Ian Barbour's Four Categories of the Science-Religion Relationship: A Brief Critique
Take the fantastic and path-setting work of Ian Barbour as an example. An American scholar, Barbour has been credited by many of in effect inventing the field of studying the relationship between science and religion. Starting his work in the 1960’s, Barbour’s attempts to understand the many varieties of relationship between science and religion—not to mention his tireless advocacy for dialogue and integration—stood out all the more in a decade where most saw nothing but conflict and the final defeat of religion’s decadence in the face of scientific progress. It will seem bizarrely antiquated to us today, but we must recall it was in that same decade where sociologists, philosophers, and others were claiming that even within a generation religion would completely die out because of science and technology. Such startlingly naïve uses of what is often referred to the “secularization thesis” have since become passé, as we will talk about later. Yet, Barbour must be given due visionary credit. To imagine any relations other than conflict was already a Herculean feat.
While Barbour’s writing is vast, he is perhaps most well-known for his fourfold typology of religion and science relationships.[1] Religion and science, argues Barbour, can be in conflict, in independence, in dialogue, and ultimately integrated so closely they become virtually indistinguishable. While undoubtedly aware of certain limitations, Barbour insists that he is outlining these categories “to give a systematic overview of the main options today.”[2] They are thus considered more or less exhaustive. Nor are these simply timeless typologies, but rather Barbour puts them into a sort of chronological sequence, and argues that both religion and science tend to proceed from conflict with each other, to independence, to dialogue, and then ultimately to integration. Barbour is admirably attempting to accelerate the process of movement into dialogue, and ultimately, its blossoming into integration.
Ironically, though, this undeniably powerful, user-friendly, and on the surface more or less neutral typology in fact unwittingly inscribes into itself and assumes categories that were constructed by those creating the conflict narrative itself. This is because while Barbour is certainly aware of some of the histories involved, his historical investigations are driven more by his typology than vice-versa. He starts, for example, with conflict, and so it is unsurprising that Galileo and Darwin are the examples to which he turns. Yet, to elaborate these historical episodes as instances of “conflict” is to miss, as Geoffrey Cantor and Chris Kenny have pointed out, that the very notion of what a conflict could be, itself underwent a transformation. A transformation driven precisely by those promoting the warfare or conflict thesis around the time of Darwin.[3]
This seems obscure, no doubt, but bear with it for a second. Originally, even up through the mid-19thcentury, conflictwas used exclusively to refer to warfare, that is, real battles, collisions, slaughter. It could also be used metaphorically to describe one’s internal spiritual conflict—say between one’s flesh and spirit, between one’s own good and evil. Which is to say, conflict was primarily envisioned as either internal to persons or between persons. It thus remained at its best a rich, contextually sensitive concept by implicit necessity. For, to describe a person’s internal conflict, or the conflict between groups, a huge array of personal life history, or economic, political, and social maneuvering also had to be marshalled. When John William Draper—one of the main proponents of the conflict thesis—wrote his A History of the Conflict Between Science and Religion(1874), this person-oriented notion of conflict with its many other shades and hues transformed into the notion that ideas—those notoriously slippery, free-floating things—could themselves, without the messy mediations, caveats, and complexities that attend both history and human life, conflict.[4]This was, it seems, a historical first for the word. And it has cast a silent shadow on the use of “religion” and “science” in both ordinary and academic conversations ever since.
This notion that ideas could themselves somehow conflict, as if Plato’s realm of the eternal Ideas could go to war, is not some isolated point. It reflected a broader trend saturating those who were responsible for the creation of the warfare thesis like Draper: namely, treating both religion and science as abstract concepts or more or less free-floating, ideal types. Suddenly, an entire array of more or less unrelated scenarios could be linked together to narrate the tale of the epic clash of these idealizations of science and religion through history. The burning of the Library of Alexandria? Oh, that was the Christian religion! The murder of the Greek philosopher Hypatia (clumsily retold recently in Alejandro Amenábar’s movie, Agora)? Religion. Galileo’s persecution? Religion. The Scopes Trial in the 20th century American south? Oh, that was again just religion, too. Now, as we shall see in coming chapters these stories are also full of errors and misrepresentations. But in some sense these are also an effect of the categories used. In the midst of what are in fact complex, messy, and often hard to understand scenarios, we have, through summoning this pristine quintessence, “Religion,” gained the ability to precisely locate it and scry its causality in history apart from the whole course of human lives that actually constitute it. As such, even things that turn out to be incorrect or skewed are easier to accept because of the presuppositions of our constructed categories. Of course Christians, who hated Greek science, would kill Hypatia. Of course they opposed Galileo. And so on.
