Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives

"This book is a classic. In a way, this was the work that articulated what’s often referred to as ‘the complexity thesis’. It opposes simplistic conflict narratives and indeed simplistic harmony narratives that say that everything was always sweetness and light between religion and science. By looking very carefully at specific historical episodes, Brooke shows that the story is really complicated. We have some instances of conflict, but we also have episodes where it’s clear that religious factors were important for getting certain scientific views up and running, by motivating scientists, by providing essential presuppositions, and so on. And for at least some of time, science and religion just don’t have that much to do with each other. I think much of the story in the last couple of centuries has been that they go their own paths independently with only a few points of tension. “We have some instances of conflict, but we also have episodes where it’s clear that religious factors were important for getting certain scientific views up and running” John Brooke was not the only person to make this sort of argument. At the University of Wisconsin, two historians—David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers—had a 1986 collection of essays called God and Nature that also ran a similar thesis. So, a number of historians had been coming up with this notion of the complexity of science-religion relations, but John’s book is the authoritative statement of this notion of historical complexity. I think so. My own view is that there is more to the harmony story than to the conflict story. If we ask why science emerged in the West when it did, religion gives us much of the answer to that question. If you want to know what the key cultural ingredients are needed to get something like a scientific culture up and running and, crucially, give it social legitimacy, religion provides an important element of that. But there are crude versions of the harmony story that I think are problematic as the conflict narratives. I also think you’re correct to point out that John’s work—and the complexity thesis in general—have sometimes been read as an advocating of harmony by those who want to keep arguing for the conflict story. But they are not. An example of this would be Yves Gingras’ recent book Science and Religion: An Impossible Dialogue , where he accuses historians of being religious apologists. That’s complete nonsense, but it’s indicative of the fact that simply challenging the conflict myth often leads to the perception of necessarily advocating some sort of harmony. It’s partly a descriptive claim because very often science and religion go their own way. But you can’t avoid the fact that if the propositional claims of the various religions are true, then empirically they must make some difference to how the world is. There will necessarily be some touchpoints in that case because science deals with the empirical facts. Unless a religion is restricted purely to the realm of the moral, it will make at least some substantive claims about empirical reality. The independence view seems quite attractive, but it’s not quite right. And in someone like Stephen Jay Gould’s view, science takes what it wants and whatever is left over is dealt with by religion. So it’s not without its problems, not least because there are points of contact that can’t be avoided. That’s right. Part of the reason for that is that the contingencies of history and the fact that scientific theories change over time. Taking the long view, you can’t predict in advance that science and religion will always be independent and there’s never any possibility of contact. Historically, it depends on what scientists might be claiming at a particular time."