Francis Collins, Science and Religion: Need I Say More?

"I have found there is a wonderful harmony in the complementary truths of science and faith…. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. God can be found in the cathedral or in the laboratory. By investigating God’s majestic and awesome creation, science can actually be a means of worship.” Francis Collins

Francis Collins embodies humanity and humility. From what I've experienced and heard (I've met him twice in person and know several of his friends), he's as compelling publicly as he is privately. At an American Scientific Affiliation conference, I video'd him leading a sing-along of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."

Collins wasn't groomed from birth for his current position as a preeminent voice in religion and science. Brought up by free-thinking artistic parents, Collins discounted Christianity until, on the advice of a Methodist minister, he encountered Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Not too long after, he became a Christian while in medical school at 27. 

The Human Genome Project represents perhaps the most significant scientific project of the 21st century. In April 2003, it unveiled the full sequencing our human DNA. Collins headed that. 

He penned the 2009 bestselling The Language of God, which demonstrated the importance of our genetic code in how God "speaks" through the book of nature. Almost immediately, he was flooded with questions. He decided to convene a small team of specialists, to work out answers, which they posted on a website. This formed the basis for starting the BioLogos Foundation.

President Obama appointed Collins as Director of the National Institutes of Health just a few months later. (As a result, he had to leave official work for BioLogos.) It's a post he's continued with President Trump. Serving under such different administrations is obviously quite a feat! But it says something about the man, his competence and his character. Indeed his is a voice that’s guided us well during the worst global pandemic in a century.

Besides all that (and more), this year he was awarded the prestigious Templeton Prize in Progress in Religion, which this leads to an invitation. If you’d like to hear him receive the Templeton Prize and offer an address through a virtual ceremony on September 24th at 7pm Eastern, use this link to register. (And please share it.)

As I did last week, I'll let quotations again speak most loudly. (And this is one, I must admit, I often use in science and faith talks when I’m searching for something wise to say).  

"Studying the natural world is an opportunity to observe the majesty, the elegance, the intricacy of God's creation."

Note: A longer version of these reflections will appear on the Science for the Church website on September 8, 2020. 

A Very Brief Collection of Provocative Quotations on Science and Faith

Sometimes, it's good just to listen, to listen, that is, to voices of wisdom. In this case, as I've been doing research for an upcoming Science for the Church newsletter, I've discovered some insights from three voices that are certainly worthy of our contemplation.

First is from the leading New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, who has emphasized how our metaphysics or our worldview (take your pick of the terms) constrains how we think about God and science:

“My point is this: if you’re trying to have a discussion about God’s involvement in the world—creation, science, whatever—while living and breathing a system in which God has been disinvolved with the world by definition… that is going to make it very difficult.” N.T. Wright in Surprised by Scripture

The second comes from late Rachel Held Evans, who died far too young at age 37 in 2019, and who still resonates as a voice for younger Christians and especially progressives (though, to me, she sounds indelibly orthodox). (In this, you can hear the emergence of a thoughtful follower of Jesus from the straight-jacket of fundamentalism, can't you?)

“Contrary to what many of us are told, Israel’s origin stories weren’t designed to answer scientific, twenty-first-century questions about the beginning of the universe or the biological evolution of human beings, but rather were meant to answer then-pressing, ancient questions about the nature of God and God’s relationship to creation.” Rachel Held Evans

Finally, I turn to the great Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, current head of the National Institutes of Health, recipient of this year's Templeton Prize, 

“I have found there is a wonderful harmony in the complementary truths of science and faith…. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. God can be found in the cathedral or in the laboratory. By investigating God’s majestic and awesome creation, science can actually be a means of worship.” Francis Collins

Now, I ask you, isn't each of those quotations a thing of beauty?

Two Ideas Spurred on by Jonathan Haidt

I just listened to an enthralling interview with the social psychologist and NYU professor Jonathan Haidt. (It's pronounced “height,” by the way.) In it, Haidt makes a clear case for why our human disgust reaction is natural and why it’s part of our human ethical life, but also the cause of much of our cultural polarization.