“Legend is at work here: or, a measure of illusion,” says Owen Chadwick, one of the great religious historians of the twentieth century. “The conflict [of science and religion] was hypostatized”—that is, given its own life as concepts apart from historical actors and contexts—"Science and Religion were blown up into balloon duelists, Science containing all knowledge, Religion containing no knowledge, and the two set side by side, with know-nothing using sabre to keep know-all from his place.” When these categories floated free of their contextual moorings, they could slide down and back to color our memorials of science and religion past: “it became possible to read back the antipathy throughout history, and see … [the] duel through centuries, Science invented by the Macedonian campaigns of Alexander the Great, Christianity suppressing the schools of Alexandria which were schools of Science, Church putting earth at the center of the universe and Galileo proving it was not …”[5]
Though it is only a piece of a broader, much more complex story, the point for now is that our notions of religion and science as we use them today—even in cases trying to declare their harmony—are in part artifacts passed down to us from the initial 19th-century gambit to prove their perennial war down through time. Thus, to describe one potential relationship as conflict as Barbour does is not only to foist an anachronistic term upon Galileo and even Darwin that they would not have recognized. Nor is it merely to allow the categories to warp our understanding of, say, the Galileo affair, or the rise of evolutionary theory. Just as importantly, it is to allow those who are historically responsible for the warfare thesis to set the methodological baseline for Barbour’s models for relationships today. “To put the matter another way,” write Cantor and Kenny, “although ultimately rejected, the conflict thesis has set Barbour’s agenda for categorizing the ways that science and religion relate.” For, we should remember, Barbour is proposing his other categories—independence, dialogue, integration—precisely as foils against the warfare thesis, which is nevertheless taken as the assumed starting point. As such a number of assumptions of the nature, limits, methods, and so on of both science and religion crafted in the warfare thesis migrate also into attempts to overcome it. Barbour’s solutions—however powerful, however initially useful they seem—do not escape this origin. “This point applies not just to Barbour, but also to many other religious writers whose understanding of science-religion relationships,” have, so to speak, “been forged in the fires of their enemies.”[6]
Thus history plays directly into our contemporary theories about science and religion. Our neat categories can often obscure how religion and science even today combine in fascinating ways. Indeed a reoccurring theme through this book is that far from true war between science and religion, it is actually a conflict between different harmonizers with different visions of religion and science. And this even among the loudest of atheists. In his landmark essay “Darwin Triumphant: Darwinism as Universal Truth,” for example the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins lays out his manifesto that Darwinism is a “universal and timeless” principle that is capable of being translated into all spheres of life. In comparison, such narrow worldviews as Marxism are “parochial and ephemeral”![7]Far from a representative element within science, Darwin is epitomized here as a messiah, and Darwinism is the religion of this brave new kingdom. Dawkins’ comrade in arms Daniel Dennett notes that Darwinism eliminates all competing metaphysical notions and so serves Dawkins’ “Universal Truth” as a “universal acid” that cannot be contained, spilling outward into every avenue of consciousness, value, and existence. It inexorably melts all of their ornamentation down until nothing remains but the truth of their Darwinian origins.[8]Darwin, it seems, has torn the veil in two. Our past conceptual sins can now be nailed to the cross of evolution. And we beasts all shouted, Hallelujah!
Science properly so-called even by the definitions of Dawkins and Dennett themselves, I think it is fair to say, has been left behind at this point. And it is no small matter that it is thesevisions of the universal philosophy of evolutionary thought that are reacted against by many religious figures. But, when they do so, would it not be more proper to describe this as a clash of religion vs. religion? Or better, a clash of different visions of harmony between religion and science, different versions of melding them into one more complex vision? Of course Dawkins and Dennett would no doubt snort at the thought they are advocates of a sort of religion. Yet the ascetic regime of peering behind the veil to find truth, the religious awe and wonder both have of the world—a world that they repeatedly tell us has no intrinsic meaning—makes one think quite otherwise.
