The History of Faith and Science: An Interview With Dr. Peter Harrison
I have been completely fixated upon this scholarship for the past fews years, and as some of you know I have signed a book contract with Cascade Books to come out with a summary of this myth busting scholarship in the form of Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes: The Curious Tale of How the Conflict of Science and Christianity Was Written Into History. One of my major inspirations in this area has been Dr. Peter Harrison, who is one of the major pioneers in this area of research and in fact kindly wrote a lengthy endorsement for my book. Harrison holds a D.Litt. (Doctor of Letters) from the University of Oxford, a Ph.D. from the University of Queensland, and Masters degrees from Yale and Harvard. For several years he was the Andreos-Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford, and was also the Director of the Ian Ramsey Center for Science and Religion there.
In 2003 he was awarded the Centenary Medal, and in 2011 he was awarded the prestigious Gifford lectureship which became his book The Territories of Science and Religion. Currently, he is an Australian Laureate Fellow and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. He is the author of numerous books, including the aforementioned Territories, Religion and Religions in the English Enlightenment, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science, and is editor of numerous works including The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion, Science Without God? Rethinking the History of Scientific Naturalism, and Narratives of Secularization. I recently had the pleasure of conducting a short interview with Peter, which I have reproduced in part here. The fuller interview is set to come out with the journal Cultural Encounters at the end of the year. Enjoy!
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Derrick Peterson [DP]: Peter, thank you so much for taking the time for this interview. It is a huge honor as your work has had a major influence on my thinking. Amazingly, it has already been three years since The Territories of Science and Religion was published. The book has been very well received, and has caused quite a stir in discussions on faith and science. Since that time, what has been the most surprising feedback you have received, either positive or negative, on your work? Has anything arisen that has led you to modify any of your positions as stated in the book?
Peter Harrison [PH]: Thank you for your kind words about my work. It’s good to talk with you.
Generally, I have been very pleased with reactions to Territorieswhich, as you say, has mostly been well received. Importantly, even those readers who disagree with parts of the book have typically understood its central arguments.
Because the book had its origins in a series of lectures with extensive question and answer sessions, I already had some sense of the range of likely reactions to it. So there haven’t been any big surprises in the feedback to the published version of the lectures.
If I had to identify one contention that has been an issue for some readers, it would be my suggestion that Christianity should not be understood primarily as a ‘religion’ constituted by beliefs and practices. In the book I argue that the idea of religion does not fully emerge until the seventeenth century. It follows that conceptualizing early Christianity, and indeed medieval Christianity, as a ‘religion’ is anachronistic. The very first Christians did not imagine themselves to be adherents of a religion, but rather thought of themselves as members of a new kind of ‘race’, or as followers of a new way of life. Medieval Christians, similarly, thought of themselves as members of the Church, participation in which was mediated through the sacraments. Belief was often implicit. The idea that Christianity was primarily about explicitly assenting to a set of beliefs came much later, after the modern invention of the idea of religion.
A few readers—equally divided between those sympathetic to religion and those not so much—have taken exception to this claim, asserting that Christianity was always primarily about believing particular propositions. In support of this they point to the importance of creeds, Church councils, and the policing of heresy (where heresy is understood to be the holding of false beliefs). While there is plenty of evidence in the book to support my own position on this, it’s clear that I need more examples and evidence for this claim to be fully convincing.
DP: In many ways, Territories seems to be a summation and development of your past publications up to this point, and all of your work comes together in my estimation at a very high level of synthesis. Since you started your major publications with your work on the notion of religion in 1990, did you have an idea of a research trajectory ending up at something like what you published with Territories?Or were there a few “aha!” moments along the way that substantially set your path of research over the years?
PH: I didn’t have any idea when I started out that I would end up where I am now. So, yes, plenty of ‘aha’ moments along the way. One was when I realized that the problem of religious pluralism—that religions make mutually incompatible propositional claims—was similar in form to the problem of science-religion conflict. In both cases, I would argue, the apparent conflict arises not out of the phenomena themselves, but out of the way in which we conceptualise them. So the solution lies not in attempting adjudicate between competing propositions, but in coming to understand that we should not be conceptualising religions or sciences primarily in terms of some propositional content. The general approach to the problem, to use the words of Wittgenstein, is to understand it as ‘a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language’.
