The Territories of Science and Religion

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

The Territories of Science and Religion

How ridiculous are the boundaries of mortals! —Seneca, Natural Questions

The ideas entertained of God by wicked men must be bad, and those of good men most excellent. —Clement of Alexandria, Stromata

Maps and Territories

If a historian were to contend that he or she had discovered evidence of a hitherto unknown war that had broken out in the year 1600 between Israel and Egypt, this claim would be treated with some skepticism. The refutation of this claim would involve simply pointing out that the states of Israel and Egypt did not exist in the early modern period, and that whatever conflicts might have been raging at this time could not on any reasonable interpretation be accurately described as involving a war between Israel and Egypt. Neither would skeptical historians be impressed if their colleague produced medieval maps that indicated the existence of such places as Jerusalem and Alexandria, and included the various topographical features—rivers, deserts, mountains, plains, coastlines—that we currently might include in any description of the modern states of Israel and Egypt (see figure 1). At issue here would be not whether the relevant geographical territory existed then, but whether there were comparable boundaries and self-conscious national identities. Denial of the existence of a sixteenth-century Israel does not entail a denial of the existence of the territory that currently comprises that nation, but rather a denial that the territory was then viewed in a particular light, as something circumscribed by a set of boundaries and informed by particular ideals of nationhood. During this period the territories of what we now know as Israel and Egypt were part of the same thing, namely, the Ottoman Empire. The idea of a medieval Israel and a medieval Egypt could only come about through the mistaken application of our present maps onto past territories.

My suggestion is that something similar is true for the entities "science" and "religion," and more specifically, that many claims about putative historical relationships are confused for much the same reason as claims about a sixteenth-century conflict between Israel and Egypt: that is to say, they involve the distorting projection of our present conceptual maps back onto the intellectual territories of the past. So familiar are the concepts "science" and "religion," and so central to Western culture have been the activities and achievements that are usually labeled "religious" and "scientific," that it is natural to assume that they have been enduring features of the cultural landscape of the West. But this view is mistaken. To be sure, it is true that in the West from the sixth century BC attempts were made to describe the world systematically, to understand the fundamental principles behind natural phenomena, and to provide naturalistic accounts of the causes operating in the cosmos. Yet, as we shall see, these past practices bear only a remote resemblance to modern science. It is also true that almost from the beginning of recorded history many societies have engaged in acts of worship, set aside sacred spaces and times, and entertained beliefs about transcendental realities and proper conduct. But it is only in recent times that these beliefs and activities have been bounded by a common notion "religion," and have been set apart from the "nonreligious" or secular domains of human existence.

In pointing out that "science" and "religion" are concepts of relatively recent coinage, I intend to do more than make a historical claim about the anachronistic application of modern concepts to past eras. What I have in mind is not only to set out the story of how these categories "science" and "religion" emerge in Western consciousness, but also to show how the manner of their emergence can provide crucial insights into their present relations. In much the same way that we can make sense of certain contemporary international conflicts by attending to the historical processes through which national boundaries were carved out of a geographical territory, so too, with the respective territories of religion and the natural sciences. Just as the borders of nation-states are often more a consequence of imperial ambitions, political expedience, and historical contingencies than of a conscious attending to more "natural" fault lines of geography, culture, and ethnicity—think in this context of the borders of the modern state of Israel—so the compartmentalization of modern Western culture that gave rise to these distinct notions "science" and "religion" resulted not from a rational or dispassionate consideration of how to divide cultural life along natural fracture lines, but to a significant degree has been to do with political power—broadly conceived—and the accidents of history.

