Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes (Part Four)

Method: What We Talk About When We Talk About the History of Science and Religion

As we have already begun to see, on nearly all fronts in the historiography of science in the last half-decade, the metaphor has been challenged as so misguided, one would not be far off to describe it as “not even wrong.”  What is meant by this somewhat elusive phrase is that the “Warfare” metaphor has not just been challenged by showing that religion and science in their historical aspects were often much more amenable to one another—indeed, even in harmony and mutual enrichment.  At a more fundamental level the historiographical challenge notes that to speak of ‘science’ or ‘religion’ as if they were somehow trans-historical and independent entities that might bear a positive or negative relationship to each other is to already have one’s interpretation implicated by later history, in which these categories were constructed, and to project back in time a set of concerns typical to our own age.  “We must constantly remind ourselves,” says Ronald Numbers, that ‘science,’ ‘Christianity,’ ‘theology,’ and ‘the church’ are abstractions rather than really existing things,” and it is a serious mistake to allow our abstractions to become absolute objects serving as placeholders for scholarly historical analysis.[1]

Francis Bacon (1521-1626), to use but one example—and we do well to remember Bacon is often called the “father of the scientific method”—recommended specific forms of empirical and inductive procedure to study nature  precisely because of his estimation of the fragile and easily deluded nature of mankind due to Adam’s fall, and its epistemological and anthropological consequences for all of Adam’s descendants.  This reading of the Fall, for Bacon, closed all rationalistic methods that would attempt—like Descartes—to proceed a priori by merely reasoning one’s way to truth.  What was needed was a laborious and pedantic empirical coercion of nature to divulge her secrets, so that mankind might begin to regain the dominion over the earth that Adam lost.  This vision for scientific advance was thus also driven by a particular eschatological vision.  In the epitaph to Bacon’s Great Instauration reads: “Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia,” [Many shall go to and fro, and knowledge shall increase].  You may recognize this as coming from futuristic vision of Daniel 12:4.  As Harrison notes, in Bacon’s time this was not to lead to a passive piety lying in wait, rather “Godly individuals were to be active participants in history, directing their efforts towards the establishment of those conditions that would usher in the final age of the world.”[2]  

Now, whatever one makes of this type of reasoning, it should at least be clear when it is put this way, the question: “was he doing theology, or science?” or “was this an act of religion, or scientific method?” does not even seem to register in our categories.  But we assume the validity of our categories to such an extent that we have become forgetful that they themselves are not transhistorical norms, but ones whose shapes bear all the marks of history.  As Harrison puts it toward the end of his book, “the twentieth century witnessed the final stages of the secularization of scientific knowledge, along with the development of a degree of historical amnesia about the role of religion in its early modern origins.”[3]  Of course, this does not mean that Bacon saw no distinction between his theological concern with the Fall, and the empirical method prescribed because of it.  Far from it.  The point is, rather, that the distinction he did see—along his erstwhile rejection of metaphysics for empiricism—does not obviously map onto science and religion or their conflict as we presume we know them. As Harrison summarizes elsewhere:

Once the constructed nature of the categories [of science and religion] is taken into consideration, putative relationships between science and religion may turn out to be artifacts of the categories themselves.  Whether science and religion are in conflict, or are independent entities, or are in dialogue, or are essentially integrated enterprises, will be determined by exactly how one draws the boundaries within the broad limits given by the constructs.[4] 

Paolo Rossi in the same vein writes that historians of science frequently concern themselves with “an imaginary object” which is constructed from an ahistorical absolutization of a variety of texts and “heterogenous disciplines.”[5]  “This is … an inadequate picture,” writes John Hedley Brooke, “not least because it leaves out the manner in which scientific practice [in the historical record] may depend upon social or economic [or theological] reasons why one project may take priority over another.”  Thus for these and other reasons

There has been a shift [in historiography] away from the image of scientific knowledge as completely autonomous, gradually accumulating and floating above the sites in which they took shape.  One effect of this shift of sensibility has been to create a greater interest in religious parameters, because they, after all, have been constitutive elements in many of the contexts in which science has been pursued. … An approach that historians have found useful here is to ask what function the theology may be playing within the science and vice-versa.  In either case attention must also be paid to historical context.[6]

        

Similar claims have been put forward regarding what exactly constitutes the realm of “religion,” however.  As Peter Harrison puts it: “While it is commonly acknowledged that modern science had its origins in the seventeenth century, it is less frequently appreciated that modern religion, too, emerged at this time.”[7]  Here the pioneering work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith took the lead: “The concept ‘religion’ then, in the West has evolved.  Its evolution has included a long-range development that we may term a process of reification: mentally making religion into a thing, gradually coming to conceive it as an objective, systematic entity.”[8]  This undoubtedly sounds obscure to modern ears (perhaps equally as obscure as the fact that “science” has not always existed).  But the claim is both important, and backed by an impressive swell of scholarship in this area.[9]  For if two entities “religion” and “science” have been in conflict, we would do well to be able to tightly define the arena that contains the “religious.”  But the paradoxical truth is the very act of attempting to tightly define the religious is itself implicated by historical permutations:

