Fraser Watts
What is ISSR for? I think the answer that was assumed by those of us who gathered in Granada in 2002 for the inaugural conference under the leadership of John Polkinghorne was that the task of ISSR was to give intellectual leadership to work in science and religion. I think that was the right answer though, with hindsight, I don’t think we did a great job of responding to the challenge. We did not actually give much intellectual leadership to the field.
Like many organisations, ISSR has sometimes become preoccupied with its institutional affairs, and often necessarily so. However, there is much that is encouraging about the present state of ISSR. We have a growing membership, and I sense a good deal of eagerness and enthusiasm among the new Fellows who are currently joining us. Encouragingly, we have been especially successful as an academic society in securing grant funding for research projects, and I am proud to announce that we have recently been awarded another significant grant of £745,000 from the Templeton World Charity Foundation as part of their Diverse Intelligences initiatives. (More about that in another blog shortly; it is the third substantial grant we have received since 2015.) There is also now a substantial list of publications arising from ISSR conferences and research projects.
However, as our 20th-anniversary approaches, I think it is right to return to the central challenge that we saw at our inception, which is how to give intellectual leadership to the field: to assess where work in science and religion has got to, and where we think it ought to go. For that, we need to become more of an intellectual community, with all that entails.
There are two main obstacles to that: time and money. The Fellows of ISSR are the most distinguished people in their field, and we are all very busy. It also costs a lot of money to run a conference like the original one in Granada and to pay for everyone to attend. Another challenge is that we are scattered across the globe, as an international society ought to be (though we are perhaps not quite as scattered as we should be, though this is a priority for us). It is hard to predict the future of international academic conferences, but the combination of health risks and the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions probably may mean that in the foreseeable future there will be fewer international face-to-face conferences rather than more.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic has opened up a new world of possibility via digital communication. Most of us now spend a significant amount of our working lives on Zoom or its equivalents, and I think this provides ISSR with the opportunity to return to the challenge of becoming more of an intellectual community and providing leadership to the field. In the Executive Committee, we are considering how we might organise a Zoom conference of ISSR. It would be marvellous if we could involve as many members of the society as possible in such a conference, so we could really put our heads together about how we wish work on science and religion to develop in the years ahead. Blogs can also play a useful role. I was encouraged that my recent blog on science, religion and coronavirus sparked off several interesting blogs on that subject, and led to some useful exchanges.
Things are different now from how they were in 2002. Then, it still seemed a real achievement to bring science and religion into fruitful dialogue, and to explore rigorously the significant issues that arise when those two domains come into contact. However, there is now abundant work on the interface of science and religion that demonstrates the viability of such inter-disciplinary work, so it no longer seems as “ground-breaking” as it did in 2002. In the present climate, I sense we are more inclined to ask the ever-important question: ‘so what?’ I sense an impatience with just thinking, talking and writing, and a growing interest in actually changing things. If I am right in sensing that current mood, there are several ways in which work on science and religion might develop.
One model is that, rather than science and religion just talking to each other, they could bring their combined perspectives together to bear on a significant world problem such as the urgent environmental crisis. The importance of science in that crisis is self-evident but, if there is to be a real change in carbon emissions, there are also problems of motivation and attitude. It is possible that a religious response to the environmental crisis, built on its understanding of creation, might be one of the most effective ways of mobilising energy and commitment for change. Most of the world’s population are religious in one way or other.
In 2002 we were largely content to take science as it was, and religion as it was, and to harmonise them. However, within the science and religion community that has always been the possibility of a more radical agenda that seeks to transform both science and religion through the mutual contact between them. Of the various science and religion groups with which I’ve been involved, the ‘Epiphany Philosophers’ exemplify that radical agenda most clearly. They have wanted to use the empirical approach of science to renew religion and to use religion and philosophy to challenge some of the dogmatic metaphysical assumptions that stand in the way of science being a genuinely open-minded enquiry. There is bound to be debate amongst us about how far we wish to see such changes.
Religions don’t always get on with each other harmoniously. One of the founding hopes of ISSR was that conducting the dialogue between science and religion on a multi-faith basis would contribute to peace and harmony between different faith traditions. ISSR was always in that sense a reconciliation project. That is as relevant now as it was 20 years ago, but we have not yet found the right way to carry it forward, though one of our early publications, Why the Science and Religion Dialogue Matters, set out that multi-faith agenda.
Work on science and religion has also broadened in terms of the number of sciences involved, and I’m pleased to say that we now have a higher proportion of people from disciplines such as psychology, social science, artificial intelligence and ecology than we did at our beginning. Broadening the range of sciences involved could potentially have a significant impact on the whole field, and I am not sure that we have yet really taken stock of the implications for science and religion as a whole of broadening the range of disciplines involved. For example, the social sciences provide a critical perspective on the whole science-and-religion endeavour. New endeavours in multi-disciplinary Humanities (such as that from INSBS) push the field further, with new and exciting possibilities of discussions of what the science and religion dialogue means outside of traditional notions.
As well as issues that confront science and religion as a whole, there could potentially be much fruitful stocktaking within particular parts of the field. In the early days of ISSR, we tried to set up interest groups (physics, biology, human sciences, theology, philosophy and history). However, with the exception of the historians, those groups never really took off. I think one of the problems concerned communication; it was too difficult and expensive to meet regularly, and an email chat room did not prove an effective way of communicating. Now, with much improved digital communication, I think this might be the right time to try again to form special interest groups within ISSR.
I am therefore proposing that over the coming months we should organise a series of Zoom meetings of members of the society in particular subfields, who have a common focus, or common approach. These might well be just one-off meetings, so we would not be asking for a significant time commitment. However, it is possible that some of these meetings will go so well that people will want to continue with them. We can take the initiative for getting these meetings going from the centre, but I would be grateful for ideas and suggestions about what subgroups there should be.
In these various ways I hope that, in the coming months, we can use digital technology to re-evaluate work on science and religion, take stock of what is good, and reflect on how we want to see it develop. If we can find a way to work together effectively on that, it could be really exciting for us all, and in the process, ISSR would become more of a genuine intellectual community.