Simply put, contemporary culture is inflaming our natural tendency to be disgusted by those we disagree with. And Haidt is particularly troubled by how that plays out in academic life, which is why he began the Heterodox Academy: "To improve the quality of research and education in universities by increasing open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement."

Since I’m writing this during the week of the Democratic National Convention, do I need to add that I’m watching the back-and-forth of our putative political “dialogue,” which is really polarized disgust that's familiar, far too familiar?



At any rate, as I listened and watched Haidt (in conversation with Jordan Peterson), I was fascinating and intellectually provoked. This led me, as a scholar of religion, to two brief reflections.

On the one hand, we are fundamentally religious, and ethical disgust is characteristic of religion.

Yes, polarization and ethical disgust are emblematic of religion. When Haidt (and to a lesser degree, Peterson) talked, they highlighted our religiosity (even though Haidt says of himself that he is not religious). This is the basis for much of our separation into what’s “clean” and “unclean,” Holy and the Unholy, “human” and “inhuman.” For example, “Harvey Weinstein is an animal” means he’s disgusting and not part of human society. Or when President Trump told congressional members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar to "go back" home, he was inflaming Republican disgust that they're not part of "us" and "our country."

Remarkably, the Apostle Paul definitively undermines these dichotomies in his letters. He particularly takes aim at the Jewish division of circumcised and uncircumcised. “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love,” (Galatians 5:6).


On the other, we as Americans are decreasingly less able to direct our desire for transcendence.

Formerly, religions had various methods to return people to the fold, and some were obviously quite elaborate—15th and 16th century indulgences represent famous examples of acts of penance. But my concern lies elsewhere: with the rise of the religious disaffiliation, we pursue fewer explicitly religious means to offer us ways back into the fold. (Currently, between 20 and 25% mark "none" when asked "what is your religion?" About 50 years ago, that number was around 5%.)

As I mentioned, robust and enduring religious traditions have means to find forgiveness and restoration. (This is one reason they've been around for awhile.) Here I’ll focus on Christianity. It’s certainly not the “cheap grace” that Dietrich Bonhoeffer once complained about, but a patient path of repentance that restores us back to ourselves, to God, and to community. 

In losing our religious affiliation, the United States has let these well-tried practices gradually slip from our grasp. And this, I believe, leads to the market rise of ethical disgust and social polarization. Which ought to trouble us.

A Few More Notes on Science and Religion/Head and Heart

Some take recourse in this common cliché: science and religion depict the contrast of “head” and “heart,” respectively. That idea is somewhat distorting since, at least minimally, we know that emotions and rationality are intertwined and take place in various functions of our wonderfully complex and often chaotic brains. 

For the past decade or two, affective neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio and Luiz Pessoa have noted the close connection between emotion and decision-making. They encapsulated the trend lines of recent research on emotion and cognitive science when they wrote, 

“There are no truly separate systems for emotion and cognition because complex cognitive-emotional behavior emerges from the rich, dynamic interactions between brain networks.” Damasio & Pessoa

And yet the head/heart dichotomy begins to bring us to the right position in understanding our heritage in the United States. Historically, we want either to be warmed in our feelings about the world around us—to see meaning and order and beauty—or to have our thinking kindled—to analyze the particulars of how things fit all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

In addition, I learned from Robert McCauley in Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not that religion, with its stories and community and rituals--but not theology, with its complicated rationalized discourse--has a higher cognitive "naturalness" than science and its patient and careful process (which is closer to theology).

This means that when science has truly affected our culture, it’s not the experiments but the larger story of ourselves and our world—what we might call its religious aspects. Albert Einstein’s special relativity theory is amazing science, but when we hear that time dilates, that’s an astounding story. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection is ground-breaking science, but what influences culture is that we are more similar to chimpanzees, and less special, than we thought. I note then not only science for science’s sake, but science for culture’s sake. 

And when science has affected culture is indeed, that is when science has interacted most notably with religious life in America.

