The Penultimate Curiosity by Roger Wagner and Andrew Briggs
OUP, £25
The authors of this splendid book inform us that they do not seek an “answer [to] the million dollar question” of “whether and in what way ‘science’ and ‘religion’ were or were not compatible”. Rather, they look at why there has been such a “long and continuing entanglement” between the two realms.
As it happens, the latter pursuit actually provides a clear answer to the question that is supposedly being avoided. If you pore over the historical record it is hard to deny that science and religion have always been perfectly compatible.
“Curiosity” is a word that crops up frequently in these pages. Human beings want to know about the mechanisms and wonders of the physical world and they crave answers to the ultimate questions about the meaning and purpose of life. The book’s main thesis is that the two endeavours are intimately connected.
In fact, and throughout history, the one usually led to the other. As soon as you start confronting theological and existential conundrums you become far more likely to pursue detailed understandings of how your world works. Time and again, science followed in the slipstream of religious musings.
More than that, the “cognitive architecture” underlying all varieties of speculation is constant and results in a quest for explanations that encompass everything from, say, gods to microbes, or creation stories to algebra. This impulse to integrate the separate domains of religion and science defined us. Aristotle wrote that the human mind starts from “obvious perplexities” and “by gradual progression raises questions about greater matters”. But the process can work in reverse. Interest in the divine “shaped and motivated the kind of interest that human societies manifest in the physical world”.
Briggs and Wagner offer many examples of this trajectory. In ancient Greece, for example, wrangling over divine matters produced a “culture of argumentation” that benefited all areas of intellectual inquiry and culminated in a “kind of religious piety that embraced the scientific study of nature”.
A little later, in Alexandria, the “truths of religion and the truths discovered by reason and observation were part of a single seamless fabric”. Much the same occurred in Abbasid Baghdad, Sassanian Persia and medieval Europe.
Those who talk of a constant battle between faith and science might hope for richer pickings later in human history, but according to this volume they would usually be disappointed. The so-called scientific revolution was crammed with people “for whom the study of nature was conceived as an aspect of religious worship”.
Even Galileo, for all his tussles with authority, possessed a “theologically informed intellectual optimism” and regarded scientific adventure as a gift of divine grace. Admittedly, by the end of the 17th century science was answering so many questions that, for some, it could be “deployed as a means of marginalising religious concerns”, but we must look closely at what motivated many of the era’s scholarly superstars.
The book’s scope is hugely impressive. It ranges from discussions of how a religious impulse inspired prehistoric expressions of creativity and discovery to a refreshingly nuanced account of what the emergence of evolutionary theory meant for 19th-century conceptualisations of religious faith. The two authors have been discussing the issues for years and the breadth of their analysis probably has a great deal to do with the fact that they come from rather different worlds: one is a celebrated religious artist, the other a professor of nanomaterials.
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