Catholics and science - updated historical view

Since this blog has devoted a lot of attention of late to the issue of what is said to be a matter of incompatibility between science and religion, it's worth adding this contribution from Catholic bishop and public intellectual, Robert Barron. After having an academic background, he is now a bishop of the Los Angeles archdiocese. He always has an interesting and well-reasoned manner of expressing his ideas. 

Science & religion: where moral questions protect us

                                                                                                                                           Graphic Source

That moral issues arise from scientists' research has long been known, highlighted by the development and expanding deployment of nuclear weapons. These days, artificial intelligence (AI) is but one of several projects that is eliciting expressions of growing concern from well-placed observers, such as Tesla and SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk who had been an investor in the DeepMind effort before it was sold to Google, and he is now involved in the OpenAI research lab.

One report put it this way:

Musk has repeatedly warned that AI will soon become just as smart as humans and said that when it does we should all be scared because humanity’s very existence is at stake.

In addition, Musk has joined "thousands of individuals and almost 200 organizations who have publicly committed not to develop, manufacture or use killer robots".  To add some detail:

“We the undersigned agree that the decision to take a human life should never be delegated to a machine,” reads the [2017] pledge [...] organized by the Boston nonprofit Future of Life, an organization that researches the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence along with other existential issues related to advancing technology.

So how can we have a better – deeper – science and religion conversation, where religion provides insights into the ethical principles that should be applied now in medicine, healthcare, in the professions to upgrade the care of the public, to give immediate examples, but more so in the future?

In a third dip into ‘Science and Religion’: Moving away from the shallow end, a report on research by the Theos think-tank, a British Christian organisation that works at the intersection of politics, religion and society, we examine what some of the more than 100 scientists, philosophers and communicators in the field had to say on the subject.

The report writers explore how we can go beyond moral polarisation in "conversations" over ethics. They start with a some recent history:

In a way that was obvious to many people, the New Atheism spasm of the 2000s was ethical rather than scientific in origin. This was partially obscured by the fact that most of its leading proponents were scientists, but the arguments, the language, and the context (Islamic terrorism, Religious Right, decay of secularism) were all highly morally (and politically) charged. That whole affair was a textbook study of life at the shallow end and was recognised as such by those of our interviewees (including atheistic and scientific ones) who mentioned it.

They quote from the expert interviewees:

“To some extent, particularly I found this with people like Richard Dawkins, they purposely misrepresent it because it makes the religious side of things look more simplistic, more basic.” (#99)

“One very simplistic and problematic way of understanding it is the way it’s assumed by the New Atheists where they seem to see religion simply as an inferior rival to science.” (#93)

 “The fact that a body can fall 32 feet per second is not something I derive a morality from... and the problem with the New Atheists is that they thought science was a value.” (#54)

The report sees a clear moral basis to the rhetorical stance of antagonists of religion: 

Talk of religion poisoning everything, of religion as child abuse, or religion as being like the smallpox virus only harder to eradicate were broadsides against religion but ones that were grounded in its allegedly harmful effects or immoral practices. As the popular New Atheist slogan of the time put it, “science flies you to the moon, religion flies you into buildings”. Religion might be wrong but, above all, it was bad.

Such views were rather rarer among the general population today than they were 15 years ago. In 2006, a ComRes poll, commissioned by Theos found that 42% (!) of adults people agreed that “faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” (It was not, to put it mildly, what we had hoped to hear from the great British people...). Today, that figure is 20%. 

As a rule, however, even the most anti-religious interviewees recognised that there was more to the science and religion debate than moral polarisation, whether that was good scientists vs bad believers, or morally-neutral science vs morally-laden (or morally-toxic) religion. 

The deep end of this ‘ethics’ part of the debate in fact had several conversations going on in it, each complex and challenging in its own way. Some were related to the epistemological dimension of the wider debate, such as the way in which science, for all its rigorous method, depended on ethical commitments or on an ethical framework that it cannot itself supply.

“Scientists... clearly have moral commitments to truthfulness, to honesty, they usually value hard work... they hate negligence and deceitfulness. So quite a number of moral things there which clearly are not justifiable in terms of science, but scientists have to proceed with them.” (#6)

It is clear some scientists do not appreciate adherents of religion assuming a role in "scientific" endeavours. Scientists ask how religion provides moral insight when a creator is the source of suffering in both the natural and human spheres. The report offers this thought:

There were answers – or at least responses – to this point. Some interviewees claimed that the argument omitted consideration of the good and beauty that results from the process (a consideration that Darwin himself drew into his reflections on this question). As one scientist said:

“I think that the only possible approach to the problem of evil is, oddly enough you can find implicit in Darwin, that suffering is part of the price of evolution but that overall in the life of any organism the good outweighs the bad, otherwise organisms would [feel] depression. He actually does use the word 'depression' in this context.” (#46)

Some pointed out that it ignored any consideration of eternity and redemption which are central to (many) religious views. Others said that the severity of the challenge presented by evolutionary suffering depended on the implicit image of God with which it was being compared.

“Unless God is an all-controlling engineer who simply makes things, it’s bound to have a degree of freedom and unpredictability about it which I believe is at the core of creation, so in that sense, if it’s messy and seems to keep changing its course, this is not incompatible with anything other than an engineering God who made the cosmos with fiat.” (#75)

Interviewees remarked that the whole discussion was predicated on a highly contestable sense of what was ‘wasted’. And some pointed out that pain was simply a reflexive mechanism without which life could not be sustained (the so-called ‘only way’ defence).

“[The] idea of wastefulness...[this is due to] the part of us that worships utility and efficiency, but there’s nothing that suggests that the cosmos works like this at all... God is able to create something which looks to the human mind wasteful, but it isn’t wasteful because it issues in what was needed, whatever means are that are needed for it those means have to be done. The whole idea that evolution is wasteful is a mistake.” (#75)

Whether these constituted adequate responses was far from clear, however, and there were several religious interviewees who were prepared to admit that the problem of suffering, amplified by our scientific understanding of deep history, did present (certain forms of) religious belief with an insuperable problem.

“The creator of the world is one who doesn’t care about the fact that 99 plus percent of all species are extinct now. Or they are suffering. Or that death is an integral physical part of life. It is very, very difficult to square that with a loving, omnipotent god.” (#88)

Whichever way one comes down here, however, the relevant point for our argument is that this critically important part of the science and religion debate is shot through with ethical considerations.

Beyond these specific parts to the ethical dimension within the science and religion debate, there was one additional, generic but very important one. In essence, it is not possible to separate science from technology, and technology from progress. Questions of whether and what we are progressing to, why, how fast, and by what means, are all irreducibly ethical, and that meant that science itself could not help be tied up with wider moral debate, whose connection with religion was obvious to all.