Whatever their love for scientific objectivity, their passions and justifications for it are supercharged with grand visions of the world, habits that orient the body and the mind to a true reality, even little imprecatory prayers they must constantly pray in the midst of their books on science against that bogeyman religion to keep it at bay. Franz Kafka once wrote the humorous observation of a religious ceremony in his essay “Reflections in Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way” that “Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalice dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again; finally, it can be reckoned upon beforehand and becomes part of the ceremony.” So too, has religion become part of the ceremonies of science. Science never looks so pure, so clear, or so true, as when it is held up against our assumingly insane, evil, or simply inept religious neighbors and ancestors. And so, religion is kept as the chalice-drinker that must always be shooed off, and becomes part of the ceremony of the presentation of the religious awe invoked by supposedly objective, neutral, facts. Historically, too, their religious-scientific view of evolution has deep precedent. As the atheist historian of science, evolutionist, and expert on the history of Darwinism Michael Ruse writes, “evolutionary thinking generally over the past 300 years of its existence, and Darwinian thinking in particular … has taken on the form and role of religion.”[9] To be sure, this religion of evolution touted by Dawkins, Dennett, and many others contains any number of elements of the science of evolution. But the science of evolution is but a thin and unassuming skeleton compared to the corpulent metaphysical frames rigged to it by these popular apologists. Like Frankenstein’s monster, it is little wonder many recoil in horror with pitchforks and torches when asked to accept such a saggy and patchworked abomination pretending to universal philosophy.
Our categories often blind us to these sorts of combinations, however. Our categories, at first spectacles that allow us to see, fog with use and age and the wear and tear of habits. Yet,
While Barbour’s writing is vast, he is perhaps most well-known for his fourfold typology of religion and science relationships.[1] Religion and science, argues Barbour, can be in conflict, in independence, in dialogue, and ultimately integrated so closely they become virtually indistinguishable. While undoubtedly aware of certain limitations, Barbour insists that he is outlining these categories “to give a systematic overview of the main options today.”[2] They are thus considered more or less exhaustive. Nor are these simply timeless typologies, but rather Barbour puts them into a sort of chronological sequence, and argues that both religion and science tend to proceed from conflict with each other, to independence, to dialogue, and then ultimately to integration. Barbour is admirably attempting to accelerate the process of movement into dialogue, and ultimately, its blossoming into integration.
Ironically, though, this undeniably powerful, user-friendly, and on the surface more or less neutral typology in fact unwittingly inscribes into itself and assumes categories that were constructed by those creating the conflict narrative itself. This is because while Barbour is certainly aware of some of the histories involved, his historical investigations are driven more by his typology than vice-versa. He starts, for example, with conflict, and so it is unsurprising that Galileo and Darwin are the examples to which he turns. Yet, to elaborate these historical episodes as instances of “conflict” is to miss, as Geoffrey Cantor and Chris Kenny have pointed out, that the very notion of what a conflict could be, itself underwent a transformation. A transformation driven precisely by those promoting the warfare or conflict thesis around the time of Darwin.[3]
This seems obscure, no doubt, but bear with it for a second. Originally, even up through the mid-19thcentury, conflictwas used exclusively to refer to warfare, that is, real battles, collisions, slaughter. It could also be used metaphorically to describe one’s internal spiritual conflict—say between one’s flesh and spirit, between one’s own good and evil. Which is to say, conflict was primarily envisioned as either internal to persons or between persons. It thus remained at its best a rich, contextually sensitive concept by implicit necessity. For, to describe a person’s internal conflict, or the conflict between groups, a huge array of personal life history, or economic, political, and social maneuvering also had to be marshalled. When John William Draper—one of the main proponents of the conflict thesis—wrote his A History of the Conflict Between Science and Religion(1874), this person-oriented notion of conflict with its many other shades and hues transformed into the notion that ideas—those notoriously slippery, free-floating things—could themselves, without the messy mediations, caveats, and complexities that attend both history and human life, conflict.[4]This was, it seems, a historical first for the word. And it has cast a silent shadow on the use of “religion” and “science” in both ordinary and academic conversations ever since.
