Neocon, if you get a chance to read this lengthy book review, I would appreciate your take on it. The way I see it is that science is the one changing position, but asserts that religion should acquisce or be destroyed. Not very friendly negotiations, and maybe even worse than none!
From next weeks Nature:
Why science and religion need to talk
CHARLES L. HARPER
Charles L. Harper is Executive Director of the John Templeton Foundation, Suite 100, Building 5, Radnor Corporate Center, 100 Matsonford Road, Radnor, Pennsylvania 19087, USA.
Human 'fallenness', freedom and pain are the preserve of both arenas.
Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? The Relationship Between Science and Religion
by Michael Ruse
Cambridge University Press: 2000. 272 pp. £16.95, $24.95
Physics in the twenty-first century may indeed discover a 'theory of everything'. Particle physicists hope so. But many people may wish to reserve their unbridled enthusiasm. Discovering the unifying theory would be an astonishingly important human accomplishment; but it would not explain everything, even at a scientific level. Solid-state physicists and chemists might protest that the theory would not help them at all. Biochemists and biologists would ask where the origin and evolution of life fit in. A truly full-blooded 'theory of everything' would also need to address the 'Really Big Questions', which all intelligent people think about to some degree or other, and which traditionally have been the province of religion and philosophy. Do I have a purpose? Is death the end? Is there an 'ultimate reality'? Is there a God? What is love?
Science is wise to avoid these questions most of the time, yet it cannot ignore them completely. Increasingly, science touches on some of them in reasonably direct ways. The advance of darwinism especially, and its application to human evolution and psychology, has opened up the domain of engagement with the really big questions. This has also happened with discussions of the so-called 'anthropic principle' within cosmology.
Where these metaphysical discussions will go in the future remains an open question. Religious thought will play a natural and necessary adjunct role, retaining an important place at the table, whether as friend or foe, or simply as interlocutor. As science explores metaphysically rich terrain, it will be increasingly important for scientists to become conversant with the remarkably complex and interesting history of dialogue linking science and religion. Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?, by the distinguished philosopher of evolutionary biology Michael Ruse, is an illuminating and witty contribution to this literature.
A number of important books at the interface between darwinism and theology have been published in the past few years. These have mostly been aimed at people looking for a consonance between science and religion. Ruse's new book fills an important gap. It makes a case more appropriate to what might be called the core constituencies: the people with specific affinities — in this case with either darwinism or Christianity — rather than with 'science' in general or with 'religion' in general. These are people who are not necessarily uncomfortable with being non- or anti-Christian darwinians or non- or anti-darwinian Christians. They are not necessarily looking for consonance, and the challenge of dialogue offers no strong attraction. Why should such people care to read Ruse's book?
First, the issue of finding consonance is intrinsically interesting intellectually as well as spiritually. It engages the 'quests' of both science and religion for deep understanding of the world. Second, both science and religion have practical reasons for exploring constructive dialogue. Work in the history and philosophy of science has shown that common perceptions of a 'warfare relationship' between science and religion are largely myth-dominated. This situation tends to reinforce rather than ameliorate the conflict-perpetuating tendencies of both religious fundamentalism and its scientific counterpart, reductionist 'scientism'. Such tendencies are unhealthy for both science and religion.
For religion, continued conflict with science could have tragic consequences. As the average standard of education rises and a higher proportion of the population participates in the knowledge economy, more and more people may dispense not only with fundamentalism but with religion altogether. As scientific knowledge grows, religious commitments predicated on 'gaps' in scientific understanding will invariably shrink as those gaps are closed. Those Christians who are currently fighting evolutionary science will eventually need to take it seriously; conflicts over philosophy are entirely another matter.
For science, the need to resolve the science–religion conflict has considerable strategic significance. In the United States especially, the persistence of conflict between Christianity and evolutionary biology impedes the broadening of public appreciation of science. This problem is particularly acute in view of the emerging genomics revolution, with its immense technological potential and the recurrent problems with the 'Frankenstein science' image. It also threatens support for the developing field of exoplanetary 'astrobiology'. Most broadly, religiously motivated antipathy towards science has a negative effect on the general climate for science education.
The third reason is that the future development of global civilization requires sensitive and thoughtful moral leadership on the control and utilization of the immense power emerging from science and technology. Both darwinians and Christians will be committed to such a future vision of responsibility — although often quite differently conceived. People's deepest cultural values, often nourished and embodied in religious contexts, should not be lightly cast into the dustbin of history as nothing more than outmoded nonsense. A certain humility and respectfulness by science towards the accumulated reservoir of moral wisdom contained in the world's religious traditions may be of considerable significance for the human future. Similar concessions by religious people towards appreciating the scientific heritage are also appropriate.
So Ruse's book serves an important role — building bridges for people who otherwise might not be interested in exploring 'win–win' as opposed to 'win–lose' relationships between science and religion. The argument is spry and engaging.
Ruse reasons fascinatingly that a Christian ought to find deep resonance with darwinism on major theological issues such as human "fallenness", freedom, pain and the problem of evil, and the importance of ethics. One section engages the issue of design, summarizing Ruse's ongoing debate over an anti-evolution movement, very popular with evangelical Christians in the United States, called 'Intelligent Design'. Ruse argues, quite rightly in my view, that the desire to ascribe the detailed particulars of nature (including anthrax, bubonic plague and cancer) to the explicit design of a Deity is a prescription for atheism, pointing precisely away from the Christian concept of God. Debating the conclusions of a much-cited anti-evolution book by the Intelligent Design movement biochemist Michael Behe, Ruse notes, "if Behe's argument actually points away from the Christian God, this should be acknowledged, for then Darwinism is surely a more attractive alternative for the Christian".
Ruse also takes to task several well-known popularizers of evolution who argue that atheism is an inevitable result of darwinism. "No sound argument has been mounted showing that Darwinism implies atheism. The atheism is being smuggled in, and then given an evolutionary gloss," he concludes. This topic covers some of the more significant passages in the book: these include a critique of the engagement of evolutionary history with St Augustine's attempted solution to the problem of evil, and a vivid endorsement of one of the twentieth century's most vital theological transformations from the classic view of the impassability of a transcendent being to the view of an immanent 'suffering God' bound into the torn fabric of the world's risky adventure. Ruse points out the sympathy of this view for the darwinian. "Darwinism stresses the natural evil of the world ... (and) opens the way for a Christian response", concluding that "Darwinism, a science which stresses physical suffering, looks to Christianity, a religion which also stresses physical suffering and the divine urge to master it".
Paths from Science Towards God: The End of All Our Exploring
by Arthur Peacocke
Oneworld: 2001. 198 pp. £10.99, $16.95 (pbk)
Readers interested in taking these themes forward will find much to stimulate their thinking in a new book by this year's winner of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, Arthur Peacocke, a biochemist also trained as a theologian. Paths from Science Towards God ranges widely over relatively little-known topics where scientific ideas have been engaging academic theology in areas of considerable philosophical interest and sophistication. These include the concept of emergence, the mind–brain relation and top-down causality, evolutionary directionality and the evolution of altruism, the significance of spiritual experience, the challenge of religious pluralism, theistic naturalism, the conceptualization of divine presence and action in the world, and the significance of suffering and moral action.
Those looking for some of the best and most innovative thinking in 'science and religion' will find much of interest in this book, which is written at the level of a high-end introductory overview. Both Ruse and Peacocke cite with approval a judgement made in 1889 by the theologian Aubrey Moore: "Darwinism appeared, and, under the guise of a foe, did the work of a friend." After more than 100 years of rancour, it may be time to take Moore seriously. |
