Hi, my name is Michael Murray. I'm a senior visiting scholar in Philosophy at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in the U.S. And I'm here today to talk to you about science and religion, the relationship between the two, and looking at some contemporary challenges that have been raised to religion, from the domain of science. To begin, I want to talk a bit about the history of the relationship between science and religion and we'll begin with a story that's often been told about Galileo and the Catholic Church. So in 1615, Galileo was reeling from the first round of public condemnations that had been made of his views about astronomy. According to his view, the sun stands at the centre of the solar system, and the Earth revolves around it. It also moves on its axis and as you might know, this was a view that was not widely held by the Catholic church, or for that matter, by the Protestant reformers of the time. According to them, as they understood the scriptures, it's the Earth that stands at the centre of the cosmos, and everything revolves around it. Galileo was convinced that the empirical evidence showed otherwise, and he aimed to convince other people of that through his writings. But Galileo also regarded himself as a devout Christian. And as a result he was keen to find a way to reconcile his religious commitments, with his newfound scientific discoveries. Now his way of doing that was to conclude that the bible just did not teach what the church authorities claimed. In fact his view was that the bible didn't aim to teach scientific truths at all. In fact Galileo said in words that are often quoted, although not at the length that I'll quote them here, the following. Galileo wrote: "Since the Holy Ghost did not intend to teach us whether heaven moves or stands still, whether its shape is spherical or like a discus or extended in a plane, nor whether the Earth is located at its center or off to one side, then so much the less was it intended to settle for us any other conclusion of the same kind. I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree: 'That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven and not how the heavens go.'" The connection between science and religion is not just one of historical curiosity, as we might suppose if we focus just on the Galileo story, but one of substantial contemporary importance. Battles between science and religion are probably most well-known and most evident in the U.S., where that battle continues to be fought primarily between Christians of a conservative variety and scientists. But it's also true that these debates are going on broadly across the globe. They're being carried on both in public and privately in China, Russia, Israel and in numerous middle-eastern countries as well, where similar issues arise at the interface between Islam and science. So in order to know how to think about the connection between science and religion, we first need to know exactly what science is. We have to define our terms here, clearly. Because there are different ways of understanding it, and depending on how we understand it, we'll understand the relationship between science and religion differently. So, we'll begin with the very minimalist definition of science, which is something like this. Science is the collective judgement of professional scholars who aim to explain the workings of the natural world through empirically testable theories. And notice here I'm defining science not as a practice or as a discipline, since practices and disciplines won't have significant points of conflict with religion. Instead we're defining science as a set of claims, claims made by a certain sort of scholar who's engaging in a certain kind of work, the kind of work that scientists normally engage in. And thought of this way, there are three different ways of thinking about the relationship between religion and science, three ways in which you might think that they intersect. On one we would that science and religion conflict in principle. On a second view we might say that science and religion cannot conflict in principle. And on the third view, the view that I'm going to defend, we could say that science and religion may or may not conflict, whether they do depends on what those religious claims are, and what scientists affirm. So let's take a look at these three views in turn. So on the first view, science and religion are in principle in conflict. So why would someone hold that view? Well according to these views, the claims of religion and the claims of science are locked in conflict in such a way that only one or the other can survive. This is sometimes called the warfare model of the relationship between science and religion. A phrase that's been used since the late 19th century, taking its cue from a famous book that was published in the late 19th century. This view was especially popular during that period and in the early 20th century as well, though there are many defenders of it today. One of those defenders is the famous Harvard scientist, E.O. Wilson. He wrote a book a few years ago with the title, "Consilience". And Wilson puts it this way: "Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age, and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms. The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually compatible" says Wilson. "As a result," he continues, "those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure." So what should we think about this view of 'in principle conflict', the view that we find expressed in Wilson's writings? Well first of all, there's something here on this view where the very definition of science and religion causes the conflict. But what are the definitions that are in play here? So some who defend this sort of model do so because they're adopting really quite contentious definitions of science and religion. For example, some claim that religion consists of beliefs that are drawn