The Joints of Nature

Another way of thinking about these two concepts is to consider an analogy with what philosophers call "natural kinds." The label "natural kind" is applied to natural groupings of things, the identity of which is natural in the sense that it does not depend on human beings. The sciences of chemistry and zoology, for example, seek to identify such kinds. Chemical elements and compounds are good examples of natural kinds—water, carbon, and hydrocarbons, for example. Occasionally, our everyday concepts, our ideas of what things go together do not map very well onto true natural kinds. We all know what jade is, for example. This lustrous, green, semiprecious stone would seem like a good candidate for being a natural kind. But as it turns out, there are two chemically distinct substances that are called "jade"—jadeite and nephrite. One is a silicate of sodium and aluminum; the other a silicate of lime and magnesia. Once microstructure is taken into consideration, it becomes clear that jade is not a natural kind, because it is actually two different kinds of natural thing. My argument with regard to the categories "religion" and "science" is that to some degree we are mistaken in thinking that they are analogous to natural kinds, because despite the apparent similarities among those things that we call religions and the things that we call sciences, in fact the concepts and the way we deploy them masks important empirical differences.

In the case of jade, the assumption that there is a single unitary entity can be dispelled by careful measurement of some less obvious properties. The two minerals have slightly different specific gravities, refractive indices, and hardnesses. Infrared spectrographic analysis will also reveal their different chemical makeup. In the case of religion, my suggestion is that in addition to careful examination of the empirical characteristics of the so-called religions—which already brings to light an enormous and possibly irreconcilable diversity—their history is also revealing. Another instance of apparent kinds reinforces the point. Superficially, whales look like fish, and bats like birds, and folk taxonomies tend to group them together. Careful examination of the internal structures will reveal a different pattern of affinities, but so would the evolutionary history of these creatures, assuming that the latter could be established. The family histories of these groups would make it apparent that whales and bats should both properly be classified with the mammals. Similar considerations apply to both "religion" and "science," and we can reconstruct the history of these ideas with much greater precision than we can establish the phylogeny of biological taxa. What the history of the categories will show is how disparate, or at least significantly distinct, activities have come to be classified together. In the case of science, "natural history" and "natural philosophy" came together under the rubric "science" for the first time in the nineteenth century. These activities had involved quite different approaches to the study of nature and arguably their modern descendents—biology and physics—still exhibit the vestiges of their genealogical past. Thus, just as our use of the single word "jade" disguises the different composition of the two kinds that now bear that label, so the use of "science" for both historical sciences such as geology and evolutionary biology and physical sciences such as chemistry and physics tends to mask fundamental differences. These differences will necessarily complicate any global claims about the entities "science" and "religion" and their imagined relationship.

What follows from these considerations is that we distort the past if we uncritically apply our modern categories to past activities that would have been conceptualized by those who engaged in them in a quite different way. We should not use our present maps to understand their territory. We should not assume natural kinds where there are none. This means that the idea of a perennial conflict between science and religion must be false, just as claims about an early modern conflict between Israel and Egypt must be false. And this will be equally true for any claimed relationship between science and religion before the modern period. In addition we can say that contemporary "science-religion" relations, however construed (that is to say, whether positively or negatively), are to a large degree determined by the historical conditions under which disciplinary boundaries originated and developed over time. To advert once again to the map-territory analogy, we can ask whether the conceptual maps that we currently rely on to navigate through our cultural terrain are, to use the ugly but apt phrase, "fit for purpose." Thus, the question of the origins of boundaries can move beyond description and understanding to a critical inquiry into the appropriateness of how current conceptual maps divide territory. Good concepts, to use Plato's vivid image, carve nature at the joints (rather than, as he went on to say, dismembering it like a clumsy butcher). Part of the burden of this book, then, is to ask whether these particular ways of dividing aspects of contemporary Western culture—"science" and "religion"—are helpful ones. In addressing this question I hope to show that "science" and "religion" are not self-evident or natural ways of dividing up cultural territory, that history shows this to be the case (as indeed does present consideration of cultures other than our own), and that persisting with these categories in an uncritical fashion can not only generate unhelpful conflict between science and religion, but can also disguise what perhaps ought to be legitimate sources of tension between the ways of faith and the formal study of nature. In short, this project attempts to set out a historical cartography of the categories "religion" and "science"—arguably the two cultural categories most important for an understanding of the nature of modernity and its legacy—with a view to casting light on their present relationship.