This could be seen at various levels. At the level of individual scientists’ behaviour, if science depended on honesty and integrity, that meant it was also vulnerable to dishonesty and fraud. The practice of science could be good or bad. Science got nowhere by ignoring ethical considerations.

At the level of programmatic research, the topic and method of research was similarly embedded in ethical considerations. Nobody claimed that scientific research was in itself necessarily morally good.

“Science can be as immoral as the rest of us. The Nazis used scientists. And we know that they experimented on not only Jews, but they experimented on mentally and physically handicapped people... One reason why, apparently, African Americans at the moment will be dubious about the vaccine is that they were experimented upon by white scientists, way back in [the previous] century.” (#73)

And then, at the level of application, it was clear that the way in which science shaped technology and technology shaped progress was rife with moral challenges. As one philosopher put it:

“I think science is absolutely shot through with moral stuff. I mean AI is a great example, and I worry about it. The idea that progress in AI is being made in this moral vacuum... [or] by predominantly male people who quite often – you look at people like Elon Musk frankly, and you’ve got to wonder whether they’re approaching all of this stuff with an appropriate sense of the moral implications of what they might be doing.” (#64)

It is important to be clear here. Just because everyone we spoke to recognised that there was an irreducible moral dimension to science – its practice, its programmes, its application – did not mean that everyone (or even a majority) thought that this meant religion should be involved in the ensuing discussions. [...] Some were very clear that it did not.

“I don’t really see religion as playing any distinctive role in that issue, except insofar as you might think that the religion is the thing that grounds the ethics. So, it seems like fundamentally an ethical issue and then you might bolt on the religion as a way of giving you your ethics, which obviously I think would be a mistake.” (#13)

A more favourable view was obvious in others' comments:

“I think there is a real tension but I think it’s an area, having said that, where having religious people and scientists together discussing it can be very interesting and possibly fruitful.” (#47)

The point was simply that there was an irreducibly moral dimension to this debate, and that, as one atheist philosopher put it:

“The religious communities often have a developed ethical vocabulary that helps people to think about ethical issues, for example, the just war tradition.” (#5)

The report's remark concluding this section on the meeting of minds between those involved with religion and science is this:  

Religion being indissolubly connected with ethical reasoning meant that, like it or not, ethics was a key part of the science and religion debate.

This aspect of the necessary conversation came through also in what the expert interviewees had to say about the political dimension of the work of scientists. One interviewee, in referring to the criticism of scientists as wanting to "play God", found that there is some logic to the underlying sentiments

The phrase ‘playing God’, when used, was not used approvingly. Nevertheless, as the same respondent went on to explain that "there is at least some logic to the underlying sentiment".

“Now while I disagree with their argument as they state it, I nonetheless have a lot of sympathy with what I think is the emotion underlying it. And that is that we will be doing something extremely complicated with unforeseen consequences. And it might be wiser if we were to be at the very, very least be very cautious here.” (#46)

Others concurred. Science could make astonishing discoveries. Technology could achieve astonishing changes. But scientists, they claimed, could sometimes be dangerously enthusiastic or naïve about their achievements.

“Particularly to do with ethics I think that scientists often lose sight of the ethical implications of their work, and they often want to just plough through ethical boundaries. This is particularly with biosciences and biotechnology, and they just see them as being an unnecessary obstacle to what they see as progress." (#13)

This was not to claim that scientists could not contribute to these ethical debates. They could. However, they were not necessarily best placed to make decisions here. Quite a number of respondents were insistent on this point.

“Scientists have no particular authority about what aims we ought to have and how we should weigh them and scientists have no particular weight on that matter.” (#55)

“I think unfortunately science and religion both are engaged in practices of control that are probably doing a disservice to it and certain control over women, for example.” (#71)

“Science is based on measurement. And measurement takes no notice of secondary qualities... never mind value or meaning.” (#12) 

So, if scientists are not in the best position to assess the value or meaning of their work, other parties can speak for the common good, with society as a whole offering its views in applying a wide-angle lens to scientific projects. Just as players in the monetary economy  are regulated, at least minimally, because they can wreak havoc with the whole of society as we saw in the financial crisis of 2008 or in imposing outrageous income inequality through corporate irresponsibility, so the scientific community should continue to be supervised by ethics committees.

Science and religion are linked in many ways, but the moral and ethical sphere is central to the effort to work together for the benefit of society as a whole. The "joy of the science and religion conversation" is in the meeting of minds, allowing even conflicting views to produce light that guides and protects.

💢 Read the first and second parts of this series:

Religion and science: a meeting of minds 

Science and religion: use a wide-angle lens 

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Jesus – the friendship at the center of our life

Abbé Ména and Jesus – original in the Louvre

 Abbé Ména was an Egyptian martyr of the third century. Jesus stands with him in a wonderfully familiar pose. The icon above is a fragment of a painting on wood (tempera on fig tree), produced in the sixth or seventh century. It was found at the site of Bawit (or Baouit) in Egypt.

The Coptic Ména has been interpreted as "everyman", and as one commentator put it:

It is easy to see why the image has received its popular title ‘icon of friendship’, as the two friends stand comfortably alongside each other with the arm of Jesus about the shoulder of his companion.

Let's think a little more about the friendship of God for humankind – for each and every individual – made visible by Jesus' life. Helping us explore this fulfilling musing is David Stephenson, an Anglican priest in Cotham, England. He wrote a blog post for Lent 2019 with the title "Praying with the Icon of Friendship". It's out of season, with the Easter "alleluia" continuing to be sounded, but it's all good for the soul and worth going back to. He writes:

I’d like to suggest a few ways in which the icon might inspire us to prayer in its spirit of friendship. First, and most fundamentally, as an image it communicates powerfully that Jesus is near to us, alongside us, with (as it were) a hand about our shoulder. Jesus is modelled as our companion who walks alongside us; who shares our place and space. Friendship can be exclusive, pictured with two faces gazing at each other. However, this image suggests a very different reality – as our friend Jesus looks where we look, and he looks upon who we look upon. 

Conversely we can be encouraged that in friendship with Jesus we can look at what his eyes of love turn towards – we can see what he sees. The icon invites us to ask where is Jesus looking and what is he telling me about what he sees? Friendship with Jesus is shared compassion, longing, vision, insight, as we gaze with his eyes of love. Perhaps this is a good summary of prayer – to look with Jesus and share his gaze of love; to know that he shares our gaze, that he sees the world through our eyes.

