Erik Hammar

Over the last year or so, I have tended to attend mass at the Swedish Church in London on Sundays. Not so much because I have put my adolescent skepticism about some central tenets of Christianity behind, but because I enjoy the calm, the community and the coffee.

Last week’s service was followed by a lecture by Dr. Sara Wrige, priest of the Swedish Church as well as a doctor of physics. (I take her lecture as my starting point, but of course any mistakes or unintended mischaracterisations are mine alone.) She interestingly and aptly summarised some of the key aspects of the debate over the compatibility of religious faith and natural science (which I will refer to as just ‘science’ from here on). In other words, do we have to choose between faith and science?

Most people (at least in Sweden and the United States), when surveyed, submit that science and faith can coexist just fine. But quite a range of positions are available. Dr. Wrige suggested that there are four broad positions open to us on the science-faith relationship:

1. Independence
2. Conflict
3. Harmony
4. Dialogue

The independence view holds that there are no tensions between science and religious faith as they are simply in the business of fundamentally different things. Their insights make claim to different kinds of knowledge, to be evaluated according to different criteria and subject to different criticisms. The phrase “non-overlapping paradigms” is sometimes employed to describe this relationship, as the core idea is that science and faith inhabit qualitatively separate spheres.

The conflict view tells us that there is a fundamental opposition of some kind between religious faith and science. The upshot is that one could not coherently be both have a Christian faith, and be convinced that science is the best source of knowledge we have. This is all very simplified, and the exact nature of the conflict can be worked out in a wide range of ways. However, the most common form is probably the charge that science-loving people who also have religious faith are guilty of inconsistency in their standards for knowledge. They do not, the charge goes, attach the same level and kind of scrutiny to the religious propositions as they do to scientific propositions.

On the harmony view, all is a bit rosier. Science and religious faith, correctly applied and interpreted, agree in all important respects. The archetypal form of this view is embodied in the (not particularly flattering) “Christian science” of creationism and similar attempts to justify “scientifically” a verbatim, factitious reading of the Bible. Claims about the age of the earth (c.6000 years) or creation of man (forget evolution) consequently result.

The dialogue view, lastly, has it that religious faith and science support the advance and sophistication of each other, through a robust dialogue where perspectives are used to enrich both spheres. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dr. Wrige argued in favour of this position.

The first thing to note, as Dr. Wrige happily admitted, is that the four paradigms above mix apples and pears. ‘Dialogue’ summarises an activity, whilst the other three views summarise a position about the compatibility of the claims of faith and science (or, more technically, the consistency of beliefs entailed by religious faith and beliefs entailed by viewing science as epistemologically authoritative).

In light of this, it is difficult not to agree with Dr. Wrige’s call for dialogue in some shape or form. Indeed, one wonders if we could ever credibly arrive at any of the other three positions without dialogue, as that is surely how the relationship has to be investigated. However, I take the dialogue view to contain more substantive claims. In Dr. Wrige’s version (as I understood her), faith and science are engaged in a dialogue where the findings or insights of each is used to advance the other. The dialogue is not merely informative but constructive. It seems to me to follow that at least strong versions of the independence and conflict views go out the window. Fundamentally separated or fundamentally opposed paradigms could hardly contribute to much in terms of constructive, piecemeal exchange. The fate of the harmony view is less obvious, but if the dialogue is to be constructive, there would unlikely be a wide-ranging, straightforward overlap between the claims of faith and of science. There would of course have to be some fundamental harmony, i.e., lack of direct inconsistency, between the two, but not more than what is simply implied by rejecting the conflict view. Either way, I will not make explicit reference to the harmony view in what follows.

The notion of a constructive dialogue is a tempting solution to the conflict-ridden relationship between faith and science, but I am left skeptical about its viability. Let us first imagine how the dialogue is meant to work. The most easily imagined exchange is one where, for example, Bible texts are interpreted differently in light of our ever-changing and growing scientific knowledge. Fair enough. Taking the Bible as a source of non-literal moral inspiration, instruction and discussion, one can quite easily see how the resultant insights can change both in content and application as we discover new things about the origins of human beings, our place in the cosmos, etc.

