Barbara Strassberg. Science, Religion, and Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Culture, and Controversy. Editor: Arri Eisen & Gary Laderman. Volume 1, M.E. Sharpe, 2006.
In order to appreciate the real-life dynamics between religion and science, we need to get down to individual and group experience. Scholars, theologians, and scientists engaged in the religion and science dialogue often focus on a very theoretical and abstract analysis that suggests the application of an essentialist approach both to religion and science. The debate addresses the questions of whether religion is a threat to science or science is a threat to religion; whether they are separate or overlapping; whether one can be used in support of the other. Moreover, the interest seems to be directed toward questions that religion and science ask rather than answers they are believed to provide, with ‘why?’ reserved for religion and ‘how?’ for science.
However, if we supplement these voices with a social scientific approach, we realize more fully the importance of the answers people believe religion and science supply. These are the answers people believe to be true, that energize their behavior toward themselves, toward others within their own group, toward out-groups, and toward the rest of the natural environment. Both religion and science are created through thoughts and actions by means of which people assign meanings to their surroundings. Since both are engaged in human interactions and struggles for power, they have real consequences for people’s lives.
There is a need for cultural inclusiveness in the examination of contemporary issues from the perspective of science and religion. The social scientific multicultural approach allows us to develop a social and cultural criticism of religion and science, and of their multiple possible relationships, on the level of lived religion and lived science. Lived religion manifests itself in behavior justified by religion-based group ethics and individual morality, and lived science manifests itself in technology available to individuals and groups in a given cultural context. In everyday life, religion is often used to sacralize specific individual or collective goals (why we need to do this), and science is often used to sacralize the means for attaining those goals (how we need to do this). A framework for further exploration of multicultural perspectives on science and religion is sketched below, followed by a discussion of the interplay between religion and science in the context of contemporary issues that operate on the macro or global level and on the micro level of individual experience.
Theoretical Framework
One important factor that shapes the perception of the relationship between religion and science is the diversity of religious beliefs and scientific disciplines. The several major world religions are all divided into numerous, often competing local interpretative dialects, and they function side by side with hundreds of local religions. The several major scientific disciplines are divided into multiple subdisciplines, and every one of them comprises distinct, often competing theoretical and applied approaches. However, the actual religion- and science-related experiences of most people are embedded in only one specific religious dialect and only one specific scientific interpretation of a given phenomenon.
Most individuals and groups develop worldviews, in which the relationship between religion and science reflects the views commonly accepted by their society. A worldview occurs on group and individual levels and reflects a society’s and an individual’s perceptions of the world and life. It helps to explain the meaning of life and why things are the way they are, and to prescribe how things ought to be, and it thus makes sense of the past and present social orders. Its normative aspect manifests itself in group ideologies that offer different, often competing visions of desired future social arrangements, and in legal codes that set out how we should behave and why we should behave that way.
Throughout history, both religion and science have been incorporated into collective and individual worldviews. Some people believe that there is a divide between religion and science that cannot and should not be bridged, and others believe that these two ways of knowing are seamlessly fused together. Between the two opposing views, there is a continuum of possibilities in the perception and interpretation of the relationship between religion and science. Social institutions and ideologies they promote, and political institutions and the policies they formulate and enforce, create opportunities for and limitations of the individual and group choices among the existing alternatives.
Individual choices, however, are heavily influenced by a much narrower social context, which is defined by the position of a person in a society and by the social roles performed within the existing hierarchy of stratification. This context provides the foundations for the processes of socialization within the family, among peers, in social institutions, and in the larger culture that shapes individual worldviews. It shapes the individual’s ability to notice, understand, appreciate, and adopt any of the alternative, competing systems of meaning offered by the globalizing world of high-speed communication technologies. Also, it shapes the individual’s chances to contribute to the modification of the collective worldview.
Such ability and chances, in turn, depend on the scope and intensity of individual and group religiosity and “scientificity.” I refer here to beliefs in specific interpretations of religious and scientific truths, feelings about such truths, and the predisposition to conform to the dictates of a given social entity and to act according to patterns of behavior prescribed for a given context. The group religiosity and scientificity shape individual beliefs, feelings, and predispositions toward actions, and those feed back into the collective worldviews. Once a sufficient number of individuals incorporate new ideas into their worldviews, the collective worldview starts to change. It’s an exercise in democracy, except that special interest groups, which are more vociferous, have disproportionate influence on the collective worldviews of human societies.
