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?

A Post You Should Probably Read

This post excerpted from my book

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? Lurking in this blog may lie a desire to reify science and religion as one thing each because then we would have a singular relationship between them. And who wouldn't want that? If we simply could help these two dance in a beautifully orchestrated duet, life might be beautiful. But that convenient pairing was a convenient fiction, a useful heuristic device.

Even more, I often use the terms science and religion--and even  faith when I'm referring more specifically to the Christian faith--but I haven't really defined those terms, and so I decided to start to rectify the situation here... at least by noting why those definitions are problematic and complicated.

Not until 1833 did the Cambridge University historian and philosopher of science William Whewell coin the term "scientist" to replace such terms as "cultivators of science." Indeed, even today there is no one Science with a capital S. In fact—as is the case in French and other languages, but not in English—we would do better to refer to “the sciences” (or less sciences) or the “science of x,” such as physics, biology, or—to follow Thomas Torrance— even the “science of theology.” A.D. Ritchie offers this in his Studies in the History and Methods of Sciences, 

“There is no Science in the singular, for there are only sciences.” 

And “There is no one scientific method that is universally applicable.” A.D. Ritchie

The failure of the Logical Positivists in the 1920s to sustain their assertion of verification and then Karl Popper’s later revision, also a failure, to promote falsification demonstrate that the “scientific method” of fourth grade science fairs provides no real aid in comprehending what scientists actually do. By the middle of the twentieth century Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm shifts” and Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method (a book title that apply describes its ethos and tone) further solidify the chaos. For my part, I’m most convinced by Imre Lakatos’s “research programme” as well as Peter Lipton’s Inference to the Best Explanation as meditating theories between the putative Scientific Method and scientific anarchy, which I’ll simply note for now.

Despite these challenges, defining science represents the less complicated side of the ledger. The term religion also has no single consensual definition in the academic guild, nor among its practitioners. The classic five “world religions” of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism all tolerate at best an uneasy relationship with the moniker religion. For example, Stephen Prothero has written, “One of the most common claims among Hindus in the West is that ‘Hinduism is a way of life’ rather than a religion … Sanatana Dharma (Eternal Law),” and many Christians will say that their faith is “a relationship, not a religion.” And when one includes Native American cultures, the discussion becomes particularly intriguing. Severin M. Fowles has noted that there is no good word for “religion” among the Southeast Pueblo peoples, but instead the best rendering is “doing,” and so he titles his study of their practices and beliefs, An Archaeology of Doings. 

I’ll stop there, but the citations could certainly be multiplied. It is no less difficult to find an accepted definition among scholars such as Alister McGrath who, in his introduction to religion and science, was provoked to concede, “there is no generally accepted definition of religion.” 

While I appreciate McGrath’s intellectual humility, I cannot take recourse to this approach in this blog. My thoughts will await another post, but for now I leave with this question, "What do you think is the meaning of science and of religion?"