Cross-cultural Issues Regarding “Science and Religion”
If ISSR was starting from scratch, and if I was part of a discussion about what it should be called, I would have reservations about it being set up as a society for “science and religion”.
Both of those terms are somewhat problematic, but the problems are greater for “religion”. It is a term that seems to have changed its meaning quite radically in the latter part of the 19th century, and which also means different things in different faith contexts. The problems associated with the term have been set out by scholars such as Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Nicolas Lash, but those working in science and religion have not generally taken much notice of their critique of the concept of “religion”. The historical problem is that a distinction opened up in the latter part of the 19th century between the public and private worlds. There is debate about the early roots of this divide though I think the etymological data suggests a crucial turn at the end of the 17th century.
It was in the late 19th century that “science” asserted its position in the public world, and religion increasingly got cast into the private world. Of course, theology was never happy with that, and has been struggling ever since to find ways of asserting its objectivity. However, the fact remains that, in the Anglo-American West, where science is most highly developed, religion is widely regarded as being a private matter. In as far as Donald Trump had any intellectual argument to support his statement that it was disgraceful for the Pope to question his credentials as a Christian, it was that religion is a private matter and, as such, it was not something that the Pope was in a position to question.
The global problem arises from the fact that if you ask a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, or even a Tibetan Buddhist, what his or her “religion” is, it is a very odd question. It is a question that arises from the prevailing view about what religion is in a post-secularized Christian world, a view that is to some extent shared by Western Buddhism, but not by other faith cultures. For the most part, “religion”, around the world, is intertwined with ethnicity and cultural identity.
There is a further problem arising from the fact that in the developed world science is widely regarded as having transcended cultural context. However, that view is not universally shared. From some cultural perspectives, present-day science looks very dominated by Anglo-American culture, and reflecting the cultural values of the context in which it has most flourished.
There is yet another problem that work on “science and religion” in the Christian West has found it hard to escape from the conflict thesis that was first propounded in Britain in the last quarter of the 19th century. A great deal of intellectual energy in the world of “science and religion” has gone into responding to the conflict thesis. It is not something that can easily be ignored. However, things may be changing in this regard, and I sense that younger scholars working on “science and religion” are increasingly impatient with the dominance of the conflict issue. A possible alternative to the conflict model is to ask how science and religion can collaborate to promote human flourishing.
This all raises significant issues for ISSR in wanting to be an international and multifaith society. It has become one of the staple activities of ISSR to apply for research grants for particular projects, and ISSR has become quite successful at that. However, if such projects are to be international and multifaith, significant issues are raised about what constitutes “science and religion” outside the Christian West.
Of the two issues above, being international is probably the lesser problem. Recently, ISSR has been successful in getting a small grant for a project on a Latin American Libraries Project in which a number of key science and religion texts will be translated from English into Spanish or Portuguese, and disseminated in Latin America. That is a very welcome step towards greater internationalism in ISSR, but it doesn’t challenge the conventional assumptions about what “science and religion” consists of.
We have also been exploring the possibility of getting a grant for work in the Islamic world, and that raises more fundamental issues. “Religion” is just not the same kind of thing in Islam as it is in the Christian West. Also, science looks more culturally embedded from an Islamic perspective than it does from England or America. It is also far from clear that importing into the Islamic world the kind of discussion of science and religion that starts from the conflict thesis is going to be helpful or constructive.
One approach to this might be to work on how science is understood and regarded in the Islamic world (which in one sense is already an inherently religious world), rather than to try to work on “science and religion” in that world, in the way the West understands that. Gaining a better understanding of how, in a cultural context where a single faith tradition is intricately woven into the fabric of social life, science is taught, learned, and understood in daily life could significantly increase the knowledge of the cultural context of science and Islam specifically, and science and religion more generally.
One final thought. ISSR has always been more dominated than was originally intended by people working in the Anglo-American Christian world. Recently, I have made a particular effort as Executive Secretary to find people to nominate to be Fellows who are doing good work elsewhere, on what might be regarded as science and religion. In terms of faith, culture and ethnicity, the latest group of people to have accepted invitations to become Fellows of ISSR are the most diverse there has ever been.
That means that ISSR is now, within its membership, slightly better equipped to engage in cross-cultural conversation than it has been hitherto. There are some within ISSR, for example, Anindita Balslev, one of our Founding Fellows, who has long advocated this. ISSR, with an increasingly diverse membership, is now perhaps better able to rise to this challenge than it has been hitherto. I would be pleased to hear from anyone who would like to be a part of a cross-cultural conversation in ISSR.
