Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science \u0026 Religion by Nicholas Spencer

Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science \u0026 Religion Reviews

• 
  Jim Razinha

  NOMA. Gould's position drew fire from all sides (yes, there was concurrence). But his position is not what this book is about, although there is a chapter on it. Mr. Spencer has, in weighty yet easy to read academic detail, defended that religion and science haven't always been at odds. They have in fact been entangled since science began (superstitions came first, of course.) I think my first exposure to a complex (and huge) historical examination was in 1992 and Paul Johnson's Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (It was revised to include the Nineties, but I read the original.) Before that, history was the spoonfed and filtered course texts. This is a big book and I recommend reading it in hard copy because flipping back and forth to the citations is clumsy in e-format if the notes aren't hyperlinked. I received a review copy of this from the publisher
  Oneworld Publications through
  Edelweiss, and I appreciate that. My review copy was watermarked "Reading Copy Only" on every page, which made for a distraction I found challenging to push through, and I don't know if the final e-copy will have hyperlinks.
  
  Mr. Spencer lays out - and supports with extensive research - a theme of the war between the two. He says

  At first, religion wins, but only by compelling the greatest scientist of the age to deny the truth that the earth moves around the sun; hence Galileo’s parting aside. Almost 250 years later, religion, no longer able to resort to the threat of torture, turns to mockery but meets its match in the form of biologist Thomas Huxley, who ably defends Darwin’s new theory of evolution against the ignorant, browbeating Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. Finally, in the American South, religion, now firmly on the defensive, is publicly humiliated before a huge audience and retreats bruised and bloodied but vowing vengeance. From such material has a popular history of hostility and conflict, of comprehensive victory and humiliating defeat, been spun.

  And what I like best of this entire book is a simple statement:
  "There is no such thing as a – still less the – history of science and religion." Indefinite article. History is biased and analyses of histories are biased. He knows that he is no exception (and yes, he has his own conclusions.)
  
  Spencer rightly says, "Myth-busting is helpful and can be fun but it can still leave a rather negative impression in the mind." It is too easy for skeptics to go negative when debunking some nonsense - and it may be because it is exhausting, but necessary. And he ends his Introduction with "Whatever its merits as a description of how science and religion should interact, Gould’s model patently does not work when it comes to history. The ‘magisteria’ of science and religion are indistinct, sprawling, untidy and endlessly and fascinatingly entangled."
  
  Yes, they are entangled. Should they be? I say no, but there is no dispute that they are. And Spencer details how and why.
  
  Curated notes of mine:
  Page 29 [classical science and superstition] Methodological naturalism, the idea that only natural explanations can account for natural phenomena, is one of the characteristics of modern science. In contrast to this, the divine was everywhere in classical science.
  
  Page 29 [on religion adjusting to science] And science does change, its fluid and evolving nature making all attempts to locate religious doctrine within scientific ‘facts’ a perilous business.
  Marrying the science of the age would repeatedly leave religion an embittered widow.
  {There are apologists for every age. Some explain in the particular meaning of the term, and some excuse, in another definition.}
  
  Page 85 [on Copernicus's publication of his heliocentric system] The year 1543 in science and technology marks the beginning of the European Scientific revolution’, Wikipedia informs us. So the year 1543 is a turning point.
  All such ‘turning points’ are arbitrary but there is something particularly problematic about treating 1543 as Year Zero. This is partly because Copernicus first wrote about heliocentrism thirty years earlier.
  
  Page 123 [on Galileo's The Assayer] Beneath the mockery was a serious point. ‘I cannot but be astonished that Sarsi should persist in trying to prove by means of witnesses something that I may see for myself at any time by means of experiment,’ Galileo lamented. ‘How can he prefer to believe things related by other men as having happened two thousand years ago in Babylon rather than present events which he himself experiences?’ Experience – experiment – was a better guide to truth about the natural world than textual authority.
  
  Page 141 [on Robert Boyle's comment that his experiment marked the validation of "New Physics"] It was more than that: it marked the world’s first experiment – in the sense of a planned, organised, hypothesised, designed, observed, measured, repeated and verified procedure, which was soon written up, disseminated and replicated.
  