As a result of those influences, religion and science are reenacted in a much different way within an individual worldview of a religious leader or a theoretical scientist than in a worldview of a religion teacher or a science teacher. A still different dynamic between religion and science is going to characterize the worldview of a person unaffiliated with any institutional religion or a person who has no interest in science, even though such a person might freely use science in its applied form of technology.
On a continuum between producers and consumers of religion and science, with these categories not being mutually exclusive, we find a great number of human experiences that underscore the complexity of the role religion and science play in everyday human life. These experiences are also modified by the fundamental social differentiations that arise from the cultural construction of age, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and social class by particular societies. They contribute to the differences in the level and character of general, religious, and scientific literacy and competence among various categories of people in a society.
The complex relationship between religion and science within the collective and individual worldviews becomes clearer when we introduce the concepts of essentialism and hybridity. These terms are used to describe the characteristic features of reality and to define the ways in which cultures are perceived by individuals and groups who create cultures, as well as those who look at them from the “outside.”
“To essentialise is to impute a fundamental, basic, absolutely necessary constitutive quality to a person, social category, ethnic group, religious community, or nation,” according to Werbner and Modood’s Debating Cultural Hybridity. This way of describing reality implies that cultures are characterized by timeless continuity, organic unity, and boundedness in space; they are internally the same and externally different from other cultures. This perception of cultures allows people to view them as “things,” separated and different from each other to the point that in certain political circumstances people representing one culture might define those who represent another as less human, and thus legitimize exploitation of the other or even genocide. According to Werbner and Modood, “The communities essentialised by perpetrators of violent acts of aggression are … defined as fixed, immoral and dangerous. In being demonized, they are reified.” Therefore, as scholars studying religion and sciences from a multicultural perspective, we need to ask who essentializes whom, when, and for what political purposes, and whether the scaffoldings for this essentialization are founded in religion or science or both.
The second perspective presupposes that cultures are hybrids. Werbner and Modood describe it as the view that “despite the illusion of boundedness, cultures evolve historically through unreflective borrowings, mimetic appropriations, exchanges and inventions. There is no culture in and of itself.” If cultures are perceived as fluid, hybridal, and open, then people are able to view the other as an extension of the self. This becomes possible because the emphasis is placed on similarities and unity, on interdependence and fusions, in spite of conflicts, debates, or differences of opinion. Thus, the awareness and acceptance of hybridization as a characteristic feature of reality widens intellectual horizons and permits the construction of a more complex, internally diversified, but still coherent worldview.
Throughout history, the processes of cultural evolution have brought almost all human cultures to a very high level of hybridization. However, even today, we observe an ongoing dialectical interaction between hybridal cultures and essentialist perceptions of those cultures, especially when political and economic gains are desired.
If we agree that all cultures are hybrids, then all elements of cultures, including religion and science, are hybrids as well. The processes of cultural mixing, crossovers, and inversions produce religious and scientific hybrids that, according to Werbner and Modood, “juxtapose and fuse objects, languages and signifying practices from different and normally separated domains and … challenge an official, puritanical public order.” However, as described by Bakhtin, hybridization of cultures, including religion and science, might be either unconscious and organic or conscious and intentional. This distinction is important because spontaneous hybridization does not challenge the sense of order or continuity; it does not present itself as a threat to the purity of any component of culture; when discovered ex post facto, it is simply accepted as an interesting observation. On the other hand, intentional hybrids are perceived as internally dialogical, fusing the unfusable. They are perceived as threatening both the social order and individual identity, and typically are countered by negative evaluations and vigorous opposition—usually unsuccessfully.
The perception of threat and opposition is usually linked to the definition of religions and sciences in essentialist terms. Essentialists believe that individuals can be classified based on some shared, static quality linked to the adherence to a particular belief system based on faith or a given scientific theory. This approach usually leads to a complete separation of religion and science within a collective or individual worldview, or to their incorporation as two separate, parallel ways of knowing. As a result, notes Epstein, some experiences are ignored or even degraded while others are privileged and no “interference,” no mutual action of several “cultural waves” is permitted. Such essentialist interpretations can also be found in the traditional theoretical model of difference applied within “mosaic multiculturalism,” which tends to emphasize the pluralistic world of self-enclosed cultures, each valuable in itself.