If we take the history of Christianity as an example we can gain some impression of what was lost to the tradition in the early modern transformation from ‘Christian faith’ to ‘the Christian religion.’  The first expression had referred to a faith which was Christ-like; the second denoted a religion—a set of beliefs—supposedly preached by Christ.  The Christian life, in this new conception, was less about emulating Christ than it was about giving intellectual assent to the doctrines that he had preached.  The concept of revelation underwent a parallel transformation.  Whereas God was thought once to have revealed himself in Christ, now he revealed doctrines.[10]

‘Religion’ like ‘science,’ has a history, and this history has a crucial bearing on claims made about its relationship with other human activities and forms of knowledge.  There is no suggestion in this historical analysis that doctrinal commitments play no legitimate role in religious life or that religious beliefs should be regarded as ‘non-cognitive.’  It is rather that the concept ‘religion’ leads to an elevation of the importance of propositional claims and that the subsequent comparison of ‘religions’ or of ‘religion’ and ‘science’ similarly promotes the idea that these enterprise have essences which are to be identified solely with their cognitive content.[11]

        Which is to say our identification of what “counts” as religion or what “counts” as science is obviously a vital ingredient to our ability to construct a historical narrative about them.  “In other word” says William Cavanaugh, “religion [as a categorization] is not a neutral, scientific tool, but is applied under certain circumstances in which the configurations of power are relevant.”[12] Dubuisson sums up the historical dilemma: “With the history of religions and its central notion, religion, what is in question is, in fact, nothing more or less than certain pretensions of modern Western science to conceive of humankind and the world according to codes that it has elaborated and to points of reference that it has fixed.”  He continues: “is Western anthropology, religious anthropology in particular, in its quest for the Other, and for our very humanity, capable of discovering anything but itself—that is, anything other than its own categories and its own way of conceiving the world?”[13]   And the sociologist Charles Taylor agrees:

[All the various subtraction narratives of secularization] make a crucial move which they present as a ‘discovery,’ something we ‘come to see’ when certain conditions [like the Scientific Revolution, or the Death of God] are met.  In all cases, this move only looks like a discovery within the frame of a newly constructed understanding of ourselves, our predicament and our identity.  The element of ‘discovery’ seems unchallengeable, because the underlying construction is pushed out of sight and forgotten.  … All these accounts ‘naturalize’ the features of the modern, liberal identity.  They cannot see it as one, historically constructed understanding of human agency among others.[14]

We therefore must be attentive to this other facet deconstructing the Warfare Thesis: not only has religion and theology played many different roles in relation to science, in some sense the juxtaposition “Science vs. Religion” or “Science vs. theology” is already part of another, deeper narrative of secularization in which “religion” as a categorization has been invented (even if often unintentionally) and so situated in relation to “secular” phenomenon like science, economics, and politics.[15]  

Indeed the very origins of the terminological pairing “science and religion” tells part of the story of their perceived antithesis, as the emerging professionalization of science attempted to distinguish itself and began gaining a social prestige previously reserved for clergy.  This is, in fact, in large part what the Huxley-Wilberforce debate was predicated upon: the shifting power from Anglican clergy as the intellectual elite (whom Wilberforce represented), to the emerging class of specialized “scientists” (Huxley, though among whom were both ranks of believers and unbelievers).[16]

This reevaluation of “religious contexts” and “scientific contexts” (and how elusive those phrases may be) has also caused a sort of cascade reaction regarding many cherished tropes of history and our preconceptions of it.  In the next section we will see one example of this, namely how this revised historiography also begins to break down “periods” of history that are often separated by typologies that in one way or another invoke science and religion to help do their sorting.  But if wider contexts now have to be taken into consideration, just how—or in what way—was the Scientific Revolution, revolutionary?  Or, were the Dark Ages really that dark?  The Middle-Ages that … nondescript?  These questions may seem pedantic, or the sole property of specialists.  This is far from the case, however.  Much as with the Huxley-Wilberforce debate, our judgments on periodization in turn serve as pictures buttressing our general outlines of what counts as plausible interaction between two idealized types of discourse, religion and science.  The epithet “Medieval” and “Dark Ages” are of course both pejorative, but have a complex network of other negative associations—dogma, organized religion, superstition, and the like.  No one wants to be Medieval, even if we have never investigated what exactly that would mean.  And of course, science is an eminently good thing, because it helps save us from those barbaric “Dark Ages.”  We briefly turn to these questions now.

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[1] Ronald Numbers, “Medieval Science and Religion,” in Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, 57.

[2] Cf. the study of Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 187.

[3] Ibid., 245.

[4] Peter Harrison, “’Science’ and ‘Religion’: Constructing the Boundaries,” in Thomas Dixon, Geoffrey Cantor, and Stephen Pumfrey, eds., Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 39. Cf. Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), which unfortunately was not released in time to be used here.

[5] Quoted in Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 8.

[6] Brooke and Cantor, Reconstructing Nature, 23-26.

[7] Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, 272.

[8] Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (London: SPCK, 1978), 51.

[9] William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: The Invention of a Modern Concept (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale, 2012); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

[10] Harrison, “Science and Religion,” 33.

[11] Ibid., 34.

[12] Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, 101.

[13] Dubuisson, Western Construction of Religion, 6.

[14] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007), 571.

[15] Cf. Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, 19: “The modern discourse on religion and religions was from the very beginning—that is to say, inherently, if also ironically—a discourse of secularization.”

[16] Lindberg and Numbers, “Introduction,” in God & Nature, 8f.