Another ‘aha’ moment was when I discovered that Thomas Aquinas classifies both ‘science’ (scientia) and ‘religion’ (religio) as virtues (rather sets of beliefs and practices). This not only provided additional confirmation of my contention that we now understand science and religion very differently from our medieval predecessors, but also gave me a way of seeing that there might be a common explanation to changes in our understandings of both ‘science’ and ‘religion’. Simply put, one element of that explanation is the early modern demise of virtue that Alasdair MacIntyre has so lucidly set out.
DP: While your work goes a long way to deconstruct the so-called historical “conflict thesis” between science and Christianity, the notion of just how complex the interactions have been between science and Christianity can also undermine—or at least mitigate—stronger apologetic claims regarding Christianity’s unique contributions to science by those like Stanley Jaki. What advice would you give to Christian apologists and systematic theologians attempting to integrate your work into their projects? Given the emphasis on complexity in recent historiography, your work included, is it possible for systematic theologians to distill normative judgments on how theology and practice should relate to knowledge of the natural world in the sciences? In your estimation what is/are the biggest mistake(s) that theologians make utilizing the historical records of Christianity and science that you would encourage theologians and others to account for in future work?
PH: There’s a lot in that question. For the most part I have let others draw their own conclusions about the implications of my historical work (and I would add that I’m neither an apologist nor a theologian). One general message would be that what sometimes seem to be acute problems that science generates for Christianity will appear in an entirely different light when we consider the historically contingent nature of the terms in which the problem is expressed.
As for stronger claims about Christian contributions to the foundations of modern science, I have argued for this myself and am in broad agreement with the claim, provided that it is sufficiently nuanced. But I am somewhat ambivalent about what follows. On the one hand, as you rightly point out, it is a necessary corrective to the pervasive myth of inevitable conflict between science and religion. But on the other hand, this very close relation between Christianity and early modern natural philosophy led to a particular style of natural theology that in my view is problematic. It contributed to the idea that Christianity needed support from arguments that ultimately relied upon scientific warrant. The ‘design argument’ is a prominent example. The close relationship with science also contributed to the construction of a new propositionally oriented understanding of religion, so that science and religion were, to some extent, created in each others image. This enabled not only dialogue, but also conflict.
I would add that some contemporary science-religion dialogue is very much one-way traffic based on assumptions that can shade into an implicit scientism. It is assumed that science is pretty much OK as is, and that theology needs to do all of the accommodating. It can be forgotten that the sciences are fallible human activities that have been, and continue to be, harnessed to undesirable ends. Moreover, the clear lesson from history is that the content of science is in constant flux, and it is important not to conflate the usefulness of science with its capacity to make ultimate truth claims. So harnessing Christianity to some present set of scientific doctrines, or even harmonizing it with them, can be a fraught business.
Finally, I would say that history offers us instructive examples of how people of faith in the past confronted the natural world and the construction of knowledge about it. It thus helps us to imagine alternative historical trajectories, and different ways of thinking about science-religion relationships.
DP: Your recent research as I understand it has focused on variations of the “secularization thesis,” resulting in the excellent Narratives of Secularization volume, which you recently edited. Are you working on a monograph on the subject as well? As a budding theologian and historian, I encounter a lot of theological works that feel a great burden to justify continuing to do theology under the conditions of a “secular” age of disenchantment, atheism, etc. I get the sense from the essays in Narratives of Secularization, however, along with work done by Charles Taylor, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Jason Josephson-Storm, Louis Dupré and others, that in part the supposedly “universal” conditions of our secular age are in fact not at all universal or natural, but caused by historiographical and narrative “framings” that don’t just describe but actively try to reinforce certain senses of secularity. If that is often the case (and please push back if this needs nuancing or correction), to what extent does theology need to operate under the conditions of secularity? And vice-versa, if what you and others argue regarding the forgotten influence of theological ideas and practices on the formation of secular disciplines are true, to what extent do supposedly “secular” disciplines need to take account of theology today, including potential vestigial theological elements that may or may not still linger within non-theological disciplines? Could you share with us a major takeaway you have had with your research on secularization the past few years?