 Although the icon is a relatively simple composition, it has much more detail than immediately seems apparent. First we can notice the hands of Abbé Ména – in one he holds a scroll and with the other he blesses. The scroll probably represents the rule of life of his community; or, like the scroll Jesus takes up in the synagogue of Nazareth, the scripture that is his own commission (‘the Lord has anointed me to…’). What does our scroll contain? What rule of life shapes our praying and living, what is our commission from Jesus our friend? These are good questions to explore prayerfully during Lent.

Meanwhile the hand of blessing is an invitation for us to recognise that prayer is the way in which we connect with God’s benediction – the face of blessing for us and for the world. As God’s people we are called to be people of blessing – not in a trite way (“aww, bless”!) but rather by noticing and naming God’s gracious presence and good intention. John O’Donohue’s fine book Benedictus is a master class in such noticing and naming; perhaps in an age of complaint and negativity we can begin our apprenticeship as people of benediction.

May you realize that the shape of your soul is unique, that you have a special destiny here, that behind the facade of your life there is something beautiful, good, and eternal happening. May you learn to see yourself with the same delight, pride, and expectation with which God sees you in every moment.

— John O’Donohue

Stephenson enjoys the thoughts arising from the image of Jesus as a friend who accompanies: 

Lastly, the icon’s age has worn away the feet of Jesus but the feet of Abbé Ména are shown to be bare. In company with Jesus he treads gently on the earth, and this place and moment of shared encounter is ‘holy ground’. Friendship with Jesus calls us to friendship with the earth – to re-connection and recognition of our absolute felt connection with the rest of creation. We begin Lent with the reminder that we come from dust and shall return to dust – this is not only an expression of our mortality but also a reminder that we are ‘of’ the earth. Praying with bare feet, especially outside, might be a good Lent prayer practice – a practice commended by Barbara Brown Taylor in her excellent book An Altar in the World: Finding the sacred beneath our feet.

This is what the publisher says about Taylor's spiritual insights:

While people will often go to extraordinary lengths in search of a 'spiritual experience', she shows that the stuff of our everyday lives is a holy ground where we can encounter God at every turn. For her, as for Jacob in the Genesis story, even barren, empty deserts can become "the house of God and the gate of heaven", places where a ladder of angels connects heaven to earth and earth to heaven.

An Altar in the World reveals concrete ways to discover the sacred in such ordinary occurrences as hanging out the washing, doing the supermarket shop, feeding an animal, or losing our way. It will transform our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in, and renew our sense of wonder at the extraordinary gift of life. 

Stephenson concludes: 

As we look towards Lent, and enter it as a season of prayer, I hope it will also be a season of growing friendship. [...] Our friendship in faith with each other is inseparable from our friendship with Jesus.

Friendship with Jesus is friendship as service within the world around us, and to and with the others who God puts in our life. This means our consciousness is awakened to what has been given to us, to the reality that everything within our world is a gift. The natural world, the built world, the cultural world, each individual – gift, gift, gift, gift! We can discover the sacred in the ordinary elements of our life. Knowing that Jesus is a friend we can give our hearts to, we are able to open ourselves to all the enchantment that life offers.

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Science and religion: use a wide-angle lens

The deeper the discourse, the more interesting it is. Graphic Source

The keys to resolving the science and religion debate are these areas of concern:

Epistemology: how do we know what (we think) we know?

Metaphysics: what is the fundamental nature of reality?

Hermeneutics: how do we read texts, particularly authoritative religious ones?

Anthropology: what does it mean to be human?

Ethics: what is good and how do we progress as a society?

Politics: who gets to decide?

How we delve into such questions will produce simply a lot of noise or, on the positive side, light by which to make our way through important issues.

The writers of a new report on research on "science and religion" say the debate in recent years has been like a swinmming pool, where all the noise is at the shallow end, with the emphasis on rhetorical point-scoring and little respect, whereas going deeply into these vital matters allows more honesty and makes the discourse more interesting.

The report is ‘Science and Religion’: Moving away from the shallow end, produced from public polling and interviews of "experts" in the field by Theos, self-described as "the UK’s leading religion and society think tank. It has a broad Christian basis and exists to enrich the conversation about the role of faith in society through research, events, and media commentary". 

Referring to the key elements of the debate given above, the report states:

This report draws out six different ‘dimensions’ within the science and religion debate and argues that for each we should abandon the shallow end and go deeper. Specifically, we need to go beyond:

💢 faith vs fact, when it comes to what we know

💢 natural vs supernatural, when it comes to what we think about reality

💢 literal vs metaphorical, when it comes to how we read holy books

💢 material vs spiritual, when it comes to how we understand what it means to be human

💢 moral polarisation, when it comes to how we think about our ideas and practices

💢 ‘playing god’, when it comes to who decides about the progress of science and technology

The report writers say that optimum outcomes in such analysis of human experience and our living reality would not be agreement and harmony—unlikely to ever occur—but to have participants accept that they should "open up the rest of the pool and [...] go deeper".  

Focusing on narrow issues disrupts our attempts to approach a field of science or religion from a wide perspective. The report gives this example:

The topic that has most often dominated the science and religion debate is, of course, evolution, the sometimes bizarre and often bad-tempered confrontation between Darwinists and those who reject the theory.

The best known and most influential figure in the science and religion debate over the last 40 years has been Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist and best-selling author, who has not only made a powerful case for a gene-centred understanding of evolution, but has repeatedly framed evolution and religion as competitors for the same truth. Religion, by his reckoning, is “a scientific theory”, “a competing explanation for facts about the universe and life”, and, more specifically, a straightforward alternative to evolution: “God and natural selection are... the only two workable theories we have of why we exist.”

By no means all evolutionary biologists adopted his line on the issue. The late American paleobiologist Steven Jay Gould not only disagreed with Dawkins’ interpretation of evolution but also with his views on science and religion. Nevertheless, the very fact that this became a debate between two evolutionary biologists further helped root the whole issue in this field. As a result, media coverage of science and religion has been heavily weighted to discussions around evolution, aided by the Darwin celebrations in 2009*, and even research on science and religion has been heavily skewed in that direction.

*[The 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species (24 November 1859) and the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth (12 February 1809)]

The report continues:

It hasn’t all been evolution. Another famous scientific figure, Stephen Hawking, was associated with science and religion ever since he ended his best-selling 1988 book A Brief History of Time with a line about knowing the mind of God. Hawking was an atheist, albeit a less combative one than Dawkins. He was clear that his famous concluding phrase was entirely figurative, and pitted his discipline against religion, in a way that drew a riposte from fellow cosmologist and longstanding friend, Lord Martin Rees^.