The American cultural context—with its dominant unique version of Protestant Christianity and the dominant uniquely strong trust in science—provides some good examples of essentialist practices within a hybrid culture. Even though both religion and science function as powerful organizing principles in American society, and are strongly fused together within the fabric of society and culture, in certain empirical political situations the line dividing religion and science might be intentionally constructed as very clear and well defined. This makes the exploitation of that line for various political purposes relatively easy, by denying economic and political resources to the side of the equation that has less power. In some situations, religion might be politically more powerful than science. This might be seen in laws banning the theory of evolution from school curricula, or laws to stop research on stem cells or human cloning. In some situations, one religion might be politically more powerful than another. Laws might then ban the practices of certain religions, or be used to eliminate a specific religion, such as the Davidians from Waco, Texas. The first case exemplifies the essentialist approach to religion and science, and the second illustrates the essentialist approach to specific religious systems. Such tendencies might also be observed when competing scientific disciplines are essentialized and put in a hierarchical order, with philosophy or mathematics considered the “key” to the understanding of all reality.
What happens on a macro social level is reflected in the experiences of individuals. Living within changing hybridal cultures, individuals continuously interact with hybridal cultural elements. As far as religion and science are concerned, most often the line dividing those two elements does not present itself as a static, insurmountable divide between two different components of a worldview, but rather as a line where they meet and fuse. It seems to operate in lived experience as a line not to be crossed but followed along, every time decisions are made that require a level of engagement both of religious and scientific beliefs. Moreover, since people think, talk, write, and theorize simultaneously in religious and scientific terms all the time, they participate in the spontaneous fusion of religion and science, whether they are aware of it or not. This usually occurs on the level of religion-based ethics and science-based technology. A good example is the application of life-support technology. For many people the use of such technology is religiously justified by the idea of the sanctity of human life, and unplugging the equipment is strongly opposed as an act against God’s will. Technology-assisted conception is accepted as adhering to God’s mandate of reproduction. Such empirically occurring fusions, however, do not mean that people who experience them do not view religion and science in essentialist terms. The hiatus between belief and practice is not an unusual phenomenon.
Today, globalization and McDonaldization have increased the speed and complexity of spontaneous and intentional hybridization. Globalization gradually leads to a hybrid global civil society and culture. The globalism ideology helps the producers of globalization to sacralize their goals. On the other hand, McDonaldization leads to the hybrid means that are most efficient, simple, and easy to calculate and control for the implementation of globalization. McDonaldization is linked to highly developed technology and science-based management and administration that help sacralize the means.
Simultaneously with these two processes of change, however, are processes that pull the globalizing and McDonaldizing social reality in an opposite direction. They are manifestations of the resistance to change, and of an effort to reessentialize the emergent fusions. These are fragmentation, localization, and de-McDonaldization, and they reflect the attempts made by some societies, groups, and individuals to reessentialize their identity, integrity, or autonomy.
The global and the local are two aspects of the same phenomenon and cannot be separated from each other on an empirical level. The interference of the global and the local, sometimes called globalization, produces unique outcomes in different cultural settings.
People who acknowledge hybridization of cultures and their components understand that all religious systems and scientific theories are hybrids and thus are transcultural in their essence. Religion and science are seen as supporting each other’s claims in some cases and challenging those claims in others. Elements of religious and scientific systems of meaning are seen as interwoven into one complex tapestry of individual and collective worldviews. Some people who spontaneously fuse the religious and scientific components within their worldview might be perceived by essentialists as confused, suspect, or lacking or selling out firm principles. Sometimes people confronted with extraordinary circumstances insist on the intentional construction of a religion-science hybrid that can respond to the situation. This might cause the institutional gatekeepers of religion or science to send their border patrols to protect the line of separation, regardless of the consequences for people directly involved in an experience that requires fusion.
People caught up in extraordinary situations understand that the interactions between religion and science are neither simple, nor static, nor easy to grasp. In some situations there is a need to intentionally create a new religion-science hybrid, because the ones that have been constructed spontaneously over time are no longer sufficient. People who go through a transcultural experience on the borderline between religion and science are aware that such experience cannot be framed by the language that emphasizes divisions and presents reality only in terms of “either-or.”
The possible relationships between religion and science can be illustrated through several global phenomena that are anchored in and shape individual experience. Terrorism and war are examples of hostile human interactions. The HIV/AIDS pandemic and the world trade in human organs reveal the unintended outcomes of the most intimate human interactions. Societal responses to these contemporary issues in terms of religion and science are the focus of the section that follows.
