Introduction
Heather Looy, The King’s University College and Heidi A. Campbell, Texas A&m University
The Need for a Science and Religion Dialogue
“A dialogue on science and religion? Must be a short conversation!” quipped a British customs officer at Heathrow Airport to one of us on her way to attend a monthlong seminar on science and religion at Oxford University. The customs officer’s surprise and skepticism reflects a widespread myth that science and religion are antagonistic, or at best unrelated, ways of viewing the world. Yet science and religion have always been inextricably intertwined, and recent years have seen a surge toward open, explicit dialogue and research on their relationships. “Science and Religion” is emerging as an interdisciplinary academic field of study, a claim that is justified by the growing number of undergraduate courses, graduate degree programs, and research institutes in this area.
The idea that science and religion are in conflict has been promoted by proponents of the secularization thesis and cultural critics of religion. Recently several well-publicized voices—such as Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion and Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon—have decried religion in all its forms as “childish superstition,” “irrational,” and the main reason for current environmental and geopolitical crises. Religion is characterized as something to be discarded, rather than integrated. In their view, rational science must take the place of irrational religion if we are to find a way through our current and future crises.
Yet those who become even superficially familiar with the history and complex-ity of the relationships between science and religion quickly realize that these recent claims of the triumph of atheism are neither new nor do they acknowledge the very real, vital, and subtle ways in which religion and science have always been inextricably intertwined. The popular view that the relationship between science and religion is
primarily antagonistic (based on a mythologized and grossly distorted telling of the Galileo story) is simply wrong. There is a tendency to simplify, polarize, and turn public discussion into science against religion, with little reflection on what is meant by either term, and to perceive a conflict or dialogue between two utterly independent entities.
|