It is less clear to me how constructive exchange in the opposite direction would work. Where would science be constructively informed by religious faith? It is of course true that if we care about our religious faith, that might have an impact on what we think science should study. If I believe God wants us to reduce suffering, that gives me a reason to give money to cancer research. But that kind of relationship does not constitute a constructive dialogue. The scientific method proceeds unchanged, with faith providing merely a motivation or reason for it to do so. If I give money to cancer research because I myself have cancer (and, let’s imagine, I don’t give a damn about other cancer patients), it does not follow that selfishness and science are somehow engaged in a constructive dialogue. I struggle to see an instance where the direction of scientific research, conclusions or conceptual innovation has been guided by religious faith.

If the above is correct and exhaustive, then the dialogue is in fact a rather one-way affair. Essentially, we seem to be saying that the beliefs making up religious faith, metaphorical and constantly reinterpreted as they are, should be re-visited, and may well change character, as we learn more about the world through science. And that might sound reasonable to unbelievers as well as some believers. Indeed, the same point could be made about science and literature, music, poetry and drama. However, it is may well leave many religiously minded people uneasy, with science pushing on independently and religion continually adjusting and reinterpreting itself in light of the findings of science. It makes the content of religious faith seem more parasitic and arbitrarily guided than would be suggested by the eternal, solemn and profound character believers often take their faith to have. There is much to say here, but I won’t dive into any further detail. However, the nature of the “dialogue” certainly raises questions, and mainly, I submit, for the believer.

So what do I think is really going on here, then? Well, I think that the kind of one-sided dialogue I described above is roughly how things go and should go; however, I think only a subset of believers have to worry about what this implies about their faith (taking it for granted that they would prefer not to reject the authority of science). I mentioned above that science can be seen to inform art in the same way as it informs religion. What makes religion different from art? If you think that the answer lies in the social and communal role that religion plays, the one-sided nature of the dialogue described above need not worry you. That special, social, feature of faith remains untouched. However, if you think that religious faith is special because it is a separate source of knowledge about the world, or because it contains beliefs about important things that actually happened (e.g., Jesus rose from the dead), then I think you have more to worry about. Because it follows from the kind of dialogue I have suggested is possible, that science retains its sole authority on matters of natural phenomena. Not so problematic if you think religious faith consists in insightful metaphors and valuable social community, but more of a problem if you think religious faith matters because of what it tells us about the world or about worldly events.

I think that the kind of view I am arguing for is not quite a dialogue view, but rather an independence view. Recall that the independence view holds that science and faith inhabit separate spheres. More specifically, the claim is that they make different kinds of knowledge-claims, ones that cannot be juxtaposed and compared on the same merits. The existence of the kind of dialogue I have described allows for this to be true. The fact that we reinterpret religious beliefs in light of what we know about the world, does not entail that our newly acquired science-based beliefs about the world are of the same kind as religious beliefs. To offer an analogy: The fact that new developments in cognitive science may offer new, interesting readings of Crime and Punishment does not mean that the kind of knowledge Dostoyevsky can offer us is the same kind of knowledge that cognitive science can offer us. So dialogue as I have presented it, or rather, as I think it possible, allows us to hold on to the independence view. It does so at a price, to be sure, namely that certain theological positions on the nature of religion and its claims are left, in my view, less viable.

As a standard philosopher’s post scriptum, the above discussion is of course enormously simplistic. It leaves out some very difficult questions and avenues of argument and counter argument. For example, one might want to argue that as religious faith shapes our basic thoughts about the world (informs the concepts we use), it informs science at a very basic level, as conceptual change inevitably changes the conceptual tools science has at its disposal in carrying out its task. Further, there are deep questions about how to more formally define different “kinds” of knowledge claims (a notion I have uncritically employed). The discussion is also framed with Christianity in mind, and experts would likely be able to inform the discussion in light of differences between various faiths.

Nevertheless, the above seems to me to be a fair take, which allows us to be epistemologically skeptical and hard-nosed whilst allowing for the insight and value of faith and religion more broadly.