Abstract

Fifty years ago, Ian Barbour published Issues in Religion and Science (1966) which, along withModels and Metaphors (1974), pushed back against the prevalent view that there was a basic conflict—or at least incompatibility—between science and religion. Barbour emphasized the ways religion and science are methodologically similar, and soon more scholars were exploring other similarities: not merely in their methods, but also in their institutional communities and traditions of knowledge production. A new discipline, the religion and science discourse (the SRD), had been born. The SRD began to develop newmodels for understanding the relationship between religion and science. Barbour would eventually lay out these various models in a typology which, while not uncontested, is still influential: conflict; independence (science and religion are two distinct practices); dialogue (science and religion are separate fields with commonalities and conflicts that can dialogue on certain issues); and integration (science and religion will eventually converge into a common understanding of reality).[1]

What these models all have in common is the assumption that religion and science are two separate spheres – that they are distinct and distinguishable “things” which can be in conflict, or reconciled, etc. But over the past two decades, work in various disciplines—including history, philosophy and the social sciences—has demonstrated that neither “religion” nor “science” are fixed practices. They are not, to use a philosophical term, “natural kinds” but are instead constructed and historically contingent. To borrow an image from the recently published Territories of Religion and Science by Peter Harrison, “religion” and “science” are maps of a particular territory. Those territories might exist, but the maps are constructions, ways of dividing and separating these territories that are in no way natural. And, as with any map, our understanding of “religion” and, subsequently, “science” emerges in a particular time and a particular place, and reflects cultural, historical, political interests and biases. To the extent that it treats these maps as given, the SRD reinforces these interests and biases, and thus implicitly privileges Western perspectives—as well as the ideologies of colonialism, racism and sexism, to name but a few.

We need new maps and new ways of thinking about the territories that get mapped out, and in this proposed, sustained conversation, we hope to do just that by exploring other ways to think about the relationship between religion and science. This conversation, what we hope will be the first of many, is an attempt to think about “religion” and “science” in a way which does not presume these categories and moves beyond the “doctrines and discoveries” (metaphysical and ontological) approach. We think that various critical theories, along with scholarship outside of the western, modern academy will be essential to this process, because from the perspective of the monotheistic cultures from which “science,” “religion,” and “science and religion” are defined, the idea of a single, objective truth forces the conversations into metaphysical and ontological directions. By approaching this conversation from outside the standard (Western) model we hope to move more toward critical questions of ethics, aesthetics, and politics surrounding the ways in which what we call “science” and what we call “religion” co-create our lives and understandings of our worlds. In order to take account of the pluralistic planet we inhabit, our approaches to religion and science need some serious re-thinking and challenging: approaches that start the discussion from ethics and aesthetics, rather than epistemology and metaphysics; ones that look at the roles narratives play in what counts as “science” and “religion” and how sciences and religions help shape cultural narratives; ones that understands that there are various “maps” for a given territory, none of which can be reduced to any other; ones that understand that there is not a single unified description of the world, but multiple perspectives with different political and ethical implications; and ones that listen deeply to non-Modern voices and constructions of meaning-making practices.

Though this work has begun in the realm of critical theories and postcolonial critiques of both “science” and “religion,” there has been little that brings together these separate critiques together to focus on the SRD (see our brief bibliography below). This further step of critique is vital to re-think science and religion from pluralistic perspectives. Science and religion have both been sources of securing knowledge claims toward colonizing ends: they can become foundations for right, wrong, true, and natural. The importance of destabilizing foundational tendencies in both “religion” and “science,” and trying to move beyond the dominant western ways of understanding those words, becomes an ethical and political task necessary to re-think this discourse for a pluralistic planet. In order to foster a sense of co-construction and openness to this re-thinking process, we also propose a conversational format to our AAR session.

[1]Ian G. Barbour, When Science Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers, or Partners? (New York: Harper Collins, 2000).