This notion that ideas could themselves somehow conflict, as if Plato’s realm of the eternal Ideas could go to war, is not some isolated point. It reflected a broader trend saturating those who were responsible for the creation of the warfare thesis like Draper: namely, treating both religion and science as abstract concepts or more or less free-floating, ideal types. Suddenly, an entire array of more or less unrelated scenarios could be linked together to narrate the tale of the epic clash of these idealizations of science and religion through history. The burning of the Library of Alexandria? Oh, that was the Christian religion! The murder of the Greek philosopher Hypatia (clumsily retold recently in Alejandro Amenábar’s movie, Agora)? Religion. Galileo’s persecution? Religion. The Scopes Trial in the 20th century American south? Oh, that was again just religion, too. Now, as we shall see in coming chapters these stories are also full of errors and misrepresentations. But in some sense these are also an effect of the categories used. In the midst of what are in fact complex, messy, and often hard to understand scenarios, we have, through summoning this pristine quintessence, “Religion,” gained the ability to precisely locate it and scry its causality in history apart from the whole course of human lives that actually constitute it. As such, even things that turn out to be incorrect or skewed are easier to accept because of the presuppositions of our constructed categories. Of course Christians, who hated Greek science, would kill Hypatia. Of course they opposed Galileo. And so on.
“Legend is at work here: or, a measure of illusion,” says Owen Chadwick, one of the great religious historians of the twentieth century. “The conflict [of science and religion] was hypostatized”—that is, given its own life as concepts apart from historical actors and contexts—"Science and Religion were blown up into balloon duelists, Science containing all knowledge, Religion containing no knowledge, and the two set side by side, with know-nothing using sabre to keep know-all from his place.” When these categories floated free of their contextual moorings, they could slide down and back to color our memorials of science and religion past: “it became possible to read back the antipathy throughout history, and see … [the] duel through centuries, Science invented by the Macedonian campaigns of Alexander the Great, Christianity suppressing the schools of Alexandria which were schools of Science, Church putting earth at the center of the universe and Galileo proving it was not …”[5]
Though it is only a piece of a broader, much more complex story, the point for now is that our notions of religion and science as we use them today—even in cases trying to declare their harmony—are in part artifacts passed down to us from the initial 19th-century gambit to prove their perennial war down through time. Thus, to describe one potential relationship as conflict as Barbour does is not only to foist an anachronistic term upon Galileo and even Darwin that they would not have recognized. Nor is it merely to allow the categories to warp our understanding of, say, the Galileo affair, or the rise of evolutionary theory. Just as importantly, it is to allow those who are historically responsible for the warfare thesis to set the methodological baseline for Barbour’s models for relationships today. “To put the matter another way,” write Cantor and Kenny, “although ultimately rejected, the conflict thesis has set Barbour’s agenda for categorizing the ways that science and religion relate.” For, we should remember, Barbour is proposing his other categories—independence, dialogue, integration—precisely as foils against the warfare thesis, which is nevertheless taken as the assumed starting point. As such a number of assumptions of the nature, limits, methods, and so on of both science and religion crafted in the warfare thesis migrate also into attempts to overcome it. Barbour’s solutions—however powerful, however initially useful they seem—do not escape this origin. “This point applies not just to Barbour, but also to many other religious writers whose understanding of science-religion relationships,” have, so to speak, “been forged in the fires of their enemies.”[6]
Thus history plays directly into our contemporary theories about science and religion. Our neat categories can often obscure how religion and science even today combine in fascinating ways. Indeed a reoccurring theme through this book is that far from true war between science and religion, it is actually a conflict between different harmonizers with different visions of religion and science. And this even among the loudest of atheists. In his landmark essay “Darwin Triumphant: Darwinism as Universal Truth,” for example the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins lays out his manifesto that Darwinism is a “universal and timeless” principle that is capable of being translated into all spheres of life. In comparison, such narrow worldviews as Marxism are “parochial and ephemeral”![7]Far from a representative element within science, Darwin is epitomized here as a messiah, and Darwinism is the religion of this brave new kingdom. Dawkins’ comrade in arms Daniel Dennett notes that Darwinism eliminates all competing metaphysical notions and so serves Dawkins’ “Universal Truth” as a “universal acid” that cannot be contained, spilling outward into every avenue of consciousness, value, and existence. It inexorably melts all of their ornamentation down until nothing remains but the truth of their Darwinian origins.[8]Darwin, it seems, has torn the veil in two. Our past conceptual sins can now be nailed to the cross of evolution. And we beasts all shouted, Hallelujah!