Religion and Science as Cultural Terms

To look at the past, present, and future of religion in the United States is to hear a narrative in which no generation ever arrives at a fixed relationship between these two cultural forces (or sets of forces), but one in which we continually negotiate how religion and science will relate. It’s less clear but, to my mind, more exciting. As James Gilbert wrote in his study of religion and science in the United States, "The dialogue between science and religion in America expresses essential ideas and deep-seated structures of culture."

 

To take this conversation up a notch intellectually then, in some ways this represents a way to grasp American cultural and intellectual history. And this brings me to a key definition. 

By culture, I proceed with Webster’s first entry, “the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or together.” 

Biology is nature, and when I speak of “human culture” it is what human beings cultivate in their various spheres of life. And when I talk of “American culture” I’m referring to the second definition primarily. Finally, it’s impossible to talk about this topic (at least for me) without referring to Clifford Geertz’s iconic definition of “culture,” 

“historically transmitted patterns of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.” Clifford Geertz

In sum, I have become convinced that we have done best as a culture when we have held both religion and science together. And, as I’ve written elsewhere, what we today call “science” and “religion” doesn’t map exactly onto our history. It’s my related conviction that human beings are at their best with this same combination.

Pondering the Apple Logo

As I mentioned last week, “Proceed with Caution” ought to guide us when we consider science and religion. 

As my colleague Drew Rick Miller put into our Science for the Church Newsletter last week, we can’t simply take recourse in slogans like “emotion vs. reason,” and “value vs. fact.” It's "Not That Simple." 

As the great mathematician and metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead once commented, science and religion are "the strongest forces which influence" us as human beings. I'll add that we won’t get their relationship right until we realize that religion and science often serve as proxies for negotiating cultural values. And, like any negotiation, this takes great skill.

In his book, Redeeming Culture, James Gilbert ponders the Apple logo, and decides that it evokes two trees, the tree in Trinity College, Cambridge where an apple is alleged to have fallen on Issac Newton's head initiating his theory of gravity and the tree of "the knowledge of good and evil" in Genesis 2. Simply put, science and religion.

But Gilbert wasn’t finished because he realized that the interplay of religion and science is also very American. 

“The dialogue between science and religion in America expresses essential ideas and deep-seated structures of culture. It reveals a theological problem and a profound concern of philosophy; it also shapes a significant portion of everyday popular culture. It provides categories for thinking about modern existence: to structure the world as divided between science and religion, or to imagine it united with their convergence.” James Gilbert

I know I'm mentioned this before, but it's worth repeating: The great Harvard philosopher and scientist A. N. Whitehead quipped, 

“Seek simplicity and distrust it.” A. N. Whitehead

To look at religion and science in America, both historically and contemporarily, is to hear a narrative in which no generation ever arrives at a fixed relationship between these two cultural forces, but one of continual negotiation. It’s less clear than simplicity, but, to my mind, more exciting. It’s my related conviction that human beings flourish with this same combination. As do Americans. 

And from everything I’ve read and seen, this is not about to change.

More on the Indelible Mark of Religion and Science on America

An overview (and almost a thesis)

Our country has often exhibited a dialectical relationship with science and religion, often expressed with rationality and order in conversation with feeling and intuition. In historian James Gilbert’s view,

Science and religion “are words suggesting two great and opposing philosophic systems—materialism and idealism—that, in a variety of forms, operate as polarities in American culture.” James Gilbert

A tension—sometimes creative, sometimes contentious—exists between these two forces, which of course continues to the present day and finds its way into any number of cultural flash points, such as, Who do we trust during the COVID-19 pandemic? Can anyone make me wear a mask? Does it make sense to send kinds back to school?

Is this feeling vs. reason?

One of theologians Robert Jenson’s comments (as he unfolds the thought of the Puritan philosopher and theologian Jonathan Edwards) struck me,

“America has been more than other nations undone by alternate fear of science itself and capitulation to usually jejune science-inspired ideologies.” Robert Jenson

For a nation as unusually religious as ours—we are outliers as a developed country—any uneasy antiphonal response to science merits attention.

