What I Want to Do in the Next Book

Here's the current intro from my book on the present state and future directions of science and religion in the United States. The plan is to finish the manuscript by December 1.

It’s true that many people think science and religion are bad for each other—and even more critically, at least one is ruinous for our country. The sooner we get rid of one (religion for the “cultured elites” and science for “good old time” religionists), the better off we will be. 

      

I think that’s wrong-headed. A fair reading of American history demonstrates that our county has been at its best when we bring these two cultural forces together. Likewise, our future will be better without the warfare of religion and science. And emerging adults can lead this future and ultimately believe it’s best for us.

      

That’s one way of describing what this book is about.

In this book, I am seeking to discern the future of the interaction of science and religion based on how emerging adults (age 18-30) views.[1] In a way that often only an outsider can perceive a country he now lives in, the great British mathematician and Harvard philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote almost a century ago,  

When we consider what religion is for mankind and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them. We have here the two strongest forces (apart from the mere impulse of various senses) which influence men, and they seem to be set one against the other—the force of our religious intuitions, and the force of our impulse to accurate observation and logical deduction.[2]

We are far from Whitehead’s generation, but the urgent appeal still has merit. Following Whitehead then I pose two questions: Will there be a détente between these two cultural forces in the coming twenty to thirty years? Or more generally, what will this interaction look like in the future?

      

How to answer is my first concern. Because emerging adults will increasingly become the thought-leaders for our country (and admittedly they already are), this book will utilize the best demographic research available, as well as my own interviews and surveys of emerging adults, to discern future trends. At this point, it is worth adding that I am not writing about what I hope will be the future. Instead, with the research data we possess, and by making reasonable judgments, what defensible claims can I make about what is to come?

      

As working definitions—or perhaps better, as heuristics—I will define my two key terms.[3] Science is knowledge about or study of the natural world, framed in theories based on observation, which are tested through experimentation. Religion, which is an even trickier term than science,[4] is the belief in God or in many gods or Ultimate Reality, as well as an organized system of beliefs, ceremonies, sacred stories, and ethical guidelines used to relate to God, a plurality of gods, or Ultimate Reality.

      

These, of course, are contemporary definitions, which Peter Harrison has argued only existed in the past three hundred years or so. In that sense they are arguably “modern”—i.e., post-Enlightenment—concepts. Referring to the alterations in defining science, Harrison writes, 

Overstating the matter somewhat, in the Middle Ages scientific knowledge was an instrument for the inculcation of scientific habits of mind; now scientific habits of mind are cultivated primarily as an instrument for the production of scientific knowledge.[5]

In describing how views of religion have changed since the time of Thomas Aquinas in the twelfth century, “Between Thomas’s time and our own, religio has been transformed from a human virtue into a generic something typically constituted by sets of beliefs and practices."[6] This prodigious and erudite study, which represents his 2011 Gifford Lectures, is a fundamentally discipline-changing work and has enormous influence on how I describe these two terms in my reconstruction of past American views on religion and science. It is woefully inadequate in grasping contemporary definitions of religion, which he repeatedly states focus on “beliefs and practices.” Harrison does not countenance some of the formative commentators on religion such as Émile Durkheim, Robert Bellah, or Clifford Geertz. Nevertheless, I take from Harrison a sensitivity to the ways in which the terms religion (or religio) andscience(or scientia) have changed during the past three hundred years in the story I am telling.

      

In sum, here’s the burden of this book: If indeed religion and science are critical to our country, 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 their faith conflicting with science? The past will provide us with a guide to the present. And as we look at the past, we see a tension between the two and yet a profound fight to integrate them, despite challenges. 

---

[1] Incidentally, I am broadly employing, along with many other commentators (e.g., Christian Smith), Jeffery Arnett’s category of “emerging adulthood,” as a stage of life that is not still adolescence, but neither is it adulthood. I am not committing to all the implications, but find this to be highly usable paradigm. Cf. Arnett, “Emerging Adulthood: A Theory of Development From the Late Teens Through the Twenties,” American Psychologist,May 2000, Vol. 55. no. 5, 469-480.

[2] Science and the Modern World (Cambridge, 1926), 181.

[3] These are the definitions I have adapted from various dictionaries and standard texts in the field, which I then reworked and finally employed in teaching religion and science to undergraduates (i.e., 18-23 year olds). So far, these definitions have worked reasonable well, and so I will employ them in this book.

[4] Here I think of my first reading of Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion (Fortress, 1991), which made the definition, and study, of religion both more problematic and more interesting.

[5] Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (University of Chicago, 2017), 15.

[6] Harrison, 16.