Twin Passions
Two scientists explore science and religion.
by Sarah Coakley
Both these elegant little books on science and religion are by eminent Harvard professors emeriti—much-revered researchers, writers, and educators. Both authors hope their monographs may stimulate some less tired thinking about the disputed relationship between science and religion than has recently been the case in the United States. More heat than light has indeed been produced in the political debates about the teaching of secular evolutionary theory or “Intelligent Design” in schools; or in the sensationalist press discussions of the assaults of Richard Dawkins and Daniel C. Dennett on religious belief; or, even closer to home, in the seemingly ill-fated attempt to insert a requirement on “reason and faith” into the successor to the Harvard College “Core” curriculum. But both Owen Gingerich and E.O. Wilson believe, in their different ways, that religion and science need not be at such logger-heads—indeed, that they can, and should, harmoniously cooperate.
Wilson, the sociobiologist, a Baptist in his youth but long a religious agnostic, fashions his book on creation and the ecological crisis into an imaginary dialogue with a fundamentalist pastor. His stated hope is to harness conservative Christianity into a shared passion with science to save the earth from impending ecological disaster. Gingerich, the astronomer and historian of science, who is also a firm Mennonite believer, has stronger intellectual ambitions, ostensibly: not merely to declare a truce between science and religion for the sake of an urgent practical end, but to demonstrate the intrinsic compatibility of the two realms. God, for Gingerich, is alive and well and sustaining the cosmos purposively from Big Bang to contemporary moments of personalized salvation.
E. O. Wilson, Pellegrino University Professor emeritus, The Creation: A Meeting of Science and Religion (W. W. Norton, $21.95); and Owen Gingerich, professor of astronomy and of the history of science emeritus, God’s Universe (Belknap/Harvard, $16.95).
Both books have the great merit of being attractively and accessibly written: no obfuscating jargon or confusing theoretical complexities will distress the scientific novice. Indeed Wilson devotes an entire excursus to the damage he sees done to budding potential scientists by what he calls “math phobia”: he insists that “Mathematics is just a language,” and that any motivated person can learn it by practice. But readers who may easily be lulled by the clarity and wit of each man’s prose should be on their guard for some interesting rhetorical elisions and lacunae in the arguments. Let me treat each book briefly in turn.
The subtitle of Wilson’s book is “a meeting of science and religion,” but this may be a slight misnomer. The conversation he imagines with a fundamentalist pastor is not one in which he seeks to bring the realm of secular science and fundamentalism into any sort of metaphysical convergence, let alone agreement (“I may be wrong, you may be wrong. We both may be partly right”). Rather, he presumes that some form of fundamental “ethics” must become an urgent point of meeting, because “half the species of plants and animals on Earth could be either gone or at least fated for early extinction by the end of the century” unless immediate preventive action is taken by concerted human will. Much of the rest of the book is devoted to a vivid and frightening account of how and why this threat now looms; and any reader—Christian or otherwise—who is left unmoved must be ostrich-like indeed. Wilson weaves into his deft analysis of the now-critical state of the “most critical biodiversity hotspots” on earth many delightful asides about particular species, whether dominant, defunct, or threatened; and we are not surprised to find the master of the ant-world lingering, autobiographically, for a whole chapter on the modern odysseys of the fire ant.
Wilson tells us that his cautionary tale is straightforwardly the story from “science,” and it does indeed reflect the latest predictions that biologists and ecologists can offer us, albeit with much room for remaining uncertainty. However, it is fascinating how religious Wilson’s rhetoric is throughout. Humans strayed from “Eden,” he says, when “Nature” (at one point actually identified with “God”) was originally threatened by “civilization”; the primal capacity for “wonder” has been eroded by human selfishness and blindness; and our “souls” and “spirits” need to rediscover “Nature’s” wisdom and so seek “redemption.” If this is not actually the altar-call of Wilson’s youth, it at least has the overtones of a latter-day Rousseau: without the return to “Nature,” it insists, we are morally and spiritually adrift. In some sense we have to recover a more ancient purity in order to go forward.
1 | 2 | continued >
