Religion and Science in Context: A Guide to the Debates

177 Pages·2009·1.2 MB·English

by  Willem B. Drees

Religion and Science in Context
How should we think about religion, science and their relationship in modern
society? Some religious groups oppose evolution; some atheists claim science is
on their side. Others reconcile their religious beliefs with science, or consider
science and faith to deal with fundamentally different aspects of human life.
What indeed is religion: belief or trust in God’s existence? How do we distin-
guish sense from superstition? What does science have to say on such issues?
Willem B. Drees considers contemporary discussions of these issues in
Europe and North America, using examples from Christianity and religious
naturalism and reflections on Islam and Tibetan Buddhism. He argues that the
scientificunderstandingleavesopencertainultimatequestions,andthusallows
for belief in a creator, but also for religious naturalism or serious agnosticism.
By analysing the place of values in a world of facts, and the quest for mean-
ingful stories in a material world, Religion and Science in Context offers an
original and self-critical analysis of the field, its assumptions and functions,
and ends with a vision of its possible future.
WillemB.DreesisProfessorofPhilosophyofReligionandEthicsandvice-dean
of the Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University, the Netherlands, and the
editor of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science.

Religion and Science in Context
A Guide to the Debates
Willem B. Drees
Firstpublished2010byRoutledge
2ParkSquare,MiltonPark,Abingdon,OxonOX144RN
SimultaneouslypublishedintheUSAandCanadabyRoutledge
270MadisonAve.,NewYork,NY100016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.
©2010WillemB.Drees
Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereprintedorreproducedor
utilisedinanyformorbyanyelectronic,mechanical,orothermeans,now
knownorhereafterinvented,includingphotocopyingandrecording,orinany
informationstorageorretrievalsystem,withoutpermissioninwritingfrom
thepublishers.
BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationData
AcataloguerecordforthisbookisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary
LibraryofCongressCataloginginPublicationData
Drees,WillemB.,1954–
Religionandscienceincontext:aguidetothedebates/WillemB.Drees.–
1sted.
p.cm.
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
1.Religionandscience.I.Title.
BL240.3.D742009
2010.65–dc22
2009012932
ISBN 0-203-86960-5 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10:0-415-55616-3(hbk)
ISBN10:0-415-55617-1(pbk)
ISBN10:0-203-86960-5(ebk)
ISBN13:978-0-415-55616-3(hbk)
ISBN13:978-0-415-55617-0(pbk)
ISBN13:978-0-203-86960-4(ebk)
Contents
Preface vi
1. ‘Religion and science’ in multiple contexts 1
2. Worldly interests: apologetics, authority and comfort 11
3. Science, sense and superstition: criteria 39
4. Hunting a Snark? Religion in ‘religion and science’ 63
5. Mystery in an intelligible world 85
6. Values in a world of facts 112
7. Meaning in a material world 135
Engaging in ‘religion and science’: an epilogue 147
Bibliography 154
Index 165
Preface
For over two decades I have been involved in reflections on religion in relation
to the natural sciences, as someone originally trained in the natural sciences
who was sufficiently fascinated by human cultures and traditions to engage in
religious studies – a discipline in which it is much harder to nourish clarity
and generate consensus. I served from 2002 until 2008 as president of the
European Society for the Study of Science And Theology, ESSSAT. As of 2009
I have served as editor of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, a scholarly
journal with a thousand pages annually, present in more than three thousand
academic libraries. Of the many occasions on which I have had the pleasure of
presenting and discussing ideas I want to recall here especially the Andreas
Idreos Lectures in Oxford in 1998 and the Samuel Ferguson Lectures in Man-
chester in 1999, hosted so graciously by David Pailin. I have been enriched by
all the friends and colleagues that I thus met. This book is written as a whole,
but I have liberally recycled ideas, phrases, and paragraphs from earlier pub-
lications.
Since September 2001 I have held a chair in Philosophy of Religion and
Ethics at Leiden University. As a public university, we engage in religious stu-
dies rather than in theology, but as a philosopher it is my duty to combine the
outsider perspective typical of historical, social and textual studies with the
insider’sinterestinthereasonability,plausibilityorpossibilityofbeliefsheld.I
thank my academic colleagues in Leiden for all that I have learned from them.
I want to express my gratitude to the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific
Research (NWO), which funded projects of mine as part of its programmes
‘Cultural Renewal and the Foundations of the Humanities’ and ‘The Future of
the Religious Past’, and thus made it possible for me to work with the post-
docs Tony Watling (Watling 2009) and Taede Smedes and with the graduate
student Olga Crapels, and to take the study leave during which this book was
written. Rob Hogendoorn and my co-supervisor of his PhD research, Henk
Blezer, have made me aware of some of the complexities of the interactions
between Tibetan Buddhism and science.
This book was written in 2008–9 while I was the J. Houston Whiterspoon
Fellow in Theology and Science at the Center of Theological Inquiry in
Preface vii
Princeton (USA). I want to express my gratitude to the leadership of CTI,
William Storrar and Thomas Hastings, and to my fellow fellows at CTI. I am
grateful to the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, which
accepted me as an affiliate fellow for that period, and thereby provided access
to a wide variety of inspiring and informative lectures at the university.
Last but not least, this book would not have been possible without the
mental and physical absences graciously allowed by my wife Zwanet Drees-
Roeters and our children Johannes, Annelot and Esther. Retreating to write
would have been much harder and far less rewarding without their enriching
presence in my life.

Chapter 1
‘ ’
Religion and science in multiple
contexts
Calvin and Hobbes,aboy andhis tiger,are walking through aforest. ‘Do you
believe in evolution?’ Calvin asks. ‘No,’ the tiger replies. ‘So you don’t believe
humansdescendedfromapes?’theboycontinues.Towhichthetigerresponds:
‘I don’t see the difference,’ and beats a hasty retreat from the angry boy. The
boy asks about the explanation of human origins; the tiger responds with an
offence to human dignity. As in this comic strip by Bill Watterson, so too in
debates about evolution in the real world: multiple issues are intertwined.
In a lecture at a college in Iowa I presented the grand narrative of modern
science, from the Big Bang until Now, and argued for the possibility of a reli-
gious appreciation of these insights (Drees 2002a). In the Q&A period a
woman asked: ‘So, you believe there has been a Second Fall?’ At first, I didn’t
understand the question. She took death to be the consequence of the sin of
Adam and Eve, while I had spoken of natural death as arising with the evo-
lution of multi-cellular life, long before there were humans – which for her
implied that there had been a Fall before the Fall of the first humans. Whereas
theframeworkofmylecturehadbeenscience,herframeworkwasaparticular
religious one. Miscommunication arises easily in ‘religion and science’.
Debates are often non-debates, as issues and criteria are framed differently by
the various participants.
A good example of the extensive literature on ‘religion and science’ is The
Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science (Clayton and Simpson 2006), a
thousand pages with fifty-five good chapters on religion and science. Even this
extensivesurvey,includingessaysbymanyofthebestauthors,hassomebiases.
It is mostly Anglo-Saxon with respect to the authors, and also with respect to
the treatment of topics. The chapter on sociology and religion ends with
remarks about the American constitution. The evolution/creation controversy
is discussed in the American context as if issues are the same elsewhere. The
authors focus on content, scientific and theological, at the expense of context.
Theology, ethics and science have universal ambitions; their truth claims and
norms seek to be valid for people of all walks of life and all cultures. While
their ambitions are lofty, religion and science are human; contexts and
assumptionsshapethequestionsasked,thecriteriaused,thecontentproposed.