 

ANW’s insights

To use the scientist and philosopher A. N. Whitehead’s categories, as Americans we are often poised between “the force of our religious intuitions, and the force of our impulse to accurate observation and logical deduction.” Far too often, we seem to feel a compulsion to decide between them.

 

From the citation, it would sound perhaps that religion is solely emotional. And that notion is worth challenging. Whitehead does later comment in a chapter from Science in the Modern World devoted to “Religion and Science,”

 

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within,

the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting

to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond. A. N. Whitehead

 

That is to say religion seeks to put us in connection with a broader Reality behind the material reality we immediately see. But this isn’t simply an emotion—it’s an intuition of Something or Someone greater than we are.

 

“Proceed with caution” ought to guide us as we decide how to define science and religion.

Sensus Divinitats and Science

Just this week, I was listening to an excellent podcast by Dan Koch with the theologian Miroslav Volf, and they ventured into the territory of human self-transcendence and how that human characteristic might open us up to the Transcendent. This has been called the religious a priori by many 19th century liberal theologians (among others). 

It got me to thinking about various connections with the Cognitive Science of Religion (which Justin Barrett describes expertly and theologically here) and its similar findings about the natural structure of the human mind, all of which will appear in the Science for the Church newsletter on Tuesday, July 14. These are some notes that didn't make it into the newsletters.

It may surprise some in the Reformed tradition—at least those who have read Karl Barth’s cavils against “natural theology”—that the seminal voice of Reformed theology, John Calvin, wrote similarly of the "the sense of the divine" (sensus divintatis). Calvin was not out to prove God, but to state that inherent in human existence is a basic, vague, and powerful natural knowledge of God. Indeed, in Calvin’s vastly influential 1559 Institutes of the Christian Religion, he wrote, 

“There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity.” John Calvin

This sensus divinitatis is “beyond dispute” according to Calvin.

It appears in other places. For example, C.S. Lewis wrote about this desire for God in his brilliant novel, Till We Have Faces, 

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing… to find the place where all this beauty came from.” C.S. Lewis

But I have to admit that I wonder, is that true? Increasingly with my Chico State University students, 40% of whom answer "None of the Above," when asked, "Which religion do you affiliate with?" I've also asked them whether they believe in a transcendent reality. And many don't. To be more precise, I did this in a Great Books class where we read Augustine, Lucretius, Lewis, Kurzweil and others on the theme of transcendence. Of course, Augustine describe transcendence as central, while Lucretius outright denies it and Kurzweil as well, though in a transhumanism motif. This experience has been replicated in my Death, Dying, and the Afterlife class where I teach about naturalism (like Lucretius) with various religions on these subjects. Many students--though not all, to be sure--express their agreement. We are our bodies. We die. Game over. And that's fine.

The preponderance of the evidence from history, from contemporary science, and even statistical analysis all support the conclusion. 

But it's worth asking: Is this desire for transcendence and the sensus divinitatis cultural and not natural? Is it therefore something we've been taught, but that today many aren't learning at all?

Reasons to Doubt the Alleged Inherent, Persistent Conflict between Science and Religion

It's not hard to find various statements--often really, extended slogans--about the inherent, persistent "conflict" or "incompatibility" between science and religion. They're often philosophically suspect and historically weak. 

Maybe that's why l've learned about these atheist slogans seems to have very little discernible effect. 

I thought I'd start with at least one of the key historical problems with these assertions.

The Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th was started largely by Christians like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton. (Of course, not only Christians were involved, but a lot them were.) They didn't seem to have a problem, a conflict between their faith and science. In fact, as many have argued, it was their belief that God created a cosmos and not a chaos that led them to seek what the laws and structure of this cosmos is. That revolution, joined by the Enlightenment and the Reformed, create the seedbed for the growth as our country, and many American voices carried forward these insights. These were Christians who integrated  their faith with “natural philosophy” (the name for "science" until the early 19th century) like 18th century Puritan philosopher and pastor Jonathan Edwards, the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, the American agricultural scientist and inventor George Washington Carver, and Gerty Cori, the Czech-American biochemist who became the third woman—and first American woman—to win a Nobel Prize in science, and the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her discovery of her discovery of glycogen metabolism. This isn't a full-blown rebuttal, but sufficient grounds to create one.