  Page 176 [on religious legitimzation of science in the late 17th/early 18th century] Science, then, did well from the marriage. And so, at first, did religion. Science was religion’s first defence against atheism. ‘I appeare now in the plane shape of a mere Naturalist, that I might vanquish Atheisme,’ wrote Henry More valiantly in his Antidote against Atheism. In reality, the threat of atheism was never what the divines claimed. The world was not ‘miserably over-run with Scepticisme and Infidelity’ as Anglican bishop and natural philosopher John Wilkins lamented. Nevertheless, physicotheology was a powerful ally in this phoney war.
  {The phony war continues.}
  
  
  Page 231-232 [on Auguste Comte's invention of the Religion of Humanity] Comte prescribed this religion in excruciating detail. An adherent should pray three times a day, once to each of his household goddesses: mother, wife and daughter. He was to cross himself by tapping his head with his finger three times in the place where, according to phrenology, the impulses of benevolence, order and progress were to be found. The Religion of Humanity had nine sacraments, beginning with presentation (a form of baptism), and going through initiation, admission, destination, marriage (at a specified age), maturity, retirement, transformation, and then, seven years after death, incorporation. Comte set out a new calendar, with each of its thirteen months named after great men, from Aristotle and Archimedes to Caesar and St Paul, and festivals that were the scientific-secular equivalent of Saints’ Days. (Gall had the 28th day of Bichat, after the anatomist Xavier Bichat, dedicated to him.) He specified the duties of various, ranked, positivist clergy, their stipends rising in neat mathematical progression. He commissioned new hymns, celebrating holy Humanity. He designed new clothing, most famously waistcoats that buttoned only at the back and could thus only be put on and removed with others’ help (thereby inculcating altruism, another word he coined). As the Grand Pontiff of this new church, Comte regulated all this piety, elevating Clotilde as a kind of Virgin Mary, and Humanity in place of God.
  It didn't catch on.
  {Joseph Smith's predated Comte by about 25 years and did catch on. And then L Ron Hubbard came along a century later.}
  
  Page 254 [from a review of Darwin's Origin of Species] Who shall number the patient and earnest seekers aft er truth, from the days of Galileo until now, whose lives have been embittered and their good name blasted by the mistaken zeal of Bibliolaters? . . . Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain.
  {Literary. I liked the turn of a phrase: retire from the lists.}
  
  Page 256 [on Bishop Samuel Wilberforce] Disraeli’s colourful phrase, ‘unctuous, oleaginous, saponaceous’.
  {Oh my, that's a barb!}
  
  Page 322 [on Bryan's position] Bryan’s worry was the impact the theory had on morality. ‘Our chief concern is in protecting man from the demoralization involved in accepting a brute ancestry,’ he wrote. For him, evolution was synonymous with the doctrine that might, ultimately, was right.
  {The ancestry isbrute, and we are not evolutionarily far enough removed to not be still considered brutes.}
  
  Page 328 [ on Darrow's hard line] On Day 2, Darrow discussed the legitimacy of the Tennessee law. He argued that the law established a particular religious viewpoint in public schools. But he went on to note how Christianity was fragmented into hundreds of sects, how such division had left a legacy ‘of hatred . . . war . . . [and] cruelty’ throughout the world, how fundamentalism was unleashing ‘bigotry and hate’ across America, how the Bible was not a book of biology and how most intelligent Christians had not thought it necessary to give up their faith because a literal six-day creation had been found to be nonsense.
  {He was right about the hundreds of sects fighting, or at least disagreeing, amongst themselves over which interpretation was the "true" one.}
  
  Page 331 [on Darrow and Bryan] "The world had been shown how intellectually vacuous fundamentalism was, but it had also seen how condescending secular elites could be.
  {Those "secular elites" lose the moral high ground when they (publicly) sneer. Keep the snark to themselves and defeat with reason and rational arguments. (Yes, I know, reason rarely sways faith.}
  