Science properly so-called even by the definitions of Dawkins and Dennett themselves, I think it is fair to say, has been left behind at this point. And it is no small matter that it is thesevisions of the universal philosophy of evolutionary thought that are reacted against by many religious figures. But, when they do so, would it not be more proper to describe this as a clash of religion vs. religion? Or better, a clash of different visions of harmony between religion and science, different versions of melding them into one more complex vision? Of course Dawkins and Dennett would no doubt snort at the thought they are advocates of a sort of religion. Yet the ascetic regime of peering behind the veil to find truth, the religious awe and wonder both have of the world—a world that they repeatedly tell us has no intrinsic meaning—makes one think quite otherwise.
Whatever their love for scientific objectivity, their passions and justifications for it are supercharged with grand visions of the world, habits that orient the body and the mind to a true reality, even little imprecatory prayers they must constantly pray in the midst of their books on science against that bogeyman religion to keep it at bay. Franz Kafka once wrote the humorous observation of a religious ceremony in his essay “Reflections in Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way” that “Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalice dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again; finally, it can be reckoned upon beforehand and becomes part of the ceremony.” So too, has religion become part of the ceremonies of science. Science never looks so pure, so clear, or so true, as when it is held up against our assumingly insane, evil, or simply inept religious neighbors and ancestors. And so, religion is kept as the chalice-drinker that must always be shooed off, and becomes part of the ceremony of the presentation of the religious awe invoked by supposedly objective, neutral, facts. Historically, too, their religious-scientific view of evolution has deep precedent. As the atheist historian of science, evolutionist, and expert on the history of Darwinism Michael Ruse writes, “evolutionary thinking generally over the past 300 years of its existence, and Darwinian thinking in particular … has taken on the form and role of religion.”[9] To be sure, this religion of evolution touted by Dawkins, Dennett, and many others contains any number of elements of the science of evolution. But the science of evolution is but a thin and unassuming skeleton compared to the corpulent metaphysical frames rigged to it by these popular apologists. Like Frankenstein’s monster, it is little wonder many recoil in horror with pitchforks and torches when asked to accept such a saggy and patchworked abomination pretending to universal philosophy.
Our categories often blind us to these sorts of combinations, however. Our categories, at first spectacles that allow us to see, fog with use and age and the wear and tear of habits. Yet,
[These grand stories of therelation between science and religion throughout history] are vulnerable because they are selective in their use of evidence. They gloss over the diversity and the complexity of positions taken in the past. Each tends to assume that ‘science’ and ‘religion’ can be given timeless definitions and that there is some inherent, some essential, relationship between them. … Many such attempts have been made in the past to construct an ideal model. The study of history is humbling because it shows how ephemeral most have been. [Thus there is] value in a historical approach if it alerts us to the way in which prior interests, political, metaphysical, and religious, have shaped the models that have been sought. … The point is that there is no single story one can tell about this.[10]
[1]Ian Barbour, Religion and Science (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1997), 77-105.
[2]Barbour, Religion and Science, 77.
[3]Geoffrey Cantor and Chris Kenny, “Barbour’s Fourfold Way: Problems With His Taxonomy of Science-Religion Relationships,” Zygon vol. 36 no.4 (December 2001): 765-781.
[4]Cantor and Kenny, “Barbour’s Fourfold Way,” 766-767.
[5]Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19thCentury (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1975), 162-163
[6]Cantor and Kenny, “Barbour’s Fourfold Way,” 768.
[7]Richard Dawkins, “Darwin Triumphant: Darwinism as Universal Truth,” in Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain, 78-90.
[8]Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 21.
[9]Michael Ruse, Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us About Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), ix.
[10]John Hedley Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 21. See also: John Hedley Brooke, “Religious Belief and the Content of the Sciences,” Osirisvol.16 (2001): 3-28. E.g. 5: “The principle consequence of this historiographical shift is to underline the artificiality of abstracting the ‘science’ and the ‘religion’ from past (and present!) contexts with a view to establishing some notional, unmediated, relations between them. Consequently, when we ask whether it is possible to show that a particular piece of science was shaped by religious belief or a religious belief by science, we have to recognize that the very terms in which we formulate these questions can at best be linguistic crutches—that behind and beyond them lie forms of intellectual life, together with social and political realities of great complexity.”
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