^ On Hawking's death Rees wrote: 

Stephen was far from being the archetype unworldy or nerdish scientist. [...] He had robust common sense, and was ready to express forceful political opinions. However, a downside of his iconic status was that that his comments attracted exaggerated attention even on topics where he had no special expertise – for instance philosophy, or the dangers from aliens or from intelligent machines. 

Rees' riposte referred to was:

 "I know Stephen Hawking well enough to know that he has read very little philosophy and even less theology, so I don't think we should attach any weight to his views on this topic."  (The Independent 2010)

He went on to comment:

"I would support peaceful co-existence between religion and science because they concern different domains. Anyone who takes theology seriously knows that it's not a matter of using it to explain things that scientists are mystified by."

His interviewer states:

Lord Rees is not a militant atheist who goes out of his way to insult people of belief – Richard Dawkins once called him "a compliant quisling" for his tolerance of religion. 

To return to the Theos report, it continues, "The third usual suspect is neuroscience":

This part of the debate usually lacks the fireworks of the others, and often adopts a somewhat humbler tone if only because most people recognise that we are a long way from understanding how the brain works. Nevertheless, since the link between epileptic seizures and religious experiences was first probed by neuroscientists, the idea of a ‘God spot’ or that the spiritual was ‘all in the mind’ has fascinated a wider audience, and gained much media attention.

It's no wonder that Hawking, putting on his philosopher's hat, would explore how his theories – yes, Hawking is known as a theoretical physicist – were linked to the range of topics that cosmology encompasses:

Cosmology naturally gravitates to metaphysics, invariably drawing on ideas of creation, contingency, necessity, lawfulness, and eternity in its rhetoric. Even if it’s only for marketing purposes, God is popularly invoked in the title of books on the Big Bang or high energy physics. Moreover, the prominence of the creation story – technically two creation stories – at the start of the book of Genesis, lends the idea of creation a religious significance. If only because they come together around the moment of creation, it feels obvious to find evidence for the science and religion debate within this particular scientific discipline.

Looming on the horizon are issues related to the impact on people's lives of AI (artificial intelligence) and transhumanism in all its forms:

In the light of this, the relevance of neuroscience and its connection with neurotheology is obvious.

However:

When you burrow into the data around public (let alone expert) opinion on evolution, cosmology, and neuroscience, you begin to realise that none of these topics is as significant or as contentious in the landscape of science and religion as you might think.

For example:

When asked the extent to which they agreed with the statement, “the more we know about the universe through astronomy and cosmology, the harder it is to be religious,” 23% of people agreed and 13% agreed strongly. By comparison, 23% of people disagreed with the same statement and 13% disagreed strongly. Public opinion was perfectly divided.

Moreover, "there was a slight balance in favour of the belief that the Big Bang theory made it hard to be religious, but it was relatively small". Also:

Half (50%) of the non-religious respondents, for example, agreed/strongly that “the more we know about the universe through astronomy and cosmology, the harder it is to be religious”, compared to 19% of Christians and 18% of Muslims. That correlation is only to be expected. Either way, what is clear is that antagonism around cosmology issues and religion is considerably lower than around generic ‘science and religion’.

For other issues on the "science-religion" front:

No scientific discipline was judged on balance to make it hard to be religious, in the way that the Big Bang was. For example, for neuroscience, 28% of people agreed/ strongly that the discipline made it hard to be religious, whereas 39% of people disagreed/ strongly. For medical science it was 32% vs 40%; for psychology, 25% vs 40%; chemistry 28% vs 37%; climate science 24% vs 44%, and for geology, 28% vs 35%.

One more set of data further underlines how the perception of science and religion is distorted. That relates to people's attitude to science. These figures come from an earlier study in this Theos series titled, The Perils of Misperception (2019).

When asked whether they agreed that “the dangers of science outweigh its benefits”, 9% of the total population agreed/strongly, whereas 65% of people disagreed/strongly. Among the religious this balance was 12% vs 61% (non-religious 6% vs 77%) whereas among regular (> once a month) worshippers it was 16% vs 59%.

Hostility (or perhaps anxiety) on the part of religious believers over science is "driven by textual literalists". Note that mainstream Christians do not believe the Bible is word for word from God. To look at that more closely:

Of those who thought that the Bible was “the inspired word of God but not everything should be taken literally, word for word”, 12% agreed or strongly agreed that “the dangers of science outweigh its benefits”, whilst 61% of people disagreed or strongly disagreed – i.e.broadly similar to the national levels. By comparison, of those who thought that the Bible was “the actual word of God and to be taken literally, word for word”, 22% agreed or strongly agreed that “the dangers of science outweigh its benefits”, whilst 31% of people disagreed or strongly disagreed. There was a similar pattern of evidence according to people’s attitude to the Qur’an.

Looking at the attitudes of the 101‘elite’ interviewees  "who were recruited (a) because of their expertise in science, philosophy, sociology, or religious studies, or for communicating these to a wider audience, and (b) because of their general distance from or aversion to religion" where 63% were non-religious and 55% said that they “did not believe in God”:

💢 12% said they thought science and religion were strongly incompatible;

💢 24% said they thought the two were incompatible;

💢  41% said they thought they were compatible; and

💢  23% said they thought they were strongly compatible.

And so to the conclusion that can be drawn from these findings:

In summary, if we adopt the narrow-angle lens on the relationship between science and religion – the evolution-Big Bang-neuroscience lens – and then present it as a series of binary choices – evolution or creation? Big Bang or God? neurochemicals or spiritual experience? – and, thereafter, a single model – harmony or conflict? – we naturally steer the conversation to a restricted area where there is likely to be a lot of shouting and noise; in effect, the shallow end of the pool. Alternatively, if we opt for the wider-angle lens take on the relationship, we will begin to see a rather more complex picture, with pockets of antipathy, anxiety, and incompatibility, but also with areas of ambiguity, complexity and harmony.

These insights into the science-religion debate are valuable because they show that the attitudes of the players in this field are key to how fruitful the attempt to achieve a meeting of minds will be. Rhetorical warfare will achieve little, whereas the truthful assessment of what is known and what is conjecture, as with Stephen Hawking, can enter into the deeper realms of human experience and knowledge.

Ω  See the first part of my delving into this report: Science and religion: a meeting of minds. 

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Coming to Christ is an intriguing journey

From left: Kent Shi, Loren Brown, Katie Cabrera,Verena Kaynig-Fittkau, and Kyle Richard

They say that God writes straight with crooked lines. How true that is can be seen in the life stories of five  people who joined or rejoined the Catholic Church at Easter. All have links to Harvard University.

