Opinion: Science and Religion

By Caleb Todd

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Preface

The interface between science and culture is a contentious topic. Debates about the position of science in society — its role, its generality, and what it is in the first place — span diverse fields and connect in complex ways. One aspect of this garnered attention recently when seven University of Auckland academics published an open letter in the Listener magazine that dismissed mātauranga Māori, suggesting that it, as a knowledge system, is less valid or valuable than what they called science. Discussions (both constructive and otherwise) have flared up, the powers that be have shifted, and many a departmental email chain has ensued.

I had finished this article only days before the letter’s publication, which I couldn’t help but find funny. What I discuss here is more than tangentially related to mātauranga Māori’s relationship with science; indeed, I mention it directly (though briefly). Nonetheless, mātauranga Māori is not the principal focus of my discussion, and I was worried that this article could be taken as a poorly veiled commentary in a way that I had not intended. Rest assured that I had no intention of doing such a disservice to an important topic. I wanted to write this preface to clarify the relationship between my article and the recent controversy, since it was not originally written with that specific debate in mind.

The case I have tried to make is that we cannot treat science as being divorced from our humanity. Science as the West knows it is not all-encompassing; it cannot answer every question that matters. We have to recognise what different approaches have to bring to the table if we are to be good people, and indeed good scientists. I centred my discussion on religion and its partnership with science. Still, much of what I say carries over to indigenous ways of knowing (although the phraseology would be too imprecise for that topic). A picture of science that dismisses out of hand the knowledge systems built up by Māori (and others) is an incomplete one.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that ‘science’ is a meaningless word. To place physics, biology, and psychology (and to some, even economics or sociology) under the same umbrella while excluding mātauranga Māori is patently ridiculous. Each discipline has utterly different methods, systems, and “validities”, and they certainly do not all follow the same ‘scientific method’. None is the same as another, and they are all necessary to a complete picture of our world — mātauranga Māori included.

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A few weeks ago, my mind was wandering during a lecture, as a student’s mind is wont to do. In my distraction, a question flitted into my brain: ‘Who else here believes in God?’ The question itself is, perhaps, not all that interesting — just a matter of statistics. What is more interesting to me is the natural reaction I had to the question. My first inclination was to assume that the answer is virtually no one.

Image by Markus Baumeler from Pixabay

Consciously I know that quite a large proportion of New Zealanders are religious. Indeed, in the 2018 census, 37% of the population identifies as Christian and 1.3% as Muslim [1]. Even among younger generations, the proportion is substantial: 28% of New Zealanders aged 15-29 are Christian [1]. ‘No religion’ was the largest category in that census with 48.5%, but even if you chuck on atheism (0.15%), agnosticism (0.14%), and (heck why not) flying spaghetti monster-adoring Pastafarianism1 (0.09%), you still haven’t cracked the halfway mark [2]. All this is to say that religious people make up around half of New Zealanders, yet I sat in a lecture with 200 people and my socialised reaction was to assume that I am in the vast minority. Why is that?

One answer may be that I am a science student, and religiosity in scientists is lower than in the general public. In a UK survey, 47% of the general population were religious, but only 27% of scientists2,3 [3]. Nonetheless, 27% of a room of 200 people is still 54 — a sizable number. So my knee-jerk assumption wasn’t really defensible. The question remains: why was it my assumption?

My proposal is that our society frames religion and science as being, in some sense, opposed to each other. It is unusual to see them as coexisting or to conceptualise them in the same context. Some people, like Richard Dawkins, take that opposition to the extreme, while others just see the two spheres as being ultimately and utterly distinct. I want to dispute both of these stances. Religion and science are not enemies, nor are they unacquainted; rather, they are old friends, and we ignore one or the other to our detriment.

Our two protagonists have a long history together. In ancient Greece, astronomers studied the celestial spheres. The motions of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars were embedded on vast spheres rotating about the Earth and each other. Circles were perfect shapes; immutable and, therefore, divine. The Greeks’ study of the skies was deeply connected to their religion. Indeed, the Greco-Roman deities were directly tied to the forces of nature, and our long history of naming astronomical bodies after these gods is no mistake. To the Greeks, the study of nature was the study of the divine, and all the more so when studying the immutable heavens. The same pattern is found all over the world, where the forces of nature are promoted to godhood. Western science’s growing recognition of indigenous ways of knowing — mātauranga Māori in New Zealand — is demonstrating that deep scientific truths are found in ancient mythologies. Separating Māori science from spirituality and culture is impossible.

I can go on. The Islamic golden age was a period of remarkable mathematical and scientific advancement. Spherical trigonometry was developed to help Muslims face Mecca when they prayed, wherever they might be on our spherical Earth.4 Widespread literacy, too, owes itself to religion in many ways. The entire Cyrillic alphabet (used in languages like Russian) was invented to bring the Bible to Slavic languages and is named after St. Cyril [4]. The first book to be mass printed on Gutenberg’s printing press was the Bible [5], and literacy rates spiked wherever the protestant reformation went because of its emphasis on each Christian’s responsibility to read their holy book. Without the ability to read and write, we could not have a populace that engages with science.