  Page 332 [on the perpetuated story that the Scopes trial was a battle between religion and science] This was the version that would pass into history, not the more accurate one of the defence lawyer, Dudley Malone, who commented before the trial that ‘the issue is not between science and religion, as some would have us believe . . . .[but] between science and Bryanism.’
  {a key point lost to anyone who doesn't dig into the histories of anything - sift the data to understand the motivations of what was really going on, and the motivations of those reporting it.}
  
  Page 335 [on a remark of Einstein on the Scopes trial] ‘any restriction of academic liberty heaps coals of shame upon the community which tolerates such suppression’
  {Einstein would no doubt be dismayed to know that today suppression exists in both political and academic objectives - and it is on the rise again (no shame to found.)}
  
  Page 337 [on a coincidence funny to only me, but I'm noting it] I was watching a television show (science fiction - Night Sky) and just as I got to this page and saw the section head, a character said ‘Spooky action at a distance’.
  
  Page 342 {Dirac, getting on Oppenheimer for writing poetry} ‘In science you want to say something nobody knew before in words everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say something that everybody knows already in words that nobody can understand.’
  {I still love this quote.}
  
  Page 353 [Darwin's ingrained biases] ‘There is no evidence that man was aboriginally endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence of an Omnipotent God’, Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, citing as his witnesses not ‘hasty travellers, but . . . men who have long resided with savages’. However, he continued, if by ‘religion’ we mean belief in ‘unseen or spiritual agencies’, it was clear that such beliefs were ‘almost universal with the less civilised races’.
  {How did Darwin not see the irony? The "more civilized" believed in different, yet the same unseen or spiritual agencies. But theirs was codified, so that makes it okay, I guess.}
  
  Page 384 [on Gould] His attempt to bring peace to what, at the time, was a fractious relationship by separating the two into a magisterium of facts and one of values was thoughtful, well-meaning but ultimately wrong.
  {I don't agree (yet). Religions as a source of "values" is largely determined by culture, geography, politics, and similar.}
  
  Page 408 [more on Gould] That does not mean that these are simply non-overlapping magisteria, as Stephen Jay Gould put it. There are plenty of areas in which that is true, where science and religion don’t have much (or indeed anything) to say to one another and don’t really overlap. In some places, NOMA makes sense. But the human being is emphatically not one of them. Indeed, it is over the human that science and religion most clearly do overlap. Humans are both ‘material’ creatures, which are measurable and explicable according to the methods of science, and ‘spiritual’ ones, who talk about and aspire to things like meaning, significance, transcendence, purpose, destiny, eternity and love, which have always been the building blocks of a religious understanding of reality. Science and religion are partially overlapping magisteria, and they overlap within us.
  {I don't agree (still, and also still "yet"), and I keep a quote from James Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter in my head that I like: “Science does have all the answers. […] The problem is that we don’t have all the science.” }
  
  Page 410 [on Ray Kurweil and AI] Spencer says Kurzweil is the "St. Paul of this transhumanist gospel" who claimed "with puppy-dog enthusiasm" that re-engineering humanity will make us better. Ending that paragraph with "Amen."
  {yes, Kurzweil can be a little wacky, but stepping outside his so far academic, journalism to mock him seemed out of character.}
  
  Page 414 [on what makes us human (over other animals, or even AI] [...] nudge the discussion away from the idea that information, cognition and intelligence are the decisive dimension within our humanity.
  {I don't think information or intelligence (yes, that definition fluxes) are unique. It may be that cognition, so far, is the decisive dimension.}
  
  For the editor/publisher
  
  Page 357 "his [linefeed gap] later Folk-Lore in the Old Testament"
  {Is this formatting issue of my reader or in the text?}
• 
  Steve

  On the plus side, I think that the book was very fair, giving due consideration to each magisterium, but not glossing over misdeeds. The coverage of the Scopes trial is excellent. In addition, some of the writing was very clever. On the downside, I found the writing to be too academic for my taste - this is not a popular-science book. I also thought that there were too many quotes which disrupted the reading flow. I think that someone looking for a more scholarly discussion of science and religion will love this book. Thank you to Edelweiss and Oneworld Publications for the digital review copy.