The Entanglements of Science and Religion
Spencer’s book is based on deep historical insight and research, it is written with elegance and energy, and it achieves the rare feat of being scholarly and serious as well as accessible and engaging. It will be an important resource for anyone who wishes to understand the scientific and religious entanglements that have shaped, and continue to frame, our views of God, humanity, and the cosmos.
Reading Nicholas Spencer’s Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion, I was reminded of T. S. Eliot’s words: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” For all the intense debates about how best to navigate the territories of science and religion, this is a journey that points back to its origin: the human person. As Spencer convincingly demonstrates, what we think about science and religion often says more about us—our views on what it means to be human and who gets to decide—than it does about science and religion.
The book’s title refers to the biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s model of science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria,” or two distinct activities that need not interact. Others have variously defined the relationship in terms of conflict, dialogue, or collaboration. Spencer rejects such approaches as too simplistic. In line with the emerging scholarly consensus that there isn’t a single narrative for the history of science and religion, he offers alternative histories. After all, the two enterprises turn out to be “indistinct, sprawling, untidy, and endlessly and fascinatingly entangled.”
But Spencer’s goal isn’t just to emphasize complexity. In his telling, the histories of science and religion tend to converge on two issues: human nature (our origins, purpose, and uniqueness) and authority (who has the right to adjudicate these questions?). Perhaps this is why the topic of science and religion can be so polarizing: if Spencer is correct, we’re dealing not with sterile abstractions about “conflict” or “harmony,” but with profoundly human concerns about who we are, how we relate to each other, and what we might be.
While the story of science and religion is not so easy to track, Spencer’s own career trajectory has been heading toward an ambitious study of the subject for some time. As a senior fellow of the Christian think-tank Theos, he has already written a book about Charles Darwin’s religious beliefs, another on The Evolution of the West, and presented a BBC radio series on the relationship between science and religion. With Magisteria, he has now produced one of the most comprehensive and compelling popular accounts of the entanglements between these contested human activities.
Histories
The book’s historical scope is vast, with the first section alone tracing 1,600 years of (general) cooperation and (occasional) combat between science and religion. Spencer shows that, to a considerable degree, ancient and medieval religious believers supported, legitimized, and helped advance scientific inquiry. Augustine warned that it is “disgraceful and dangerous” for Christians to ignore facts about the physical world. Islamic scholars made original contributions to astronomy, chemistry, and medicine. Christian ideas about the order and rationality of the natural world informed the assumptions that continue to underpin science today. Medieval universities functioned primarily as scientific institutions.
Of course, the terms “science” and “religion” (as well as “science and religion”) are modern inventions, and Spencer acknowledges the risk of anachronism when using them in relation to the ancient and medieval worlds. His point is that, for large parts of human history, what we would now compartmentalize as scientific and religious outlooks were fully integrated in the lives of important figures. The twelfth-century scholastic philosopher Robert Grosseteste combined scientific work with an ecclesiastical career. The fifteenth-century philosopher Nicholas of Cusa was a Catholic cardinal as well as a mathematician and astronomer. Both men believed that God’s creation was subject to quantification and experimentation, and both engaged with ideas (such as the concept of infinity) that would sit easily with developments in twenty-first-century physics.
The book’s other three sections are framed by three major incidents in the history of science and religion, which Spencer sees as central to sustaining the popular myth of endless conflict: the Galileo affair, which seemed to pit Copernicus’s heliocentrism against the Catholic Church; the Huxley–Wilberforce debate, which seemed to pit Darwin’s new theory of evolution against Christian belief in Victorian England; and the Scopes Monkey trial, which seemed to perform a similar role in Tennessee sixty-five years later.
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Hope for Hard Marriages
Please hear: I’m not trying to downplay the real difficulty and suffering experienced by those married to an unbeliever. But is it possible to see God’s grace even in the pain? Is it possible to see in your situation a reminder that marriage is not our ultimate purpose in life, and was never meant to be our source of happiness? Is it possible that the sorrow you carry around is but one reminder that you’re not home yet, and the person you’re really longing for is still coming for you?
The past two Sundays we’ve spent time in 1 Peter 3:1-7, a passage which is largely addressed to Christian women with unbelieving husbands. Peter instructs them to seek to win their husbands through their God-fearing conduct and inner beauty.
It’s interesting to notice how Peter speaks to this situation in such a matter-of-fact manner. Doesn’t he understand how profoundly lonely it is to be married to someone who rejects the most important part of your identity? Has he no sympathy for the aching pain of knowing that, unless they turn from their unbelief, the person with whom you share your earthly life will not share eternal life with you?