Now to a more contemporary one...

"Ok, the link between religion and science may have worked in the past, but as we know it's not working now." As a response, I think of Jennifer Wiseman and Francis Collins (both of whom I've mentioned many before in this blog). 

But why not highlight John B. Goodenough? He's the father of the lithium-ion battery, the rechargeable power source inside your mobile phone or laptop, and a Christian. In 2019 this University of Texas at Austin Professor Emeritus of Engineering was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work at Oxford University. 

As University of Wisconsin at Madison biologist (and friend) Jeff Hardin writes, 

"I'm sure each Nobel recipient is interesting in his own right, but to me Goodenough is the most fascinating of the three. His quirky humor comes through in interviews, and he has the distinction of the being the oldest recipient of a Nobel prize in the long history of the program. Goodenough is doubly significant for me because he is a Christian, as his fascinating autobiography, Witness to Grace, makes clear.

Goodenough himself has this to say,

“Scientific knowledge is a means to power, power to extend the limits of our existence, to challenge fate; but it also provides the means to subdue, to terrorize, to destroy. Science teaches why things are the way they are and how to use this knowledge to achieve a specified goal; but it does not distinguish between the moral qualities of the human goals this knowledge serves. For that, another discipline is needed! …For the religious person, what gives meaning to life is our walk with that which is eternal; the beauty of holiness inspires the choice of our service to the humanity in all people; dialogue with the Spirit of Love as well as with nature is sacred…”
Slogans are so easy to take recourse in. But the truth, though often much less neat, is so much more interesting.

The Indelible Mark of Religion and Science on America

The interplay of science and religion indelibly marks American culture and carries with it all key American values, like the connection (sometimes denied) of reason and emotion, the primacy of experience, and the enduring legacy of racism. The relationship between these two cultural forces goes back to our earliest founding voices, such the Pilgrim divines who, being the most educated members of the early colonies, brought together religious reflection with “natural philosophy” (as science was called before 1834). A century or later, in the very founding of the United States politically, there was both the rationalist “freethinkers” Thomases Paine and Jefferson joined by the religious Johns, Witherspoon, Jay and Adams. The late 19th century paired the Christian evolutionist at Harvard, Asa Gray, with the preacher’s son and itinerant evangelist for agnosticism, politician Robert Ingersoll. 

Through these voices and many others has coursed the question of whether the “heart” or the “head” is more important, whether human beings can be changed in an instant (aka experience a spiritual revival), and what to do about the enduring American sin of racial prejudice, the latter so often couched in scientific terms and given scientific teeth through movements like the early 20th century eugenics movement. Of course, today in light of COVID-19 and our failure as a country to address this pandemic, we have the anti-science wing of the church (take your pick) counterpointed by the devout Christian in science, Francis Collins, at the helm of the National Institutes of Health.

I submit these as simple notes and a few exemplifications of the key fact:

To understand how we’ve negotiated science and religion is to understand America.

Where is Race in the Bible? Some Notes As I Ponder

Our country is talking about race quite a bit right now, but I’m not sure we have an agreement about what “race” means.

Here are some notes as I work on answering this question.

In other places (like this), I’ve noted that race, as we often understand it, isn’t a biological or genetic category…. which certainly doesn’t mean race is non-existant. Race is a cultural one with powerful implications, most notably racism.

I'm a bit surprised to say that Wikipedia is remarkably good here: 

“A race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into categories generally viewed as distinct by society. The term was first used to refer to speakers of a common language land then to denote national affiliations. By the 17th century the term began to refer to physical (phenotypical) traits. Modern scholarship regards race as a social construct, an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society. While partially based on physical similarities within groups, race does not have an inherent physical or biological meaning.”