Religion, Science, and Contemporary Issues
Terrorism and war are good examples of a fusion of essentialist religious beliefs with science. In this case religion and science operate together but remain separate, parallel, and equally important, and they address different questions. The September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, for example, showed a pragmatic fusion of the essentialist religious beliefs of Islamic fundamentalism with the technology and scientific knowledge embodied in jet planes and high-rises. This fusion is particularly interesting because it links religious beliefs that oppose science and technology with the very science and technology that are the target of the attack.
The U.S. response—a global war on terrorism—shows a similar fusion, but this time essentialist beliefs rooted in American Protestantism are fused with the means of industrialized killing rooted in science. Both sides of the conflict use their essentialist interpretations of religion to define the opponent as evil and thus less human, and they use technology to perform the job of killing effectively, efficiently, and in a relatively controlled way. Religion is used to sacralize the goals, to help people understand why they are doing what they are doing and why what they are doing is the right thing to do, and thus to accept their own conduct as congruent with ethical norms they were taught to follow. Fused with those beliefs is science, which is used to sacralize the means by providing technology and skills to perform the job of reaching the goals. On an individual level, the fusion of religion and science comprises elements of ideology promoted by political and religious leaders, knowledge of technology and science, and elements of the individual’s life context. Together they are powerful enough to push people to kill themselves, to kill others, and to die in combat.
If science provided the answers to “why” questions, and religion provided the answers to “how” questions, the outcomes could be quite different. In scientific terms, there is no way to support the idea that some people are less human than others, or that killing is a right thing to do, since the scientific data only supply the evidence that we all are one species. And religious systems do not contain instructions pertaining to how to kill and how to remain safe. If people constructed a hybrid of religion and science that would try to answer the questions simultaneously from both points of view, fusions like the one that permits killing out-group members would not be as powerful as they are now. People would see that both parties involved, whether in a conflict or a peaceful relationship, regardless of how they might be defined by the others, are human and thus actively play their roles as individual or collective agents. Both are motivated to action by their own interpretation of religious beliefs that they accept as true, and both have access to technological means and scientific know-how. We frequently see war as something we do and terrorism as something they do, instead of seeing both as actions undertaken by two parties engaged in one interaction. Our confusion results from the simultaneous essentialist fusions of religion with science by both parties involved. Each party sees such fusion among the opponents but denies its existence within their own ranks, thus making it possible to interpret the conflict as a negative outcome of such a fusion constructed by the enemy. As a result, the fusion itself might be perceived in negative terms.
The fusion of religion and science is seen as well in responses to the outcomes of the most intimate human interactions possible. The exchange of body fluids between two people, for example, through sexual contact or other means, can pass along HIV/AIDS if either of the individuals carries the infection. The condition, if untreated, causes an early death in the infected individuals, and the spread of HIV/AIDS has reached the level of a pandemic. Another example is seen in the exchange of body parts through transplant surgery. A global trade in human organs has developed, which might cause a live donor to die or suffer for the sake of the recipient who gains a chance to live or to live longer. These examples differ, however, in intentionality, since the exchange of body fluids, except in some isolated cases, does not involve the intention of spreading the virus.
Most religious systems provide guidelines for sexual behavior, and many believers consider epidemics a penalty applied by the sacred to people for their sexual transgressions. Throughout history, people affected by the epidemic outbreak of a deadly disease have been suspected of engaging in unacceptable conduct and viewed as sinners. At first, religions addressed both the how and the why questions. In many cases, infected people were stigmatized, isolated from their communities, and left to die. With the development of biological and medical sciences though, more and more people started to understand contagious diseases and the ways in which they can be controlled or eliminated. Medical science acquired the ability to address the how questions, but the why questions in many cases remained in the domain of religion.
Thus, the fusion of religion and science in this area was similar to the one that characterized war and terrorism, with religion and science engaged in answering different questions. In the case of a pandemic, however, there is an ongoing tension between religion and science within the fusion of beliefs rooted in traditional interpretations of religions, and beliefs rooted in modern biological and medical sciences. This tension is caused by the lack of intentionality to spread the disease on the part of individuals involved in the exchange of body fluids and, at the same time, the threat it presents to the survival of humanity. Religious interpretations are applied to people infected only ex post facto and not to construct them as potential targets.