Twenty-five-year-old Kent Shi's path was typical of many young people in that he was agnostic to belief in God for a good part of his life. 

However, there was movement toward trying to understand the depths of his being so that as a graduate student in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government  he accepted Christ and started attending services at a Presbyterian church.

Then during the summer of 2021, a crucifix outside St. Paul’s Church near the Harvard campus that Shi says he “must have passed multiple times a week for months and never noticed” caught his eye, and deeply moved him.

Soon after a friend invited him to attend eucharistic adoration even though he “didn’t know what adoration meant”. But kneeling in the front few pews he started asking questions about the host displayed in a monstrance on the altar. Catholics hold that, taking Jesus at his word, the consecrated host is his body and blood in the form of bread.

This is a key point of Shi's story:

For many non-Catholics considering entering the Catholic Church, the Real Presence can be a major obstacle.

Not Shi. He says that once the Eucharist was explained to him that day, he instantly believed.

Shi began attending Mass and decided to take part in the program that prepares non-Catholics for baptism or, if they are already Christians, for full participation in the life of the Church.

The wish to be fully involved in a way of life that brings us close to God seemed to be driving Katie Cabrera, a 19-year-old Harvard freshman, on a path that led her to the Church.

She grew up in Massachusetts, was baptized as a child and comes from a family of  immigrants from the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean. Her father had little education, but during a difficult life maintained Catholic traditions in the home.

Growing up, however, Cabrera attended a non-denominational church with her mother. Because she felt the church’s teachings lacked an emphasis on God’s love and mercy, Cabrera eventually left.   

“Even though I Ieft, I always knew that I believed in God,” Cabrera said. “So, I was at a place where I felt kind of lost, because I always had that faith, but I didn't know what to do with it.”

One day she accepted a friend’s invitation to attend an ice-cream social at the Harvard Catholic Center — “and that was like, sort of, how it all started”.

“There was a void that existed in my heart,” she said. “As soon as Father Patrick [Fiorillo] started teaching about marriage and family, theology of the body, and the sacraments, I was like, ‘This is what I've been looking for my whole life.’”  

[...] She felt a “calling” that she “really wanted to officially become Catholic” after many difficult years without a faith community. 

Coming to understand Catholic doctrine was not an obstacle because the priests available at Harvard were experienced at explaining the faith.

For the next Harvard student God used poetry and art to open the door to a closer relationship with him. For Loren Brown, 25, being at Harvard was "providential" in the way God worked in his life. Here is the account of his journey: 

[H]e comes from a “lapsed” Catholic family and wasn’t baptized. He didn’t think much about the faith until the spring semester of his freshman year, when Catholic friends of his “began to question my lack of commitment to faith”.

Later, when students were sent home to take classes virtually due to the pandemic, he had time to reflect and began to read some of the books they’d recommended to him. The poetry of T.S. Eliot and the Confessions by St. Augustine, in particular, “pulled me towards the faith,” he said.

Brown describes his conversion as a “gradual process” which backed him into a “logical corner.” But a chance meeting with a priest was also key.

One day in the summer of 2021 while walking back to his dormitory he encountered a man wearing a priestly collar outside St. Paul’s Church on busy Mount Auburn Street.

It was Father George Salzmann, graduate chaplain of the Harvard Catholic Center.

“He asked me how I was doing, what I was studying, and we immediately found a common interest in St. Augustine.”  

Brown remembers the gregarious priest telling him: “You know, there's this great window of St. Augustine inside St. Paul's [Church] and you should come see it." Salzmann wound up giving Brown a brief tour of the church.

The next week, Brown found himself sitting in a pew for his first Sunday Mass at St. Paul’s. 

Brown says he now realizes that coming to Harvard was about more than majoring in education.

“What I wanted out of Harvard has completely changed. Instead of an education that prepares me for a job or a career, I want one that forms me as a moral being and a human.” 

Verena Kaynig-Fittkau, 42, is a German immigrant who came to the U.S. 10 years ago with her husband to do her post-doctoral research in biomedical image processing at Harvard's engineering school.

The couple settled in Cambridge, where they had their first child. Two subsequent pregnancies ended in miscarriage, however. That second loss was overwhelming for Kaynig-Fittkau, who says she was raised as a “secular Lutheran” without any strong faith.

“It broke me and a lot of my pride and made me realize that I can’t do things by myself,” she said

She found herself on her knees one Thanksgiving, pleading with God. “I can’t do this alone,” she said. “Please help me.” 

She says God answered her prayer by introducing her to another mother, who she met at a playground. She was a Christian who later invited Kaynig-Fittkau to attend services at a Presbyterian church.

In that church, there was a lot of emphasis on “faith alone”,she said. But Kaynig-Fittkau, who now works for Adobe and is the mother of two girls, kept questioning if her faith was deep enough. 

Then one day she stumbled upon a YouTube video titled "The hour that will change your life," in which Father Mike Schmitz, a Catholic priest known for his Bible in a Year podcast, speaks about the Eucharist.

She began watching similar videos by other Catholic speakers, including  Bishop Robert Barron, Matt Fradd, and Scott Hahn, each of whom drew her closer and closer to the Catholic faith. Her journey continued in this way:

Familiar with St. Paul’s from her days as a Harvard researcher and lecturer, she decided to attend Mass there one day, and made an appointment before she left to meet with Father Fiorillo.

When they met, Fiorillo answered all of her questions from what she calls “a list of Protestant problems with Catholicism”.

 Kaynig-Fittkau went on to join the program for those seeking to know more about the traditions and practices that Catholics have received. 

Recalling her first experience attending eucharistic adoration, she said it felt “utterly weird” to be worshiping what she describes as “this golden sun”.

A conversation with a local Jesuit priest helped her better understand the Eucharist, however. Now she finds that spending time before the Blessed Sacrament is “amazing.”

The journey to the Catholic Church for Kyle Richard, 37,was fostered by an attachment to the rosary, the prayer to Mary, Jesus' mother, asking that she intercede for us now with all our needs, and at the hour of our death, when we have to give her son an account of our life. 

Richard works in a technology startup company in downtown Boston. His journey is described here:

Although he grew up in a culturally Catholic hub in Louisiana, his parents left the Catholic faith and joined a Full Gospel church. Richard said he found the church “intimidating”, which led him eventually to leave Christianity altogether.

When Richard was in his mid-twenties, his father battled pancreatic cancer. Before he died, he expressed a wish to rejoin the Catholic Church. He never did confess his sins to a priest or receive the Anointing of the Sick, Richard recalls sadly. But years later, his non-believing son would remember his father's yearning to return to the Church.