If you haven’t fallen asleep yet, you might be thinking that this argument is all well and good for ‘ye olde dayes’, but we have the scientific method now. We can dissociate from our religion-steeped past. But I’m afraid you can’t even escape there. Francis Bacon, usually considered to be the first to lay out the hallowed scientific method, was devoutly Anglican and saw science and philosophy as a way of expressing and understanding God. He is famous for saying, “A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion” [6]. I quote that not to imply that the scientific method is a religious institution per se; rather, to show that the scientific process has never been seen as being divorced from the spiritual. Even science at its most rigorous was, to many, a religious endeavour. Theology, the study of the divine, used to be known as regina scientiarum, or ‘queen of the sciences’, because understanding the nature of God was so integral to Western science. One of my personal favourite Bible verses is Proverbs 25:2, which reads, “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter.” It says that God has hidden great beauty and truth in our world and that we can participate in that by seeking and studying it. So it is with many religious scientists: they see their art as a means of engaging with the glory of God.

Although I have spent a disproportionate amount of time on Christianity — it’s what I know best — what I’m saying is true across the board. As scientists, we are almost drowning in millennia of religious tradition. Even for those who don’t believe in God, or indeed disbelieve in God, it is difficult to ignore. How, then, did we get from regina scientiarum to hostis scientiarum — the queen of the sciences to the scientist’s enemy?

Georges Lemaître, a physicist and priest, giving a lecture at the Catholic. University of Louvain in Belgium. Image from Encyclopædia Britannica.

Despite the embedding of science in religion and spirituality, this relationship has become rocky in more recent history. I do want to point out that this is not only true of religious institutions. Indeed, religious, political, social, and even scientific institutions have given scientists problems, because any institution is made up of fallible people. Nonetheless, the development of Darwin’s theory of evolution, James Hutton’s old-earth geology, and Georges Lemaître’s big bang theory,5 among others, allowed scientists to understand and describe creation in a rigorous way without reference to God.6 Many religious institutions saw this as a threat and set themselves against these scientific theories. Conversely, those who stood against religion (or even just one religion) presumed to see a way of weaponising science against philosophy — physics against metaphysics.

To my mind, this reframing of the relationship between science and religion began a positive feedback loop of the worst kind; one which drove the two modes of thought further and further apart. On the one hand, if a scientifically-minded person sees a religious person insulting or decrying science, what are they to conclude but that religion is anti-scientific? Similarly, if a pious individual sees a scientist claiming that science has disproved God, then of course they will think that science is flawed. In both cases, it is not that science and religion are truly clashing; instead, the illusion of a clash is continuously reinforced by toxic rhetoric on both sides.

As time progresses, more people will become skeptical that the two can be reconciled. The ‘atheistic scientist’ and ‘religious quack’ stereotypes become self-fulfilling, since a scientific person will find it uncomfortable to mingle in religious communities, and a religious person will feel derided in scientific communities. Again, the less comfortably one group can engage with the other, the more that divide will reinforce itself and the harder it will be to reverse.

Science is a powerful tool that has expanded our realm of knowledge at an unprecedented rate, but it is not all-encompassing. Not everything of importance can be scientifically derived. You cannot deduce experimentally a ‘correct’ value structure, yet most people would agree that it is important for you to spend time considering what you value. I am not suggesting that theism is the only pathway to morality, but I am certainly saying that science alone can tell you nothing about how you should act in the world. Nothing could make that clearer than the historical use of science to maximise destruction and suffering.

Both science and religion are limited in scope. Both are necessary components in society. By viewing them as opposing doctrines, we risk constructing a society where academics are completely detached from broader society, and where piety requires sacrificing intellect. We cannot treat the two categories as being at war, nor even as utterly distinct, because they each have implications for the other. They both have contributions to make which cannot always be separated out. We have to hold them both in our purview, accept their shared history, and take what they each have to offer. Science has a place in religion, and religion has a place in science.

Photo by Tony Sebastian on Unsplash.

Footnotes

1 If you don’t already know about these guys, boy are you in for a wild ride.

2 To the surveyors, “scientist” meant physicist or biologist. Luckily, I am a physics student, so that sounds like a perfectly fine definition to me (although I’m not completely comfortable being in the same category as biologists).

3 Interestingly (I promise this is the last percentage), religiosity in Taiwanese scientists increased relative to the general population from 44% to 54%.

4 Everyone, can we drop the whole flat Earth thing now? We’ve known it’s round for ages.

5 No, not the TV show. Please stop talking to me about that every time I say I study physics. I am NOT Sheldon.

6 There are plenty of scientifically literate religious people who are able to reconcile these theories with their theologies one way or another (in fact, Georges Lemaître himself was a Catholic priest). How they do so is a story for another time, but suffice to say that these theories in no way sound the death knell of religion as some claim.

References

[1] Stats NZ, “Religious affiliation (total responses) by age group and sex, for the census usually resident population count, 2006, 2013, and 2018 Censuses (RC, TA, SA2, DHB),” Available at http://nzdotstat.stats.govt.nz/wbos/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=TABLECODE8289 (2021/07/15).

[2] figure.nz, “Most common religious affiliations in New Zealand,” Available at https://figure.nz/chart/RfmHYb2IsMMrn9OC(2021/07/15).

[3] Ecklund, Elaine Howard, David R. Johnson, Christopher P. Scheitle, Kirstin R. W. Matthews, and Steven W. Lewis. “Religion among Scientists in International Context: A New Study of Scientists in Eight Regions.” Socius, (January 2016). https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023116664353.

[4] Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Cyrillic alphabet.” Encyclopedia Britannica, May 20, 2020. https:// www.britannica.com/topic/Cyrillic-alphabet.

[5] Wikipedia contributors, “Gutenberg Bible,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gutenberg_Bible&oldid=1034745315 (accessed July 15, 2021).

[6] F. Bacon, The Major Works: Including New Atlantis and the Essays. Oxford University Press, 2002.