Abstract
The conflict thesis, the idea that science and religion compete for the same territory, that science is the modern religion par excellence, or that theology is not just queen but sole authoritative source for the sciences, remains prominent in education as in the public realm. But this view typically rests on mistaken assumptions about the nature of both science and religion. What we call religion and science in the modern era, and specifically since the mid-nineteenth century, are best understood as social practices that require the virtues for their perfection. This chapter seeks to move the conversation about religion and science forward, beyond the significant work of both Ian Barbour and Peter Harrison and beyond territorial metaphors, by suggesting that the virtues that perfect practitioners of religion and science are crucial for helping modern agents make a home of the world we inhabit.
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Notes
- 1.
(Harrison 2015, pp. 184–186) In a methodological note in the Epilogue, Harrison indicates the Wittgensteinian ambitions of his project. But what he tentatively gives with one hand, he immediately withdraws with the other. He doubts that these concepts will change or that the conflicts between them will go away. Of two influential approaches to intellectual history, this book seeks to offer a conceptual history [Begriffsgeschichte] rather than a contextual history (an approach advocated by Quentin Skinner and John Pocock). He sees certain advantages in this approach but seems less aware of the attendant dangers and weaknesses of the Geistesgeschichte, such as MacIntyre’s and his own. Richard Rorty elucidates these dangers in “The Historiography of philosophy, four genres” (Rorty et al. 1984).
- 2.
See footnotes and the rest of this section for more about this prominent picture or narrative, which has its inception in Alasdair MacIntyre’s story of the virtue modern demise. Harrison’s extension of this narrative to the practices of religion and science remains unchallenged. Since the publication of his book, Harrison has been invited to lecture twice at the University of Notre Dame by the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies, the Reilly Center, the Center for Theology, Science, and Human Flourishing, and is one the most prominent philosophers and historians of science.
- 3.
(Harrison 2015, pp. 184–85)
- 4.
(Aquinas 1981, p. II–II, Q. 81, A. 1–3) In Question 81, Article 1, Aquinas draws on Cicero’s use of ‘religio,’ or ‘relegit’ meaning to read over again the things that pertain to the worship of God, Augustine’s ‘reeligere,’ meaning to choose over again rather than neglect God, and “religare” [to bind together] whereby we are bound to God. Aquinas does not so much care which meaning of the term we adopt, since all of them properly denote a relation to God. In the following article he clarifies that religio may also be understood as the virtue whereby we pay due honor to God.
- 5.
(Harrison 2015, p. 11) I added the term “propositional” before belief, because Harrison describes the contrast this way at several other points, and the Preller quote reveals the inadequacy of drawing the contrast between the medieval and modern use of these terms along these lines (7). As an afterthought to his consideration of the virtue, Harrison concedes that in the Middle Ages there were “sciences (scientiae), thought of as distinct and systematic bodies of knowledge” (13).
- 6.
(Harrison 2015, pp. 7–16)
- 7.
(Bible NRSV2010) The contrast here is between the worthless religion or worship (θρησκεία) of those who consider themselves religious but do not keep a tight rein on their tongues and the true religion of those who worship God by caring for orphans and widows. The contrast is not between true interior religion and secondary exterior expression but rather between the outward expressions which serve as signs of the impious or devout heart.
- 8.
It seems that the virtues Aquinas describes as religio and pietas (giving due honor to the sources of one’s being— parents, country, teachers, etc.) are collapsed into the virtue of piety in the modern era. That is, piety was used to refer to proper honor of both God and parents, political community, etc.
- 9.
Arguing, rather than merely suggesting this point, is not something I can do in the scope of the present piece.
- 10.
(Harrison 2015, pp. 177–79) See note 4 above on methodology and the limits of his approach.
- 11.
As of late there has been a growing interest in virtue epistemology, the intellectual virtues of science, and virtues in science education. But most of these thinkers give little sustained attention to the medieval scholastic consideration of the virtues, particularly that of Thomas Aquinas. In my view, these fields are impoverished for this lacuna. Prominent contemporary virtue epistemologists include Linda Zagzebski, Jason Baehr, Robert C.
