The Warfare between Science and Religion: The idea that wouldn’t die
from Theos:
Nick Spencer reviews ‘The Warfare between Science and Religion: The idea that wouldn’t die’, published by John Hopkins University Press. 29.04.2019.
Over the last few months I have been working with the BBC Religion and Ethics department in recording a major new series on the history of science and religion, to be broadcast on Radio 4 in June. The idea for the series had been chasing me around for years. The popular view of science and religion is that they have long been in conflict, and in many ways still are. But from my reading round the subject, especially the work of Professors John Hedley Brooke and Peter Harrison, I knew that this view is now almost entirely rejected by the growing number of historians of science and religion. It needed a wider audience.
And then, last December, John Hopkins University Press published The Warfare between Science and Religion: The idea that wouldn’t die. In the first paragraph on page one it remarks (adapting a statement by the historian of science, Steven Shapin), that “there has never been systemic warfare between science and theology, and this is a book that explains why the notion nonetheless lives one.” And then in the following paragraph, it goes on to say “notwithstanding all the outstanding work by a generation of historians dismantling the ‘conflict model’, their revisionist accounts have scarcely made a dent on leading public intellectuals.” Others, it seemed, were thinking on similar lines.
Opinions vary as to the extent of the religion vs science rift and, as a forthcoming Theos report on the topic suggests, much of it may be down to the kind of questions we are asking in public opinion polls and the ways in which we are asking them. But that there is some perception of conflict is hard to doubt.
We scientists “do our best [to provide excellent education],” the biologist Steve Jones once opined, “but faced with schools or faith groups that get their ignorance in first, we seem to be fighting a losing battle.” Debates between science and religion, remarked the former MP Evan Harris, need to be had in public. “Science has nothing to fear from them. I don’t think we’re winning; we’ve won a few battles; but there’s a war to be fought.” “We gather Professor Reiss is a clergyman,” sneered the Nobel Prize winner Sir Richard Roberts in the wake of Michael Reiss’s dreadful treatment by the Royal Society a decade ago. “Who on earth thought that he would be an appropriate Director of Education,” he went, “who could be expected to answer questions about the differences between science and religion in a scientific, reasoned way?” (Presumably Sir Richard Roberts would have done a better job).
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