from purported divine revelations, and that these beliefs are held entirely on the basis of authority. So you believe those claims that come from revelation because you believe the authority of the purported revealer of those truths. Science on the other hand, according to this view, consists of beliefs that are justified by sense experience and by the scientific method. So you might wonder just given that characterization of the relation between religion and science, does it actually follow that they're in principle in conflict? And the answer is no, because it could be, given that characterization, that the same truth is revealed in whatever revealed text you take as authoritative might also be the claim that's being affirmed by the scientists. So what do we have to add in order to draw the conclusion that science and religion are in principle in conflict on this point of view? Well what we have to add is something that's really quite controversial. The principled conflict arises only when we add to this characterization of science, that the only justifiable beliefs about the natural world, are those that arise from sense experience and the scientific method. And when we add to the characterization of religion, that the only justifiable beliefs about the natural world are those that are held on the basis of religious authority. The problem is, those definitions don't seem to be very plausible, especially in the case of religion, holding that the only justifiable beliefs about the natural world are those that are held on the basis of religious authority. There are very few people who would affirm that that's a reasonable understanding of religion. So on this view as result to accept the teachings of the bible or the Quran about the natural world is to be anti-scientific, because it is not held on the basis of the scientific method. And to accept the deliverances of experience and the scientific method would be anti-religious, because on this view, the only justification for holding these views about the natural world, is that they're revealed by a religious text. So, if you were to hold this sort of view, then you have really to choose. It's science or religion, one can win only at the expense of the other. Some actually defend this model because they think it's a straightforward reading of the history of the relationship between science and religion. So you might take the Galileo affair as one example of this. Or even previously, it's often times claimed, although this is not actually the case, that Christian figures, for example, held that the Earth is flat, and science later proves that that's wrong. Or religion says that the Earth doesn't move, and science later proves that in fact it does orbit the sun and rotate on its axis. Or religion says that the universe is less than 10,000 years old, and then science proves that it's 14 billion years old. Or religion claims that human beings are directly created by God, and then science shows instead that human beings are descended from earlier primates, and so on. So you might think, on this reading of the history, science and religion are locked in this kind of conflict, because religious believers are committed to the idea that they're supposed to draw these claims about the natural world from revelation. But in fact when the science comes along it shows them that these views are wrong, and so the two stand in this perpetual state of conflict. But as I mentioned earlier, it's not really clear that this is a reasonable way to characterize the relationship between science and religion. This is not a characterization which we should accept. Even if scientists were to accept that the only way to justify scientific beliefs is through sense experience and the application of the scientific method, it's worth noting that nothing from the domain of science justifies the scientist in that claim. That is the claim that science alone provides us with justified beliefs about the natural world. That itself is an epistemological claim, a philosophical and normative claim, and not something that we could justify by appealing to sense experience and the scientific method. So there's something self-refuting about that way of trying to understand science. Second is that it grossly mischaracterizes the relationship between science and religion. So it's simply not true that the only way in which apparent conflicts between religious claims or claims from purported revelation and science, that the only way to resolve those conflicts is for religion to concede the point. And you can see this by looking at certain historical examples. So, for example in the early 20th century, the reigning cosmological model was something that's known now as the steady state model. And on the steady state model, the universe is eternal and not expanding. It's simply a static universe that doesn't change in any significant way, other than movements of the parts. And many religious believers, especially those within the monotheistic traditions, struggled with the steady state theory. Because they believed that their religious revelation taught that in fact the universe had an origin and time. And so, Christians, Muslims, and Jews who were confronting the steady state theory really wrestled with how to reconcile their religious beliefs with the science and many of them concluded that they couldn't. That either this had showed that religious belief was false, or that something was wrong with the science. And of course, what happened in the mid 20th century was that science in fact did change, and came to the conclusion that in fact the universe had an origin, an origin in something we now describe as the big bang. Of course scientists didn't reverse course on this point. Didn't change their beliefs because they were appealing to religious revelation. But it simply shows that the relationship between these two are more complicated that this simplified historical narrative will lead us to believe.