“I kind of filed that away for a while, but I never really let it go,” he said.

Initially, Richard moved even farther away from the Church. He said he became an atheist who thought that Christianity was simply “something that people used to just soothe themselves”.

Years later, while going through a divorce, he had a change of heart.

Feeling he ought to give Christianity “a fair shot”, he began saying the rosary in hopes of settling his anxiety. The prayer brought him peace, and became a gateway to the Catholic faith.

Before long, he was reading the Bible on the Vatican’s website, downloading prayer apps, and meditating on scripture.

A Google search brought him to St. Paul’s program for those learning about the Church, something that he feels was a continuation of his father's desire on his deathbed more than a decade ago.

Father Fiorillo said that people often assumed that those who seek to come close to Christ through the Harvard Catholic Center are intellectual powerhouses and therefore have an intellectual kind of belief:

“That is definitely true of some people. But I would say the majority are not here because of intellectually thinking their way into the faith. Some are. But the majority are just kind of ordinary life circumstances, just seeking, questioning the ways of the world, and just trying to get in touch with this desire on their heart for something more."

Several times in scripture God points out to us that his care continues even when we are not attentive: "Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear" (Isaiah 59:1); or, "The Lord answered Moses, 'Is the Lord’s arm too short? Now you will see whether or not what I say will come true for you' ” (Numbers 11:23). 

All the best for your enchanted journey in life toward a deeper relationship with God! 

Ω With thanks to CNA writers Joe Bukuras and Shannon Mullen 

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Labour Day message to neglected workers

Workers need to stand up for themselves. Photo by Yan Krukov

In Vietnam, where I live, International Labour Day is being marked today Monday May 2, providing a public holiday.  Attention is given to what people need to ensure that work is not degrading, but a positive experience for themselves, for their family, and for the ethos of the whole society.

In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh declared in 1945 that May 1 should be a public holiday, but the Japanese and French powers had other ideas. However, even with Ho Chi Minh's party in control after 1954 the struggle for improved working conditions would have to continue. 

The labour "shortage" that has created headaches for employers since the end of the Covid-19 lockdown tells us that working people are not happy with their situation.

A vision of what is possible by way of new practices, a willingness to regain what has been lost to employer power in the way of  union bargaining and overtime pay, for example, and a society-wide acceptance that the family must have more protections through legislation to allow parents, especially women, to have flexible arrangements in order to meet the needs of their children—these are essential for the well-being of all.

To regain what has been lost to working people means restoring provisions such as contract negotiations only through a union, provisions lost under the onslaught of the Milton Friedmanite ideology from the 1960s onward where businesses are held to have no responsibility for the welfare of society, but only for generating the highest possible returns for investors. 

Here is a graphic picture of what has been one of the consequences for Americans:

If it feels like you’re working longer hours for less money than your parents or grandparents did, it’s because you probably are. Adjusted for inflation, average hourly wages have actually fallen since the early 1970s, while average hours worked have steadily climbed. American workers are increasingly underpaid, overworked, and overwhelmed.

What went wrong? In part, overtime pay.

If you’re under the age of 45, you may have no idea that overtime pay is even a thing. But believe it or not, middle-class workers used to get a lot of it, while you likely don’t get any at all. That means that every hour you work over 40 hours a week you work for free, contributing to a giant pool of free labor that modern employers have come to expect and exploit. Profits are up, real wages are down, and income inequality has soared to its highest level since the Gilded Age [period of rapid growth in U.S. 1870-1900].

The writer goes on to say that employers—but let's widen the reference to managers (see how Apple's top lawyer got $27 million last year on a base salary of $1 million)—are able to live it up while the typical employee finds it tough to pay for childcare:

It wasn’t always this way. Overtime pay was one of the biggest deals of the New Deal reforms—along with the prohibition of child labor and the establishment of a federal minimum wage, it was one of the three core provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The FLSA literally changed the way we think about work: by establishing a salary threshold below which workers were guaranteed time-and-a-half pay for every hour worked over 40 hours a week, it was the FLSA that created both the weekend and the eight-hour day. “Except perhaps for the Social Security Act,” President Franklin Roosevelt declared on the FLSA’s passage in 1938, “it is the most far-reaching, far-sighted program for the benefit of workers ever adopted here or in any other country.”

Benefit program maliciously neglected 

A little history: 

From 1938 into the 1970s a robust federal overtime standard served as a kind of minimum wage for the middle class, providing both a valuable source of extra income and an invaluable shield against the imposition of exploitative working hours. At its inception the FLSA set the minimum wage at one-half the median wage and the overtime threshold at three times the minimum—an amount equal to 1.5 times the median wage, a level high enough to cover about two-thirds of salaried workers. Over the next few decades, thanks in part to these strong labor standards, real wages at all income levels broadly grew in lockstep with growth in worker productivity.

Year after year as the median wage grew, both the minimum wage and the overtime threshold were regularly adjusted upward to maintain the FLSA’s intended 0.5 (minimum) to 1.0 (median) to 1.5 (overtime) ratio. For more than three decades overtime pay was the norm; most American workers expected to be paid 150 percent of their regular wage for every hour worked over 40 hours a week, and most employers expected to pay it. And since time-and-a-half gets expensive fast, employers were strongly incentivized to hire more workers in order to avoid routinely incurring the added cost. 

The result has been for the powerful to treat fellow Americans with contempt:

But sometime around 1975 the prosperity of working Americans was dramatically severed from that of the economy as a whole. Entranced by an emerging free market neoliberal consensus, both Congress and federal regulators quietly abandoned the historic 0.5 to 1.0 to 1.5 ratio, allowing the overtime threshold and the minimum wage to be relentlessly eaten away by inflation. Our current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour now stands at little more than a quarter of the median wage and has not been adjusted since 2009. 

At one point, the overtime threshold remained unchanged for 29 years. And absent the strong labor standards the FLSA once provided, wages inevitably stagnated too. Today’s median wage of $52,520 stands at just 54 percent of what it otherwise would be had its growth continued to track growth in worker productivity. In fact, over the past 45 years, nearly all of the benefits of economic growth have accrued to top one-percenters like me. 

Furthermore:

Today’s $35,568 overtime threshold now stands at only 67 percent of the already diminished median wage and covers only 15 percent of salaried workers, compared to over 60 percent in 1975. If you earn more than $35,568 a year (and 85 percent of American workers do), chances are you’ve been misclassified into an “exempt” position that does not receive any overtime pay at all. As the memory of overtime pay fades away, employers are taking full advantage.

