century saw an explosion of new ideas in the physical sciences. The theory of relativity, quantum physics, chaos theory and ‘Big Bang’ cosmology all brought with them suggestive new religious and theological ideas. The fuzzy, indeterminate mathematics of quantum theory seemed to indicate that physical reality was not, after all, closed and deterministic. The central role of the observer in determining the outcome of quantum events challenged the modernist dichotomy between subject and object. Big Bang cosmology could be interpreted as confirming something like a biblical view of a moment of creation out of nothing, or alternatively as describing a closed system with no boundaries and no need for a Creator. This all opened up new possibilities in debates about divine activity, which continue to be discussed by theologians and scientists (Clayton1997; Drees 1990; Polkinghorne 1994; Russell et al. 1999; Saunders 2002). A key danger of which such writers are constantly aware is that they might end up constructing a ‘God of the gaps’ – in other words, locating God simply in gaps in current scientific knowledge. If those gaps turn out to be temporary ones that disappear with advances in science, rather than being permanent, metaphysical gaps, then the cause of theism will have been weakened rather than strengthened.

Darwinism and design

There is a stark contrast between the images of God and nature suggested by the physical sciences on the one hand and those conjured up by the biological sciences on the other. Physicists have often found it natural to infer the existence of an intelligent designer from the awesome scale and mathematical beauty of the universe, and from the apparent fine-tuning of its fundamental laws and constants, as discovered by modern physics. The biological sciences, on the other hand, deal not with immense expanses of space and time, nor with grand, elegant and satisfying mathematical proofs, but rather with the messy, violent realities of the Darwinian struggle for existence. A famously gruesome example of this struggle is to be found in the case of the parasitic ichneumon wasp. The female ichneumon lays her eggs inside the body of a caterpillar, with the result that, for their first meal, her offspring eat their host alive. Having observed this phenomenon, the young Charles Darwin wrote to a friend: ‘What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of nature!’ And since the publication in 1859 of Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species, others too have found it harder to discern in the natural world the benign and intelligent Deity of Newton or Paley.

Indeed, for many, the question of evolution, especially human evolution, remains the central one in discussions of religion and science. It is certainly a question that polarises opinion, especially in the United States. Polls have found that about 45 per cent of the population of the US believe that man was created in roughly his present state at some time in the last 10,000 years; about 40 per cent prefer to say that humans were the result of a divinely guided process of evolution; and only about 10 per cent believe that human beings evolved in an entirely natural way over millions of years through a process in which God had no part. Among professional scientists, of course, the vast majority would believe in the minority view – that humans have a common ancestry with all other animals and have evolved in an entirely natural way. The philosophical question of the demarcation of science from pseudo-science takes on a new political urgency in the context of debates about creationism and evolutionism. Creationists, from the early twentieth century onwards, have claimed that the theory of evolution is scientifically unsound and, in reality, is merely a dangerous atheistic ideology dressed up in scientific clothing – a new pied piper leading the

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children of America into a pit of unbelief and immorality. Evolutionists return the compliment, arguing that ‘creation science’ is nothing more nor less than fundamentalist Christianity mischievously masquerading as science, in an attempt to confer on itself a bogus academic credibility. Arguments on both sides range from partisan bluster to careful philosophical and scientific argumentation. The most recent incarnation of this debate has focused on the scientific, philosophical and religious credentials of the new ‘intelligent design’ movement (Dembski and Ruse 2004; Sarkar 2007). The way that these confrontations are resolved has particularly important implications since what is most often at issue is the practical question of who should determine the content of the science curriculum in public schools, and what should be on it. Thus, deciding how to answer the question of whether the biological sciences reveal a world of design or of chance, of divine purpose or of meaningless strife, continues to have concrete political consequences, as has been evident in American court cases from the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925 to the ruling against the teaching of ‘intelligent design’ in Dover, Pennsylvania in 2005 (Bowler 2007; Dixon 2008: Chapter 5; Larson 1997; Numbers 2006; Ruse 2003).

Science and the soul

While some reactions to Darwinism have centred on the difficulty of reconciling the theory of evolution by natural selection with the teachings of the Bible about the creation of separate species, the sticking point for others has been the question of the existence and status of the human soul. The problem of how to combine an evolutionary understanding of human origins with anything other than a materialistic understanding of the soul is a difficult one. If the brain is the organ of the mind, and the brain, like all our other organs, gradually evolved from much more basic beginnings, it is hard to see how an immaterial or supernatural ‘soul’ can be inserted into the process. If human beings are nothing more than large-brained apes who live in particularly complex and violent societies, what sense can be made of religious ideas about the dignity or even immortality of the human spirit? Scientific writers from Darwin himself, in The Descent of Man (1871), up to popular writers of more recent times such as E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Steven Pinker have produced intriguing accounts of the evolutionary origins, and genetic basis, of moral and religious feelings. For many theologians, however, the human soul, created in the image of God, with its faculties of will and intellect, is something that marks human beings out as quite different sorts of creatures from other animals. For them, the soul is the seat of reason and morality, which are both lacked by non-human animals.

It is not only modern evolutionary science that has posed problems for traditional understandings of the soul. Developments in medicine, psychiatry, psychology and neuroscience during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had already illustrated evercloser links between the physical structures of the brain and nervous system and the healthy or pathological functioning of the human mind. As these links were made with ever greater precision and certainty through the twentieth century, theologians were confronted with difficult questions about the relationship between the body, on the one hand, and the mind, soul or spirit on the other (Dixon 2008: Chapter 6; Dueck and Lee 2005; van Huyssteen 2006; Watts 2002). The simplest explanation, that all our thoughts and feelings were simply states of the brain, seemed incompatible with religious ideas about an immaterial soul and a freely acting will. One response to these questions was the development of a philosophical position termed ‘non-reductive physicalism’ (Brown et al. 1998). Proponents of