Religion vs Science by Elaine Howard Ecklund and Christopher Scheitle, oup, 240pp, £20
Is there a tension between science and religious belief? Or can they happily coexist, perhaps even enriching each other? These questions have been debated since the 17th century, and were given a higher profile through the rise of the “New Atheism”, championed by Richard Dawkins. For Dawkins, science is the only reliable form of knowledge. In his influential The God Delusion (2006) he argued that religious belief was little more than pseudo-scientific nonsense.
While the passing of time has seen a fading in both the influence and academic reputation of New Atheism, the question of the relation of science and faith remains important. Recent discussions of this question – such as my own work Inventing the Universe (Hodder, 2015) – have tended to focus on conceptual approaches to the relationship between the natural sciences and religious belief. While this way of dealing with the question undoubtedly has many strengths, it also has obvious weaknesses. It is academic and abstract, focusing on ideas rather than considering how people weave their ideas together into a coherent and workable synthesis.
Ecklund and Scheitle report on the outcomes of a five-year exploration of how religious Americans understand and respond to the natural sciences. Based on detailed conversations, this substantial piece of empirical research makes it clear that the slick slogans of anti-religious scientists and anti-scientific religious believers fail to represent the complexity of the ways in which people integrate the various elements of their worlds of thought.
Religion vs Science is not simply a welcome and highly engaging contribution to contemporary debates about science and religious faith – it is also a powerful illustration of the way in which the social sciences can deepen our appreciation of how human beings hold together ideas originating from quite different sources.
The book synthesises the results of data analysed from the Religious Understandings of Science study, a nationally representative survey of 10,000 Americans. This is easily the most significant investigation of its kind.
Most of the work’s eight chapters begin with a myth about religious believers’ attitudes towards science (such as “Religious People Are All Young-Earth Creationists” or “Religious People are Climate Change Deniers”), followed by its findings in the area and what scientists might learn from the patterns of thought and reflection that the research discloses.
The work is fascinating at many levels. Readers of this magazine will be particularly interested to note the significant disparities between the attitudes of American Evangelicals and Catholics towards science. Whereas 21.8 per cent of American Evangelicals were interested in learning about new scientific discoveries, this figure increased to 30.6 per cent in the case of Catholics.
Ecklund and Scheitle noted that religious believers were more interested in the positive application of science – for example, in medicine – than in scientific research for its own sake. “If your faith tradition emphasises the importance of life or the importance of helping other people, then ‘physician’ might be more easily seen as a ‘spiritual’ profession than ‘biologist’,” they write.
Yet perhaps the most interesting question to arise from this work concerns how
religious people might become more engaged with science, and its counterpart, how scientific people might become more involved with religious faith.
One of the most striking findings of the work is that there is a correlation between negative stereotypes about science and religion and a lack of personal interaction between religious believers and scientists. The Church, Ecklund and Scheitle argue, needs “faith leaders to celebrate the scientists within their congregations and they need these scientists to speak out about how scientific knowledge is not a threat to their faith”.
Ecklund and Scheitle’s work supplements their earlier findings which call into question any notion of the “warfare” of science and faith. It turns out that scientists aren’t usually hostile to religion, even if they aren’t religious believers.
Yet the book also represents an extension of their previous work, in that they propose a number of ways in which the gap between scientific thinking and traditional faith-based communities might be bridged, including bringing science into religious communities and emphasising the essential philosophical similarities between a scientific and a religious approach to issues such as climate change.
The best method of demonstrating the compatibility of science and faith, it seems, is not abstract argument from first principles: it is rather personal knowledge of individuals who hold together science and faith in their lives.
If Ecklund and Scheitle are right: we need more religious believers to get involved with science, and more believing scientists to talk openly about their faith and how they integrate this within their personal existence. The authors are to be congratulated for opening up such fascinating questions, and giving us so much food for thought.
Alister McGrath is Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University
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