According to a 2019 Gallup poll, 52 percent of full-time workers report working more than 40 hours a week; 39 percent work at least 50 hours a week, and 18 percent work at least 60. Yet few of these workers are paid a penny of overtime for all the extra hours they put it in on the job. Overtime pay is no longer the norm. As a result, Americans are working longer hours at lower wages while employers and shareholders reap record profits.

This illustrates how societies can collectively forget what is of benefit to their members if their attention is directed elsewhere, especially by the pressure of burdens placed on them, such as the threat of firing or being declared redundant, given the associated banishement of union solidarity in the workplace.

But, as the author says, it doesn't have to be that way. The overtime threshold can be raised by an administrative order, not needing legislation:

No doubt opponents will argue that raising the overtime threshold by any measure would be a surefire “job killer”, because that’s what they have always cynically argued about every policy intended to benefit working people, from child labor laws to workplace safety regulations to the minimum wage. And in the case of overtime, this job-killer logic is particularly wrong. In fact, it has been the steady erosion of the overtime threshold over the past 50 years that has been the real job-killer, enabling corporations to effectively convert three 40-hour-a-week jobs into two 60-hour-a-week jobs, and to pocket the 40 hours in lost wages.

I know, because as a venture capitalist and serial tech entrepreneur I built a lot of personal wealth doing exactly that. Of course, do it at a single tech startup and you end up with a bunch of miserable burned-out twenty-somethings working crazy hours in exchange for decent pay and a shot at striking it rich off stock options. But do that 60 million times across the entire economy, and you effectively kill 20 million middle-class jobs. This has been the most underappreciated driver of stagnant wages and rising inequality over the past 50 years: the jobs lost to a steadily eroding overtime threshold. 

In addition, the ensuing inequality is staggering:

According to a study by the RAND Corporation, rising inequality since 1975 is responsible for a $50 trillion upward redistribution of wealth and income from the bottom 90 percent households to those in the top 1 percent—roughly $2.5 trillion in 2018 alone. That $2.5 trillion is enough to more the double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $13,728 a year (an amount remarkably close to the additional $13,787 a year the median wage earner would take home if they were paid time-and-a-half for the average seven hours of overtime worked every week). 

With the mid-term U.S. elections in mind:

Free labor may sound good to corporate CEOs, but it’s terrible for working families and the economy as a whole. If Democrats know what’s good for them, they will raise the overtime threshold to at least $85,000 a year and proudly run on it, leaving it to Republicans to explain to voters why the American middle-class should be expected to work overtime for free.

For me, this recommendation for urgent action is a case study of what affects working families around the world. Economic exploitation is rampant even in what are regarded as sophisticated economies. But without the power that comes from solidarity with fellow workers, applied through a union, working people are at the mercy of those who wish to elevate their own wealth, and status, and aura of success, defying God.

As Christian morality has faded from many WEIRD societies so immoral economic practices have returned. 

Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. (James 5:4)

Unions as a winning way of life 

Time has another article that is very relevant to this topic, that relating to the suppression of unions in the US, and to possibility of their return as more working people realize the degree of repression inflicted on them. 

Unions became popular in the U.S. starting in the 1930s, with membership rising from just over 10% of the eligible working population in 1936 to about a third by the mid-1950s, according to 2021 research published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. That remained the case until the mid-1980s, when they fell out of favor, thanks to a culture in which companies refocused on maximizing shareholder value and minimizing worker benefits, as well as a court-backed emphasis on the value of private property and private profit. 

By 2002 union membership had fallen to about 15% of the workforce, but the article notes the recent resurgence of a unionising movement.

During unions’ heyday in the U.S. the income gap between the richest and poorest Americans shrunk considerably. “The only time that the bottom tenth of the population and the top tenth of the population have come closer together has been during those years, when unions were operating in the largest corporations in this country,” [Stanford University's Ileen] Devault says. As unionization declined in the 1970s and 80s, that income gap grew once more. Today, it is at an all-time high since tracking began over 50 years ago, based on Census Bureau data. Research shows that as much as $50 trillion has migrated into the coffers of the top 1% of income earners in the U.S., an upward redistribution of wealth that has squeezed out the middle class.

Unions are responsible for bargaining contracts between workers and employers that guarantee anything from better working conditions to higher wages—on average union households have received 10-20% better pay than non-union households, according to one study. When benefits are considered, that improvement can rise to nearly 30%. And while that is certainly a boon for the workers themselves, corporations must adjust both their balance sheets and employment practices to acquiesce to the contracts. That’s at the heart of the battle between the two forces.

The distinctly American value of revering private property over public goods has made this relationship particularly challenging, says Devault. “We’re all supposed to try to gain as much private property as we can, and then protect it from anybody who isn’t us, whatever that means,” she says. “And I think that emphasis—and the fact that the courts have bought into that emphasis on private property—has meant that unions have always been seen as somehow against the whole idea of private property.” Instead of viewing unionization as a net positive that supports better returns for everyone contributing to a company, companies view their bottom line and profits as property that needs to be protected from workers.

Plus, unions give workers power that doesn’t always jive with the preferences of corporate leaders. “Unions aren’t just about higher wages. They are very much about workers having a say about what happens in the workplace,” Devault says. “And that’s what employers don’t like.” When things like vacation policies, health care benefits, and firing practices are set by the union and not the employer, it means the employer becomes more responsible for its workers—and less capable of, say, instituting layoffs.

[W]hen unions are functioning well, Devault says, they aren’t just about pay—but about making sure that workers have more overall power in the workplace. “The pandemic has really changed the way people look at their work,” she says. “We’re starting to see now [that one of those changes is that] I want some say in what goes on in my workplace.” And when workers have more say, they can be more invested in their company’s future, too.

Read the article in full, for a useful look at the false accounting and rhetorical posturing that goes on when corporate bosses find they are having the prospect of facing up to workers and their representatives.   Here is the link again.

The arrangements we make about work are up to us. We have the opportunity to exert personal agency to restore overtime pay, to build in greater flexibility, to experience afresh the cooperative solidarity of old, and in doing so, free ourselves from the general debilitating individualism we learn from our consumerist society.   

 Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Religion and science: a meeting of minds

Is 'Who were Adam and Eve?' even a question? Graphic: Source

The trans-Atlantic New Atheism tag team of figures such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, the late Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali have certainly had an impact on the public's attitudes towards science and religion, according to a report published in Britain in the past week.

The report from Theos, the Christian think tank which commissioned the research, "draws on a three-year project in which the researchers conducted over a hundred in-depth interviews with leading academics and science communicators, and commissioned a YouGov public opinion poll of over 5,000 British adults".

