MAGISTERIA

This highly acclaimed history of science and religion is indeed magisterial, as its title suggests, and the most significant book on the topic I have read since John Hedley Brooke’s Science and Religion: Historical Perspectives (1991/2014). Its main thesis suggested by the subtitle that I have used as the title of this review is that the so-called war between science and religion is a myth largely created in the 19th century by John William Draper and Andrew White around the time of the advent of Darwinism and the famous debate in 1860 at the British Association between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and TH Huxley. I first came across Draper’s name in Bertrand Russell’s autobiography when he went up to Cambridge and first met CP Sanger. He noticed Draper’s History of the Intellectual Development of Europe on Sanger’s bookshelves, and remarked that he thought it a very good book and had not met anyone else who had read it. Many years later, I was in a second-hand bookshop in Penzance when I reached up to the top shelf to pull out two green volumes, only to find that they were Draper’s book at £1 the set. I very much enjoyed the polemical style, but it does convey a strictly rationalist view.

Nicholas has written a much more intricate and nuanced history, bringing in many lesser-known figures and evoking the historical and cultural context in which they worked. The two key themes running through the book are the question of authority and legitimacy: ‘who has the right to pronounce on nature, the cosmos and reality?’ And secondly, the nature and status of the human: ‘our makeup, origins, purpose, dignity and uniqueness (or lack thereof).’ Since the 17th century, the West has been dominated by mechanistic and naturalistic ways and of thinking epitomised in the sciences, and reducing human beings entirely to the material – ‘physical, animal, evolved, genetic.’ Religions and indeed spirituality more generally claim that ‘we are not only or merely such beings. We have some moral or spiritual or eternal or transcendent or divine dimension to us too.’ (p. 8) This concerns ontology, epistemology and methodology – crucially, the validity of different ways of knowing. St Bonaventure proposed that we have three eyes: the eye of sense, the eye of reason, and the eye of contemplation – sense perception, logic and direct mystical insight or gnosis. Much of the mediaeval debate was theological – for instance, arguments about the existence of God – rather than mystical and related to human experience. This sets up potential tensions between scriptural authority and empirical findings, as in the case of Galileo.

Nicholas divides his treatment into four parts, beginning with the Greeks and moving on to interfaces between science and Islam, Judaism and Christianity, with the pivotal moment in 1543 with Copernicus’ heliocentric theory. Here, we are dealing not only with scriptural authority, but also with the authority of Aristotle. The questioning doubt of science is seen as threatening to the existing order, and the traditional distinction between celestial and terrestrial realms is eventually obliterated. The next part gives a fascinating insight into Galileo’s ‘truth by observation’ and his tempestuous genius where he cheekily suggests to the cardinals ‘that the intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven and not how heaven goes’ (p. 119) – demarcated in in this way the interests of the soul from those of the physical.

There is a really interesting chapter on mechanising the soul, essentially introducing the familiar mechanistic and reductionist way of thinking applied to the human being, pioneered by David Hartley in England and La Mettrie in France proposing a radical materialism whereby sensation and thought are exclusively bodily processes. Both Gomez Pereira and Descartes dualistically maintained the integrity of the soul, while at the same time arguing that the animals were automata. The body becomes a machine subject to deterministic laws, which paves the way for the philosophical removal of free will. The universe as a whole becomes mechanised and self-regulating, removing its previous spiritual underpinning. Margaret Cavendish and the French philosophes pursue this work with an emergent anti-clerical Deism and atheism.

The 19th and 20th centuries are thoroughly explored, with their profound impacts and developments in physics, cosmology, biology, evolutionary theory, neuroscience and many other fields. The influence of Huxley’s X-Club was far-reaching in its free thinking and its promotion of scientific thinking while undermining the cultural authority of the Anglican clergy. Alfred Russel Wallace disputed Huxley’s view and maintained a complementarity between empirical science and experiential spirituality, as did William James in his Gifford Lectures, which for 120 years have played an important role in the relationship between natural science and natural religion in the Scottish universities.

I noted a few figures whom I would have included in this entangled history, while recognising that one cannot cover everything – and Nicholas’ exploration is very wide-ranging and scholarly. The work of Swedenborg and his impact on Kant (and Goethe) in the 18th century is very interesting as a prefiguration of scientific and philosophical resistance to exceptional human experiences – some instances of his telepathy were very well-attested, but hard to reconcile with a naturalistic view. Jung is only discussed in relation to Freud, and there is no treatment of transpersonal psychology. I also think that the work of David Bohm is very important, and the research by Sir Alister Hardy on religious and spiritual experience showed how common these are. And the emergence of panpsychism and post-materialist science marks a new development beyond strict physicalism and naturalism, founded as it is on evidence-based spirituality. Iain McGilchrist endorsed the book, but his own work makes the signal contribution. I agree with him that it will become a classic work and recommend it highly to readers.