I don’t know what was going on in Peter’s mind as he wrote these verses, but I can’t help but consider some of the ways in which his letter has already prepared a wife (or a husband) to face this situation with the necessary perspective:we are exiles and sojourners who don’t belong here (1 Pet 1:1, 2:11)
our present life is full of grief as our faith is tested by various trials (1 Pet 1:6-7)
our joy is to be found not in our present experiences but in the expectation of our inheritance (1 Pet 1:4-6)
we must set our hope fully on the grace that will be brought to us when Christ returns (1 Pet 1:13)That last point is especially relevant to the matter of marriage. So many Christian young people set their hope on marriage as their happily-ever-after. And the truth is that even a good Christian marriage can’t support the weight of those expectations. The best marriage will disappoint you. The best marriages are just temporary shadows of the real thing, which we’ll experience fully when Christ has returned (Matt 22:30, Eph 5:25-27, Rev 19:6-8).
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The Parts We Leave Out
God is sovereign over every square inch of his creation, and so he is equally sovereign over square inch of our lives. Our building, our dreaming, our working, our sleeping, it all fertile ground for growing in faith and giving glory to God. We just have to learn to see it.
Unless the Lord builds a house,
its builders labor over it in vain;
unless the Lord watches over a city,
the watchman stays alert in vain.
In vain you get up early and stay up late,
working hard to have enough food
PSALM 127
You moved across the country to start a new job. A dear friend has wronged you. Your husband has cancer. Your child is rushed to the hospital.
In the scary and difficult situations of life we know we must look to God for help. God is big and sovereign and exactly what we need to face the daunting challenges and bitter disappointments of life. And when God pulls us through and gets us safely to the other side we are more than ready to give him the praise he deserves.
But what about the ordinary, everyday grind of life. Do we reach out for God’s help as we groggily wake up from a fitful night of sleep? Do we think God is particularly concerned about our response when things don’t go as planned on the construction site? Does the fact that we can fill the grocery buggy fill us with thanksgiving?
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The Notion of Authority in God’s Created Order
God built authority into creation from the beginning, and Satan’s strategy—his plan for maximizing the humiliation he wanted to inflict on God—was to tear down those good and beautiful structures of authority. Do you realize the importance of this? It’s nothing short of profound: to tear down good, God-ordained authority is to join Satan in his rebellion against God; it’s to do serpent-like work.
How God Set It Up
Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. (Gen. 2:19–20)
Have you ever thought about why this odd little story is included in Scripture? Obviously, it shows Adam beyond any doubt that none of the other creatures God created would make a good wife for him. You can imagine Adam’s dismay as the last animal walked by and Adam said, “Zebra. Yeah, that’s not going to work either, but I do admire your creativity, Lord!”
But there’s another reason Moses records Adam naming the animals. By doing so, Adam exercised the authority God had given him over all creatures (1:28). Even in modern culture, we recognize that naming something is an act of authority. When parents name their children, they’re showing their authority over them. When some people name their cars—my wife once named hers “Jellybean”—that’s an act of authority, in that case derived from ownership. Anyway, you get the point. When Adam named the animals, he acted as their king. He carried out the authority and dominion God had given him over the cosmos and its inhabitants.
But look at what happens next:
So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,
“This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” (Gen. 2:21–23)
Adam names Eve. Of course, that doesn’t put Eve on the same level as animals. Genesis 1:26–27 says at least four times that she, just like Adam, was made in the image and likeness of God. What’s more, the phrase “have dominion” in Genesis 1:28 is in the plural, applied to both the man and the woman. Yet even as Adam and Eve both rule over the cosmos as king and queen, God still institutes even within their marriage relationship a structure of authority. Adam is given the responsibility of holding loving authority over his wife, Eve.In this booklet, Greg Gilbert explains why God reserved the office of pastor and elder exclusively for men by examining the structures of authority God established from the very beginning. Part of the Church Questions series.
Do you see what God did in these early chapters of Genesis? He designed a beautiful framework of royal authority throughout his cosmos. Adam and Eve exercise godly dominion over the animals, while within their relationship Adam reflects God’s divine character as he holds authority over his wife. Ruling over it all is the High King of the cosmos, God Himself.
Authority often strikes people as an inherently negative, abusive, or tyrannical concept. That’s understandable, given how sinful human beings have abused it throughout history.
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