There is good news for those hoping for a balanced conversation on the topic, but it's worthwhile studying first the fact of the residue of antagonism that has been deposited – or cultivated  – in the public's mind by the campaigning of that tiny clique of atheists who loved to court controversy, with their efforts ebbing in more recent years.

The 'science-religion' research report's executive summary provides these negative findings:

The British public are more likely, by a proportion of 2:1, to think that science and religion are incompatible (57%) than compatible (30%). 

There is an even more pronounced difference (3:1) between those who think they are strongly incompatible (22%) than those who think they are strongly compatible (7%). 

This issue has a noticeable gendered and ethnic dimension. Men are more likely to voice an opinion on this matter and to be hostile than are women. Conversely, respondents from non-white ethnic groups are more likely to be positive than white respondents.

Of those who expressed an opinion, 68% of white respondents were on balance ‘incompatible’, compared with 48% of those from nonwhite ethnic groups respondents. In effect, white men are the group most likely to have a negative view of science and religion.

However, the good news on attitudes concerning the interaction of science and religion suggests that "the angry hostility towards religion engineered by the New Atheist movement is over". 

The summary states: 

About 15 years ago, [...] a ComRes poll found that 42% of UK adults agreed that “faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate”. Today, that figure is 20%. 

By comparison, 46% of people today agree that “all religions have some element of truth in them”, 49% that “humans are at heart spiritual beings”, and 64% of people agree that “there are some things that science will never be able to explain”. 

One of the report's writers adds:

Moreover, younger people are notably less hostile about all this than any previous generation. Gen Zs, aged 16-24 in the survey, are more likely to agree that it is possible to believe in God and evolution, more likely to believe that you can be religious and be a good scientist, more likely to think religion has a place in the modern world than any other generation, more likely to disagree that science will be able to explain everything one day, and more likely to disagree that science is the only way of getting reliable getting knowledge about the world. For them at least, the conflict seems to be passing. 

On closer inspection, there seems to be a conflict of image rather than substance: 

Tension with specific sciences is much less than with ‘science’ in general. If you ask people about their view of religion and science, they are likely to lean towards incompatible. If you ask them about religion and a specific science, e.g. neuroscience, medical science, chemistry, psychology, geology or even cosmology, they are more likely to say that, on balance, it doesn’t make it hard to be religious.

A similar point can be made for specific religions. The perception of hostility between ‘science and religion’ is greater than it is between ‘science and Christianity’ or ‘science and Islam’. 

Although much of the science and religion debate has been focused around evolution, it has rightly faded as a matter for contention.  Only 6% of the religious group disagree (3% strongly) with the statement that there is “strong, reliable evidence to support the theory of evolution”.

Religious people and even regular worshippers are only marginally more antagonistic to the theory of evolution than non-religious. Even among strict biblical literalists, a small group (3%) who are traditionally the most hostile to Darwinism, only just over a third rejects evolution.

In fact, any antagonism that may exist between religion and science does not appear to arise from the religion side.  When asked whether they agreed that “the dangers of science outweigh its benefits”, only 12% of the religious grouping strongly agreed or agreed compared with 9% of the general public. Conversely,  61% of the religious disagreed or disagreed strongly, just below the figure for the general public.

On this, the report's writers state that "[...] the religious are no more antagonistic towards science itself than are the non-religious, and:

In short, much of the science and religion ‘battle’ has been smoke – and there has been a lot of smoke – but without much real fire. 

This comes out clearly in the more than 100 in-depth expert interviews with scientists, philosophers, and sociologists. One strong atheist in this expert category stated:

“I want it on record, don’t just list me as an atheist in the Richard Dawkins type. Because I am not an atheist like him at all.” 

The report writer says separately:

Perhaps most tellingly, the sense of hostility seems to weaken with knowledge and education. The higher your level of education or knowledge is, the less likely you are to think that, for example, “you can’t be a good scientist and be religious”. Indeed, we spoke in depth to leading scientists and philosophers, from Brian Cox to Adam Rutherford – people who were recruited on the basis of their expertise and their non-belief – a surprising number (two-thirds) saw science and religion as compatible, far more than the general public.

 In the words of one interviewee, the evidence seems to show that “there is much less of a conflict for anyone who has had to think a bit about it, whether they be a practicing scientist or a practicing member of a faith community. The idea of a problem comes more from those who aren’t either and who have just picked up the cultural zeitgeist.”

The report writers continue: 

The contention of this report is that the science and religion debate has been distorted by being viewed primarily through a few narrow lenses – in particular, evolution (“vs creation(ism)”), the Big Bang (“vs God”), and neuroscience (“vs religious experiences”) – and because these are ‘conflictual’ lenses, the resulting picture is one of wholesale conflict, a conflict that the public feels but finds it hard to locate or explain.

The research findings seem to provide evidence for the view that:

 “‘Science and Religion’ is a lot like a swimming pool. All the noise is up at the shallow end.”

The commissioning think-tank acknowledges that there are remaining areas of conflict but the hope is that by understanding it better deeper issues can be examined in a mutually respectful manner. Rather than a war of words, the goal is to have a meeting of minds on matters such as metaphysics, epistemology, anthropology, and ethics.

Two of the expert comments were these, first with regards anthropology and then ethics: 

“Although there are tensions within modern thinking, I don’t think they’re specifically problems for religious belief, they’re problems for our ways of thinking about ourselves as human beings.” 

 “I think there is a real tension [here] but I think it’s an area, having said that, where having religious people and scientists together discussing it can be very interesting and possibly fruitful.”

The report itself states:

Properly speaking (as a number of philosophers and sociologists of science and practising scientists themselves pointed out in our interviews), science itself is an inherently conflictual process. Disagreement is not a problem. 

There is no reason why the science and religion conversation should be any different. In the process of those disagreements, some will come to a place of broad compatibility between science and religion, some to one of broad incompatibility, and some will linger in ongoing contestability. That is fine.

The goal, then is not "premature or unwarranted harmony" nor "staged and exaggerated conflict". 

What we hope is that, wherever people do find themselves on this issue, they do so on the basis of the best and most nuanced thinking possible, and that, in the process, they get a taste for quite how stimulating and intellectually provocative the field of ‘science and religion’ really is.

To close, we note this statement in the report, perhaps referring to the discrete disciplines of the History of Science, and the Philosophy of Science:

What is important is to recognise that the territory of science even today still has complex, contestable borders and numerous different elements within it. 

That issue, and others relating to the nature of religion, are worthy of scrutiny in a further post. Look out for it in the coming week.

Ω Find the full Science and Religion report here 

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