SCIENCE and religion are in opposition from their foundations upwards, right? One is built on reason and evidence, the other on belief.
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Well, I have a confession to make: I donāt buy it. I am an evangelical Christian and a Ā鶹“«Ć½ editor. Some might say I am the definition of a square peg in a round hole ā but there it is.
I say all this by way of explaining why I was excited to get hold of Nicholas Spencerās new book Magisteria: The entangled histories of science and religion. I am already a fan of Spencer, who is a senior fellow at the Christian think tank Theos. I particularly enjoy the thoughtful, erudite podcast he hosts, Reading Our Times, which looks at the books and ideas shaping culture today.
In his own book, Spencer does what his subtitle promises ā he recounts the entangled histories of science and religion and shows how there is so much myth and misunderstanding around how the two interact.
The book takes its title from ās description of science and religion as ānon-overlapping magisteriaā. In other words, they are distinct fields of endeavour that neednāt ā perhaps shouldnāt ā interact. Spencer wants to show us it isnāt as simple as that. It isnāt true to say that science and religion have been at war forever or that they have always been separate.
To his credit, he goes beyond merely saying āitās complicatedā. At the start of his book, Spencer identifies two crunch points where science and religion have repeatedly conflicted. These, he argues, are questions around āthe nature and status of the humanā and āwho has the right to pronounce on nature, the cosmos and reality?ā. Overall, the book isnāt an essay ramming this down your throat. It reads more like a traditional history, and Spencerās argument about these two crunch points comes across quite subtly.
Magisteria begins in the year AD 415 and examines the emergence of proto-science in the classical Christian, Jewish and Islamic worlds. It also covers the Enlightenment, Galileo, Darwinism, the development of quantum theory, right up to the recent development of machine learning. At 468 pages, it is quite a hefty book and there is plenty of detail here. But the depth of Spencerās scholarship shines through in every sentence. It isnāt a short or simple story, but it is a surprisingly breezy one.
For me, Spencerās crunch points between science and religion really come into focus towards the end of the book. Here, he relates the story of the Scopes trial in 1925, when John Scopes, a high school teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, was convicted of violating the law prohibiting human evolution from being taught.
Spencer shows how, contrary to some accounts, few Christians at the time were upset about evolution because it contradicted a literal reading of the book of Genesis. What got people fired up, both the religious and otherwise, was the complex way in which some used evolution to inspire eugenicist views. I found the story of this whole complex episode fascinating.
He then leaps to the development of general relativity and quantum theory in the early 20th century. Here, I particularly enjoyed passages where Spencer tries to deduce what Albert Einstein thought about religion, drawing on his often cryptic references to God.
But his main objective is to illustrate how quantum theory, surely just as revolutionary as the theory of evolution, didnāt cause anything like the same public brouhaha. This, he contends, is because science and religion clash most fiercely when they claim to make statements about what it means to be human.
āThe arguments that ricocheted around the streets of Dayton in the 1920s were rich with human significance,ā he writes. āThe theories of relativity and uncertainty and the observer phenomenon were not.ā
If you are the sort of person who thinks religion is nothing more than an immature fairy story, Magisteria will probably infuriate you. If, on the other hand, you have a more open mind, then prepare to read something genuinely fresh in what can be an extremely hackneyed debate.
