Webs of Reality: Social Perspectives on Science and Religion

These authors lay out their project thus -

The unifying theme of this book is the metaphor of the seamless web of science, technology, religion and ethics. We will look for the subtle relationships, tacit understandings, unrecognised assumptions, forgotten history, symbols and implicit myths that tie all four elements together…. We examine three models of the relationship between science and religion [conflict, independence and integration] arguing for an inclusive model that sees a seamless web between science, religion, technology and ethics.

They intend the image of the web to allow both for real separateness and for real connexion between these awkward items. Their central aim is to avoid both unnecessary conflict and the distorting reduction of one factor to another. They describe their method as the `Toronto Approach', one that was developed in a series of conferences arranged by the Templeton Foundation during the 90s, an approach which `welcomed more religions than Christianity, more sciences than physics and biology, and historians and social scientists as well' They proceed by treating both science and religion, where possible, as practices – as ways of living, rather than as dogmatic sets of beliefs, which are harder to bring together and more likely to clash. For this purpose they invoke the social sciences. As they remark, it is rather surprising that those sciences have recently been left out of these debates, considering that in the past they were much involved in them. Indeed, `the founders of modern social science played a prominent role in drawing the boundaries between science and religion in the nineteenth century'. Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Freud were major players and they raised many of the questions that we need to answer today. The authors have therefore boldly decided to analyse science through religious categories, using the category-list that Weber drew up – soteriology, saintliness, magic, theodicy and mystery - and enquiring, in each case, what background of social practice exists for science that might parallel the one that marks religion. `Rather than asking what science and religion supposedly are, we analyse what they do. What we find is that the so-called scientific worldview is itself implicitly religious'. Thus, for Weber's first heading, soteriology, they examine the evidence that science is currently seen as furnishing salvation – the dreams of a new heaven and immortality in outer space, the hugely teleological interpretations of evolution, the esoteric priesthood, the dismissal of other forms of thought, the claim to take over ethics. Similarly for his next category, `saintliness', they observe how, alongside the picture of demonic, mad scientists, there exists the equally fantasized but much more influential notion of the scientific hero – typically Einstein. Noting parallels like these is, of course, only the beginning of their discussion. It is never enough just to say `your're another'. For each category they look in detail at the social function served and the shifts of meaning that have affected it. In particular they observe the history of how various concepts have come to change, altering the idea of what science is. Thus under `saintliness' they give a very interesting account of the Newtonian Revolution, remarking on how

a special feature of this revolution is its perceived birth from the mind of one man, who eventually became the prototype for the rational mind of the modern scientist. This association… was promoted by generations of scientists and historians partly in order to create the self-serving myth of the Scientific Revolution as a clean, discontinuous triumph of rationalism and enquiry over ignorance, tradition and the occult…. [This served to justify] the triumph of the philosophical approaches and systems of rationalism, objectivity, materialism and naturalism.

Thus, the impression that impersonal methods had triumphed was not itself established solely by impersonal methods. It required also the growth of a colourful and tendentious myth. Similarly under the heading `Magic' they note how often technology – which of course is closely linked with science - has come to fill that place today. They point out the explicit association of magic with technology that is used in advertisements such as an IBM brochure which asks -

What if there was a box… A magic box… A box that contained all the answers to all the questions you've ever had. A box that contained every invention and every idea that you've ever wondered about….Well, there is such a box….The magic box is an IBM business server. 737

Under Theodicy they point to the various scenarios which show evolution as a steady progress towards an inevitable happy ending – namely ourselves and whatever even grander avatars of ourselves we may bequeath to a still more glorious future. They show how these stories have been used, not only to cheer us about the future but also to justify the horrors of the past and present by showing them as necessary means to a glorious end. The fate of the dinosaurs, along with other extinctions, was long used in this way as a moral tale, inculcating a special view about which human qualities constitute our peculiar merits and earn us this evolutionary prize. In the last section – Mystery and Objectivity – they discuss the Science Wars, raising some very big questions about the meaning of objectivity. Necessarily they leave many of these open. On the whole, however, this is surely a wise and helpful book, one that makes a lot of sense on a notoriously awkward topic.