A Short Treatment of My Upcoming Book on Science and Religion

I'm currently doing research and writing on an upcoming book for Routledge Press (2019) with the title, Science and Religion in the United States: The Present State and Future Directions. Since it's going to be several months before this sees the light of day, I thought I'd offer a glimpse into what I'm working on via a short treatment of the book's contents. Please feel free to comment with any insights and/or questions.

In 1925, a little under a hundred years ago, the Harvard scientist and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead commented that the future of our civilization depended, to some degree, on how effectively we were able to relate science and religion, particularly “the force of our religious intuitions, and the force of our impulse to accurate observation and logical deduction.”

      

And thus the burden of this book: If indeed religion and science are central to the United States, where is their future relationship? (This would be a worthwhile question without its centrality, but that fact intensifies the need for an answer.) What do we do with the fact that two-thirds of Americans see ultimate conflict between the teachings of science and religion, but that same percentage of believers don’t see science conflicting with their faith? The past provides us with a guide to the present. One problem, however, is that what we today call “science” and “religion” doesn’t map exactly onto our history. (The word “scientist,” for example, was coined until 1833.) Still, as we look at the past, we surely see tensions between science and religion. And yet, despite challenges, there are concomitant endeavors to integrate them. It might even be a way of describing U.S. cultural life.

      

I will sketch this answer out in three phases: past, present, and future.

      

The past I’ll define as approximately 1687 to 1966, with a clean division of 1859 in between. I freely admit that every historical division is clunky, somewhat arbitrary, and therefore distorting; nonetheless, I am employing three publication dates, Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687), Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), and Ian Barbour’s Issues in Science and Religion (1966). Between Newton and Darwin, the United States was officially founded, and in that time, it maintained a tensive relationship between religious affections (to use Jonathan Edwards’s term) and rationality. This period is marked by an Enlightenment rationality that features prominently in our nation’s core documents, while also embodying a warm of emotional life that is no less characteristic of America. In fact, Edwards worked with his impressive intellectual skills to hold together these two American cultural impulses, even as the First Great Awakening was booming. This indeed, I argue, is the key way to understand America intellectually. Then, in the next chapter, I chart what happened post-Darwin through to the modern study of science and religion with characters such as Andrew Dickson White, Charles Hodge, and Asa Gray, as well as events like the Scopes Trial and the fundamentalist-modernist split. Here the United States was coming of age intellectually and culturally, and continued to find an uneasy relationship with a variety of impulses. Put another way, both scientific advances and religious expansion—sometimes in alliance, sometimes in antagonism, and sometimes in contented independence—mark this period of about a hundred years.

      

For the present, I use Barbour’s book because, at least for the academic study of religion and science, it defines the field and the massive splintering that defines the sixties through our present day, when a variety of religious traditions became more mainstreamed. It helps us understand a more nuanced and effective approach to religion and science (than, for example, White’s), even if it has significant limitations. It helps us see the emergence of ideas that broaden the dialogue such as Capra’s The Tao of Physics and the Gaia Hypothesis. Broadly speaking, this takes us to the new millennium (a term I like because it sounds so grand) where religion becomes more pluralized and secularized. In the next chapter, I look at how the early twenty-first century interaction of religion and science brought the increasing importance of technology, sexuality, global climate change, and religious pluralism. It also highlights new voices, and I will use Francis Collins and Richard Dawkins as case studies.

      

The final part peers into the future, analyzing research from key scholars on emerging adults’ attitudes about religion and science (seasoned with the author’s surveys and interviews) as signposts for the future. I conclude by analyzing these views as a way to discern the contours of both the present state and future directions of science and religion in the United States, a world in which evolution and creation will be present, but concerns about sexuality, climate change, technology, AI, and Transhumanism will rise in importance. There will also be a reduction of the influence of the Christian church, a modest rise in the influence of atheism, agnosticism, the “Nones,” as well as other religious and spiritual traditions. Nonetheless, the interaction of science and religion will most likely find a decrease in the antipathy that’s often been promoted between the two. One might hope that this is a conclusive answer to Whitehead’s challenge, but it’s most likely another set of responses in ongoing historical process.