Roberts, and Jay Wood. See Zagzebski 1996; Baehr 2012; and Wood 2015.
- 12.
Ristuccia contends that “If a historian plans to investigate cultural phenomena that are sometimes classified as religions… that historian has three choices. (1) Avoid the words ‘religion,’ ‘religions,’ ‘religious’ altogether.” (2) “Supply a fiat definition at the start, in order to render the concept usable for one specific purpose… (3) Begin with an excursus… on all the possible meanings for ‘religion’ that existed in the time and place under consideration” (Ristuccia 2016, p. 75). He opts for the first in his own work but then argues that we might seek better, more accurate and useful, classifications. My own approach will be to acknowledge that there are contested usages and then clarify how I intend to use the terms and why I commend this use.
- 13.
I will use the term science throughout in a narrow sense to refer to the modern practices of natural science. Aware of the plurality of sciences that fall under the natural sciences, and the wide diversity of activities that comprise the practices of science so broadly conceived, I nonetheless us this term (and “scientist”) to indicate the natural sciences broadly conceived.
- 14.
(MacIntyre 2007, p. 187) In using the terms “social practice” and “internal good,” I follow MacIntyre’s description of each when he writes, “By a ‘practice’ I am going to mean any coherent and complex from of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved are systematically extended.” But there are also goods external to the practice of science, for instance, that are also goods that can only be achieved through the practices themselves, such as control, prediction and explanation of natural phenomena. These external goods cannot be had through other practices, and yet they are not goods strictly internal to the practice of science itself. They are the ends at which scientific practice aims.
- 15.
(MacIntyre 2007, pp. 188–89) Internal goods are goods that cannot be specified or attained apart from a given practice. MacIntyre calls these goods internal because (1) “we can only specify them in terms of” the given practice and examples from that practice and (2) “they can only be identified and recognized by the experience of participating in the practice in question.” I agree with the first point. As a non-scientist, I certainly do not presume to name all of the internal goods of modern science, and those I do name will have no great degree of specificity. For I will bump up against the precise limitations that kept MacIntyre from describing the internal goods of chess with greater specificity. Nonetheless, I disagree that internal goods can only be identified by practitioners of a given practice. I concede that there are certain internal goods that a non-practitioner could not likely identify, but at a general level I do not see the difficulty. I will name certain internal goods of science and religion and encourage practitioners to augment these with greater specificity or reject them altogether.
- 16.
When I refer the practices of science throughout, I have in mind the natural sciences specifically as these are most often compared to religion and theology in contemporary debates. I do not then have in mind the broader notion of science and its comparison with the arts more broadly, though this distinction is certainly relevant to the contemporary debates as well.
- 17.
(Gardiner and Engler 2010) By “naive correspondence theory of truth” I have in mind the view that language corresponds to something non-linguistic and that truth should be understood in terms of accuracy of that representation.
- 18.
For more about the distinction and relation between the moral and intellectual virtues specifically in the practice of science see, Emily Dumler-Winckler (2018).
- 19.
(Emerson 2006, vols. 1, 2) See his lecture “The American Scholar” and essay “Self-Reliance” in essays first series.
- 20.
(Bromwich 1989, p. 20) With David Bromwich, we might identify the define an interpreter as, “a persuasive observer whose theory of a family of objects may acquire the authority of fact.”
- 21.
(Bromwich 1989, p. 30) Bromwich credits Roger Sharrock with this discovery. All citations of Davy herein are from Bromwich.
- 22.
(Bromwich 1989, p. 36) 35. Bromwich explains that scientific knowledge understood as interpretation, “can still have the character of fact because the book of nature has been with us a long time, and in order to carry weight any revision must have preserved some part of its inheritance” (35).
- 23.
- 24.
I am grateful for the excellent feedback I received from Daniel Pedersen and Emanuele Ratti on an earlier draft of this paper.
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Dumler-Winckler, E. (2019). Beyond the Territories of Science and Religion. In: Billingsley, B., Chappell, K., Reiss, M.J. (eds) Science and Religion in Education. Contemporary Trends and Issues in Science Education, vol 48. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17234-3_5
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