HIV/AIDS can spread by means other than sexual contact, such as blood transfusions, needle sharing, and exposure in the womb. In most cases, the virus is transmitted through sexual intercourse or from a mother to her child. The speed with which HIV/AIDS is spreading within particular social and cultural contexts shows different outcomes of the tension between religion and science. For example, in the United States, the scientific worldview manages to overcome the traditional religious narratives that stigmatize people on the grounds of sexual conduct. Even if some stigmatization still takes place, in most cases it does not lead to isolation, rejection, or refusal of medical care. Moreover, we observe a growing movement among religious leaders, medical professionals, and social workers to intentionally construct a religion and science hybrid that would counter the pandemic more effectively.
On the other hand, in many developing countries, the fight between the two worldviews takes place in a culture that favors religious beliefs and creates obstacles for the work undertaken by global and local medical establishments to control or stop the spread of the pandemic. In the case of postcolonial societies, this is not necessarily the result of the superior strength of the religious component of a worldview. In some of those contexts, the religious beliefs are intentionally used as the sole source of answers to questions related to the pandemic, because the Western medical sciences are perceived as a threat to the newly acquired political, economic, or social autonomy. However, in all cultures and subcultures, there are individuals and groups more responsive to scientific approaches to disease, and those who prefer to follow traditional religious beliefs.
Organ transplantation illustrates one more possible interaction between religion and science. Beside instructions related to sexuality and illness, most religious systems also put forth presuppositions about the human body, its integrity, and the relationship between organs and the body, and they formulate explicit guidelines according to which the body needs to be handled. They emphasize the value of human life and address situations in which for the sake of saving a human life other religious guidelines are suspended, and situations in which the loss of life is justified by some still higher goals.
Throughout history, religious teachings about the body formed a continuum, from a command to maintain it intact in life and death on one end, to acceptance of the separation of body parts on the other. The belief in the body’s integrity functioned in cultural systems side by side with a belief that dismembering was one of the most severe penalties for crime, a form of revenge, or a treatment appropriate only for the most hated enemies. Dismembering the body after death and throwing the parts in different directions was believed to ensure that the person would not be resurrected or enjoy the afterlife. On the other end of the continuum were various forms of ritual cannibalism, the consumption of human organs and bodies for purposes well defined by religious myths that emphasized the benefits to the consumers. Religious teachings about the integrity of the human body were overridden by teachings about the priority of life. The medical practice of organ transplantation often found legitimization in the interpretation of organ donation as a gift of life, the ultimate gift one human being can offer another.
Today, technology permits transplantation of organs from dead and living donors, from those who expressed their consent and those whose organs were harvested during some medical intervention into their bodies. As a result, a world trade in human organs has developed, and organs are bought by brokers who sell to recipients at high prices. This developing practice of organ sales or theft makes it difficult to maintain the religious gift-of-life narrative and leads back to the tension between religious beliefs and medical science, and even to a complete disconnection of medical procedures from the religious views on life and the body. The donors are no longer donors, the gift is no longer a gift, and the life, either saved or extended, is a commodity that can be purchased by those who can afford it. At the same time, those who supply organs suffer all the medical consequences of this transaction, including death. Contrary to the HIV/AIDS example, the case of organ transplantation illustrates an almost complete disconnection of scientific medical practices from traditional religious beliefs.
The importance of a multicultural social scientific approach to the religion and science dialogue needs to be emphasized. Religion and science both occupy central positions in human societies. They both function as ways of knowing; both serve the continuation of societal institutions and structures; both provide individuals with a tangible link between past, present, and future. However, both religion and science are interconnected and interdependent processes that unfold within the tapestry of other processes characteristic of a particular culture, of many cultures, or the entire human family.
Also at work in the examples presented above are the global social, economic, and political inequalities deepening with the processes of globalization and McDonaldization. Most often it is the poor and the powerless who turn into terrorists, join the armies, suffer and die of HIV/AIDS, and provide organs for transplantation. The rich and the powerful buy the troops, buy the means to live with HIV/AIDS, and more easily receive necessary organs. And this dimension is one more important contemporary issue that should be included in future discussions on religion and science.
The brief social scientific analysis of the religion and science dialogue presented here seems to suggest that, in order to conduct transcultural studies of the relationship between these two ways of knowing, we need “a processual theory of hybridity,” as described by Werbner and Modood, that would differentiate “between a politics that proceeds from the legitimacy of difference, in and despite the need for unity, and a politics that rests on a coercive unity, ideologically grounded in a single monolithic truth.” Such a theory might help us explain more fully the complexity and dynamics of human experience that takes place on the borderline between religion and science, and that requires simultaneous activation of the religious and scientific tools embedded in an individual or collective worldview.