So far so good. Let me add this: As a Christian and a student of the Bible, I'm interested in this particular question: How does this line up with the New Testament? 

Three NT Greek words might help:

1.     Oikos (from which English gets economy) means “house,” “family,” or “race,” as in “ but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 10:6).

2.     Ethnos (the root of ethnic) can mean “mass,” “tribe,” “nation,” and sometimes more specifically, “Gentile.” It appears multiple times in the New Testament such as in 1 Peter 2:9 and Acts 10:22, “They answered, 'Cornelius, a centurion, an upright and God-fearing man, who is well spoken of by the whole Jewish nation, was directed by a holy angel to send for you to come to his house and to hear what you have to say.'”

3.     Suggenes (the root of nothing I can identify) has these meanings: “a relative (by blood) and by extension fellow kin” as in Romans 9:3, "For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race."

 

Personally, I'm not making a ton of connections between these New Testament words and our understanding of race. I hope to make those in the next post. And so I'll leave it with you: How well do any of these New Testament map onto our understanding of “race”? What do you think?

From the Cutting Room Floor: On Racism, Religion, and Science

I've been working on a Science for the Church newsletter, which will be posted soon, and here are a few ideas that left on the cutting room floor. 

The topic is the history of scientific racism.

First: We could of course talk about how our earliest American Christian leaders had racist ideologies—and I’ll pick on one of my heroes from the 1700s, Jonathan Edwards who brilliantly integrated his theology with natural philosophy (or science) also owned slaves. Here's a bit more nuance to that statement: 

"Though he recognized the cruelty of the slave trade and considered enslaved people his spiritual equals, Edwards himself owned slaves throughout his life and career." Princeton & Slavery

Second: We can't forget the extension of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection into social Darwinism, the theory that “sociocultural advance is the product of intergroup conflict and competition and the socially elite classes (such as those possessing wealth and power) possess biological superiority in the struggle for existence.” Darwin himself repudiated social Darwinism, but his cousin Francis Galton who coined the term "eugenics" in 1883 certainly launched a social Darwinist experiment in England and the United States.

Third: The implicit racism of anti-immigration sentiment today is shocking, but it's not new. When the restrictive 1924 Immigration Act allegedly sought to restore the racial composition of the United States, it set those standards on a census over four decades old, the 1880 census, before many Southern and Eastern Europeans had emigrated to America, who were not considered the same “race” as their Anglo-Saxon counterparts.

Fourth: Note Webster’s updating of their definition of racism to include systemic racism. 

Fifth: My grandfather Nicholas Kutsonas, escaping persecution as a Greek in Turkish-occupied Macedonia, fled to this country as a teenager in 1915. He was considered, as a Southern European, to be the kind of “race” that the United States didn’t want. It’s no surprise, that when the 1924 Immigration Act went into effect, it led to a net decrease of Eastern and Southern European immigrants. Put another way, because race has little or no basis in science, and particularly in genetics, it’s a concept that’s malleable and can be manipulated to serve racist ends. Nichole Phillips, Emory University theologian, recently spoke against “colorism”--the prejudice that privileges lighter skin over darker and that leads to racism, 

Racism and Science: Still Bubbling Around and Not Going Away

This is another adapted excerpt from my book, Negotiating Science and Religion in America, which I felt I had to post in light of George Floyd's killing and dialogue about racism in our country. 

In this book, I noted a few places where the construction of race, and especially racial superiority, has been tied to science; for that reason it’s also promoted as “scientific racism.” 

The status of race as a scientific category has been significantly questioned—for example, in the influential work of Alan Templeton. In this respect we—and by “we” I mean those who want to bring together religious and scientific insight (and who are often white and male)—have to grapple with race as a social construction.

And with race arrives many other ills. One of the surprises of cultural life in contemporary America is the return of white supremacists and nationalists, and along with them, the anti-immigration rhetoric that highlights certain countries (in this case, Latin American ones) and religions (Islam). I am concerned about the rhetoric against the immigrant that led to Donald Trump’s election as President and how it mirrors the social concerns of the early twentieth century. And, I am horrified at the killing of George Floyd and what that means about the bubbling caldron of racism that is exploding right now in the United States. 