PH: I do hope to produce a monograph on science and secularization at some future moment, but that list of potential books is a long one. I fully agree that much contemporary thought assumes ‘natural’ or universal categories and inevitable historical trajectories, whereas in fact many concepts that we imagine to be universal are historically conditioned, and the historical path that led to the modern world has been a highly contingent one. The fundamental framing narrative of the modern West is a simple narrative of progress. Secularization stories, the science-religion conflict myth, the vaunted superiority of scientific naturalism are all sub-plots of the progress narrative. (Arguably, that narrative is itself a heretical version of Christian eschatology, but I won’t go into that here.)
Insofar as the secularization myth remains pervasive, it is understandable that some theologians feel the need to take the secular condition as their starting point, and I’m not opposed to that. But as you rightly point out, implicit theological assumptions underpin secularity. The general question goes to what Hans Blumenberg referred to as ‘the legitimacy of the modern age’. For Blumenberg, the modern secular age has its own, independent legitimacy. Against this I would argue (with Karl Löwith and others), that in fact the putative independence of many modern institutions from theological considerations is largely a mirage. Any conversation between theology and other modern forms of knowledge should therefore begin with a careful exposure of the hidden metaphysical assumptions of the latter. This, in turn, calls for a critical debunking of the various myths of modernity, and a careful tracing back of the intellectual genealogies of the modern disciplines—philosophy, along with the natural and social sciences. This may uncover even more fundamental conflicts but, equally, might point to surprising and unsuspected convergences.
The specific case that I am presently working on is scientific naturalism. The assumption is that the superiority of ‘naturalism’ and naturalistic explanation is just an obvious implication of scientific progress. In fact, when we examine the relevant history we find little to support this claim. ‘Naturalism’ turns out to be a nineteenth-century invention based upon a highly dubious distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’. This modern story of the triumph of naturalism is just another facet of the master narrative of progress.
DP: Finally, I work with many scientists, theologians, and others who are very keen on advancing faith and science dialogue by utilizing sociology, psychology, social-psychology of religion, or by delving in to evolutionary accounts of religion, and so on. But a major implication of your work is that since “religion” is an artificial and historically constructed category there is no such “object” to submit to these kinds of analysis. In Territoriesin particular, you use the example of David Sloan Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedralas one such misguided attempted. This is understandably a hard pill for many to swallow, as they not only hope to reconcile science and faith in this manner, but sometimes their entire discipline receives some pushback by your historical analyses. How do you typically interact with your colleagues in these fields? Are there aspects of these approaches that are useful, or given the chimerical nature of religion does sociology of religion (for example) need major rethinking?
PH: It is important to acknowledge some of the excellent work being conducted in the social sciences in the science-religion sphere. I am convinced that the contribution of the social sciences is a crucial one, and in my own work am trying increasingly to engage with sociologists. To take an example, the question of how ‘framing narratives’ such as the conflict myth presently operate to forge social identities is one that needs the expertise of social scientists. We know that arguments and evidence don’t have much traction for some populations, and social scientists are out best bet for understanding why.
Another interesting finding is that of all the academic disciplines, social scientists are the least likely to be religious, and there is some evidence that they are most likely to subscribe to the conflict narrative. This, I believe, tells us something interesting about evolution of the social sciences, and their historical mission.
To your question, it is true that many social scientists are prone to assume the naturalness and universality of some of their objects of study, including religion. What follows is that casual power is attributed to it (‘religion causes violence’, e.g.). At the same time there is a search for the natural basis of religion (the ‘God gene’, ‘Hyperactive Agency Detection Devices’, and so on). In my view, these are a little bit like investigating the nature of ‘phlogiston’ or ‘the aether’, and attributing causal power to them. (Both of these were one objects of respectable scientific enquiry, which later succumbed to the weight of empirical evidence against them.) Not only am I unconvinced by quests for to discover the natural basis of religion, but even investigation of apparently atomic components of religion—such as ‘belief in the supernatural’ —are deeply problematic. Both belief’ and ‘supernatural’ turn out to be the conceptual products of a particular moment in modern Western history, and hence any assumed cross-cultural universality of ‘belief in the supernatural’ is likely to be a mirage. All of this affords us good reasons to improve the channels of communication between historians and social scientists who are asking interesting big questions about religion.
DP: Peter, thanks again so much for your time, it has been a great pleasure.
Comments
Thanks for the kind words, I enjoyed my discussion with Peter and am very happy to hear you found it helpful! And of course I would be delighted if you pick up my book at the end of the year when it is out!