All of this implies that there is something not quite right with how we presently think about the relationship between science and religion, whether we think of it in terms of conflict or congruence, or even if we think that they do not have much to do with each other. Not only is too much of our present discussion uninformed by relevant historical considerations—imagine a comparable analysis of tensions in the Middle East that made no reference to history—but it is also often oblivious to the problematic nature of the categories in question. Much contemporary discussion about science and religion assumes that there are discrete human activities, "science" and "religion," which have had some unitary and enduring essence that persists over time. That this is not the case, I hope to illustrate in a number of ways, one of which involves closely attending to the history of the relevant terms.

In the remaining sections of this chapter I will make some rather cursory and compressed remarks about the history of the terms "religion" and "science" (or at least of their Latin equivalents). More extended treatments will come in the chapters that follow, but for now I am seeking simply to establish a basic case for the importance of reconsidering our historical understanding of these two concepts.

The History of "Religion"

In the section of his monumental Summa theologiae that is devoted to a discussion of the virtues of justice and prudence, the thirteenth-century Dominican priest Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) investigates, in his characteristically methodical and insightful way, the nature of religion. Along with North African Church Father Augustine of Hippo (354–430), Aquinas is probably the most influential Christian writer outside of the biblical authors. From the outset it is clear that for Aquinas religion (religio) is a virtue—not, incidentally, one of the preeminent theological virtues, but nonetheless an important moral virtue related to justice. He explains that in its primary sense religio refers to interior acts of devotion and prayer, and that this interior dimension is more important than any outward expressions of this virtue. Aquinas acknowledges that a range of outward behaviors are associated with religio—vows, tithes, offerings, and so on—but he regards these as secondary. As I think is immediately obvious, this notion of religion is rather different from the one with which we are now familiar. There is no sense in which religio refers to systems of propositional beliefs, and no sense of different religion s (plural). Between Thomas's time and our own, religio has been transformed from a human virtue into a generic something, typically constituted by sets of beliefs and practices. It has also become the most common way of characterizing attitudes, beliefs, and practices concerned with the sacred or supernatural.

Aquinas's understanding of religio was by no means peculiar to him. Before the seventeenth century, the word "religion" and its cognates were used relatively infrequently. Equivalents of the term are virtually nonexistent in the canonical documents of the Western religions—the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur'an. When the term was used in the premodern West, it did not refer to discrete sets of beliefs and practices, but rather to something more like "inner piety," as we have seen in the case of Aquinas, or "worship." As a virtue associated with justice, moreover, religio was understood on the Aristotelian model of the virtues as the ideal middle point between two extremes—in this case, irreligion and superstition.

The vocabulary of "true religion" that we encounter in the writings of some of the Church Fathers offers an instructive example. "The true religion" is suggestive of a system of beliefs that is distinguished from other such systems that are false. But careful examination of the content of these expressions reveals that early discussions about true and false religion were typically concerned not with belief, but rather worship and whether or not worship is properly directed. Tertullian (ca. 160–ca. 220) was the first Christian thinker to produce substantial writings in Latin and was also probably the first to use the expression "true religion." But in describing Christianity as "true religion of the true god," he is referring to genuine worship directed toward a real (rather than fictitious) God. Another erudite North African Christian writer, Lactantius (ca. 240–ca. 320), gives the first book of his Divine Institutes the title "De Falsa Religione." Again, however, his purpose is not to demonstrate the falsity of pagan beliefs, but to show that "the religious ceremonies of the [pagan] gods are false," which is just to say that the objects of pagan worship are false gods. His positive project, an account of true religion, was "to teach in what manner or by what sacrifice God must be worshipped." Such rightly directed worship was for Lactantius "the duty of man, and in that one object the sum of all things and the whole course of a happy life consists."