Racism and bigotry make many claims.

“The essence of bigotry, including racism, is the belief that easily identified categories reliably predict behavior, intelligence, and character,” Dave Unander.  

Marouf A. Hasian, Jr., in his 1996 The Rhetoric of Eugenics, had already

noted a “revival of eugenics” twenty-five years ago. I see no reason to miss the same parallel in post-Trump America:

"Just as Americans in the 1990s are confronted with the specter of armies of homeless, dependent AIDS patients, and violent inner-city gangs, in the 1910s and 1920s the nation was concerned with what it termed problems of the feeble-minded, the congenital defectives, and other degenerates." Marouf A. Hasian, Jr.

In his study of race and eugenics in the southern states, Edward Larson examines how southern eugenicists were vexed about “the deterioration of the Caucasian race than about any threat from the African race” and then presents this 1919 quotation from a white Louisiana physician: “What language can express the humiliation we should feel at seeing [our] race, physically, mentally and morally, slowly going to decay?”

As a California child in 1960s and early 1970s grade schools, I remember growing up and learning about three primary human races: “Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid.” How confusing those easy distinctions have become in light of the reality of mixed racial compositions and the fact that the relevant sciences don’t support commonly held discriminating features distinctions based on race.

“Genomics—reading DNA—is showing that all human populations carry most of the same genetic variations, contrary to what we would expect if ‘races’ existed.” Dave Unander

In a related vein, Templeton concluded his study of any biological basis for race with this, 

“Humans are an amazingly diverse species, but this diversity is not due to a finite number of subtypes or races. Rather, the vast majority of human genetic diversity reflects local adaptations and, most of all, our individual uniqueness.” Alan Templeton

At this critical time for our country, my hope is that skilled and informed contributors to this conversation will rise up to address the links between racism and the use of science. May it be so.

I Finally Arrive at My Definitions of Science, Technology, and Religion

To define is to separate and, one hopes, to clarify. Sometimes, however, definitions also create problems. Do religion and science represent two clearly definable two things? 

In this post, I return to those questions and offer my answers.

This post again excerpted from my book

Peter Harrison has argued that some definitions that we take for granted have only existed in the past 300 years or so. In that sense they are arguably “modern”—i.e., post-Enlightenment—concepts. For that reason he would rather talk of the “territories” of religion and science, not their definitions. Referring to the historic alterations in defining science, Harrison writes on the shift from emphasizing an approach to focusing on what it produces: 

"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." Peter Harrison

Harrison then describes 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.” Peter Harrison

This prodigious and erudite work, which represents Harrison’s 2011 Gifford Lectures, is fundamentally discipline-changing and will influence how I describe these two terms in my reconstruction of historical American views on religion and science.

Nonetheless, Harrison repeatedly focuses on “beliefs and practices,” which is inadequate for grasping contemporary definitions of religion. True, one of the greatest minds in the sociology of religion, Émile Durkheim, offered this definition in his 1912 Elementary Forms of Religious Life: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” But a great deal has changed in the past 100 years in the study of religion, and any number of more recent commentators such as Robert Bellah, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Huston Smith, Clifford Geertz, Robert Orsi, and Stephen Prothero do not solely emphasize beliefs and practices. 

Prothero is perhaps clearest in presenting his “four Cs” of religion: 

“creed, cultus, code, and community.” (Stephen Prothero's four marks of a religion)

Obviously beliefs (“creeds”) and practices (“cultus”) can be found in this palette, but these two do not exhaust his list. Similarly, Orsi, in his ground-breaking The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith And Community In Italian Harlem, 1880–1950, coined the term lived religion as including “the work of social agents/actors themselves as narrators and interpreters (and reinterpreters) of their own experiences and histories, recognizing that the stories we tell about others exist alongside the many and varied story they tell of themselves.” At this point I’ll add myth or story—narratives about how the world works and our place in it—as central to what a religion does.

Religious narratives and practices form us. Or, put differently, as George Lindbeck pointed out in his brilliant The Nature of Doctrine, religious teachings do not simply express internal states of piety (the experiential-expressive model), but form how we experience life and the world. Lindbeck, appropriating the later Wittgenstein, summarized his cultural-linguistic alternative: 

“a religion can be viewed as a kind of cultural and/or linguistic framework or medium that shapes the entirety of life and thought.” George Lindbeck

Finally, these comments lead to two related definitions—theology, “the systematic study and development of religious beliefs and theory,” and theologians, those who produce theology.

In addition, what I hope is clear then is that these scholars do not equate religion with belief in a supernatural being. Buddhism, as is commonly known, has many nontheistic forms and it is not even clear that the Buddha himself had much use for a god. Belief in God or many gods may of course be a component of religion in the sense that I’m using the word, but there’s much more. The scholarly definition of religion brings us much closer to spirituality in common parlance, especially among emerging adults who play a major role in this book and my methods, which makes it difficult to interpret “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” Roughly speaking, to be spiritual is to be religious in the academic study of religion.

From Harrison I’ve learned a sensitivity to the ways in which the terms religion (or religio) and science (or scientia) have changed during the past 300 years in the story I am telling. He thus highlights the problem of essentialism, which Joshua Reeves also raises, that there are enduring essences in religion and science, or, put another way, that these two are natural kinds; i.e., ones that exist in nature and not simply in the socially constructed world of human beings. 

Related to the issue of essentialism is the question Who speaks for a particular religion? I often tell my introductory to religion students that, in a lecture on Islam, for example, I’m offering general contours for the religion as a whole, but they shouldn’t think that this applies to every single 1.8 billion Muslims. If religion is a “thing,” then all who participate in this “thing” ipso facto agree. But it’s not that simple. Religion, like truth, resists simplicity.

Jettisoning essentialism can lead to significant problems, as Reeves admits,

"If one rejects essentialism—if one gives up the assumption that unique features unite science across time and disciplines—then there is no straightforward way to prove the 'scientific' nature of theological claims or to assert the cognitive parity of theology and science." Joshua Reeves

He’s right. Although essentialism makes a scholar’s life easier, it’s deficient. In addition to mourning the loss of essentialism, we cannot comprehend the relationship of science and religion solely as cognitive categories. And yet, even if I don’t swallow anti-essentialism whole in this book—or that we best grasp religion and science as sources of systematic knowledge (alluding to John Evans)—I note these critiques as a way to chasten any overly enthusiastic conclusions. And below I will even propose two working definitions.

Finally, before asserting that I can propose those definitions I will further complicate the binary mode of science and religion by gradually slipping in a third term (one that admittedly does not even make it into my title): technology, which is replacing elements of what has been defined as science in the minds of many. In agreement with the comments by Willem Drees, technology is increasingly central to the science and religion dialogue: “The practice of science is culturally and technologically embodied….” In studying the mindset of 18–30-year-olds, I have discovered that technology and science are closely related. That these two terms appear conjoined merits no particular power for determining their definitions. Nevertheless, we cannot comprehend Artificial Intelligence or genetic engineering, as two examples, except as both scientific and technological pursuits. 

Moreover, technology and science are actually quite close, and what affected the historical interaction of “science and religion” was not only Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, but also the development of geography and shipbuilding that brought the English and Spanish to the Americas and thus Darwin to the Galapagos.

With these considerations in mind I arrive at my working definitions—or, perhaps better, as heuristics—of my key terms. 

Science is “knowledge about or study of the natural world, framed in theories based on observation, which are tested through experimentation.” Science studies nature. 

Religion, which is an even trickier term than science, doesn’t just “study God,” but it can be defined as “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.”

Finally I define technology as “the use of science in industry, engineering, etc. to invent useful things or to solve problems” and “a machine, piece of equipment, method, etc. that is created by the use of science.”

Which leads to a question: What do you think?