José Carlos González-HurtadoThe more science, the more God".Stephen BarrThe thesis of the conflict between science and faith is a myth generated by the polemics of the end of the 19th century".Nicholas Spencer is a member of "Theos Think Tank"He is also a member of the International Council on Religion and Society, a think tank on religion and society that seeks to stimulate public debate through research. He also holds a degree in Modern History and English from Oxford University and a PhD in Philosophy from Cambridge University.
He is the author of several books and articles. His latest, "Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion", is currently only available in English and was published on March 2, 2023. In it he discusses the historical relationship between science and religion, which is much more complex than popular myth allows us to understand.
Nicholas's view is that the relationship between science and religion "is going to become the most important issue of our century, because science is increasingly capable of redesigning human nature". He believes that some advances, such as the famous "GPT Chat" tool, "are much larger pieces of development than the space we have for ethical reflection on them. And that is a religious question, because it goes back to the idea of the human."
Given his extensive experience in research on issues related to science and faith, in this interview he talks about issues such as the boundaries between one and the other, their link with politics or the possible future consequences of the great advances that are currently taking place.
How do science and religion help us, in their own unique way, to answer the question of who we are?
– To answer this you need to go back to what science and religion are, and they both are very slippery entities. Science is an attempt to gain an objective, or at least neutral, understanding of the material world. Humans are material beings, so science is a deck at understanding us in that way.
But we humans are also complex. We are persons, in the sense that our emerging complexity has produced in us something that might be called a soul. We naturally resort to the language of the soul to try to explain the emerging personal dimension of human nature. And religion, to put it negatively, is parasitic on that dimension. More positively, religion is one of the areas, probably the most prominent, in which we relate to each other and to reality on a personal level.
One of the arguments for this is that you have to understand humans at multiple levels. To only understand as though scientific methods, as material, organisms, you end up dehumanizing us. If you only understand us as “spiritual beings”, you’ll ignore our vitally important material presence.
So that is why both science and religion can contribute positively to a fully rounded understanding of the human.
Can we have a truly positive view of progress without the religious concepts of a human being, dignity and the moral system that a Providence implies?
– Progress naturally depends on some kind of teleology, some kind of end point. You can only have progress if you have something to which you can progress.
Now, I do think it is possible to have forms of progress completely devoid of any religious or spiritual, or even moral, framework. For example, is it better to have less physical pain than more physical pain? And if you are moving towards there is less physical pain, that is progress of a kind. So I don’t think the very idea of progress is entirely dependent on having a moral or spiritual framework. You can progress in purely secular terms.
However, I believe that because we are the kind of creatures we are, we also crave a form of moral and spiritual progress.
Our Western civilization has made incredible progress over the centuries, both in science and religion. Are there any correlations between these two areas that could explain this progress?
– Without a doubt, science, as technology and engineering, has transformed the face of the earth and human life in a relatively short period of time. And the world is overwhelmingly religious, and likely to become more religious, in the 21st century.
However, politics, which has a very bad reputation today, is probably more important than science or religion as a vehicle for progress. A case in point is the eradication of cholera disease in the 19th century. The scientific understanding of the disease and the humanitarian desire to eradicate it, which often came from a religious impulse, were coordinated through government and state, through politics, and then cholera was completely eradicated.
Science and religion both contribute, but very often they require the kind of public coordination through politics to achieve that progress.
You’ve talked about certain scientific revolutions that were theologically based. How do science and religion get intertwined without stepping over one another?
– Something to remark here is that science and religion, as we understand them today, are pretty modern terms. If we go back two hundred years or so, people did talk about science and religion, but they didn’t talk about them in the way we do.
In the United Kingdom, up until the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a very significant overlap, socially, conceptually and intellectually, between science and religion. One of the reasons why there was tension and conflict between science and religion at this time was the two different magisteria, which were socially pulled apart. And since then the question has been what is the relationship between science and religion. Some argue that they are totally separate magisteria, one dealing with facts, the other dealing with values. Therefore, they can’t overlap one another.
You can delineate the different magisteria. However, my argument is that in one very important area they overlap, and that’s when it comes to us, human beings. When you're talking about us you can’t make the distinction between facts and values that easily.
So, the tension today comes from the perspective that in certain matters both science and religion have a very proper role to play. And that requires careful negotiation. It’s not enough to say they are separate. When we are talking about artificial intelligence or genetic engineering, abortion or life extension, all of these things are important scientific issues in our century. But it is also meddling with the idea of what it means to be human, and that is a deeply religious question.
Why did you write your book “Magisteria: The entangled histories of science and religion”? What was the idea behind it?
– So, I’ve been working on science and religion on and off for fifteen years or so. I’m acutely aware that the default public opinion is that the two are in conflict and that, historically, they’ve always been in conflict. That is a narrative that is born of the late nineteenth century, from a period of tension, and in particular to very influential histories of science and religion that argued that the long standing relationship between has been one of perpetual conflict.
In the academic world, the discipline of the history of science and religion is a relatively new one. The academic world has totally overturned that picture, showing that the relationship is much more complex and far more positive than the popular myth allows. But has never filtered down to the general public. I did a series on the BBC a few years ago telling the story, and “Magisteria” was the book basically on the back of that.
Centuries ago, a lot of scientists were christians, but nowadays, the most popular names in the scientific areas label themselves as atheists. How would you explain this change?
– Actually, the picture is a lot less dramatic and exciting. Is not that the scientists stopped being religious, so much that society is a lot less religious. The broad view is that the proportion of religious scientists is roughly equal to the portion of religious people in the country. Or more precisely, it’s roughly equal to the proportion of people in the socioeconomic class from which scientists are drawn that are religious. Broadly speaking, a society’s scientists are about as religious as the society itself.
Why was the “Theos Think Tank” born? What is its purpose?
– We are a Christian think tank, we’ve been going for seventeen years now. We were founded with the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, but we are not affiliated with any particular denomination. We exist to tell a better story about Christianity, specifically faith generally in contemporary public life.
A better story in two ways: better in the sense of more accurate, since research is at the heart of what we do; but also better in the sense of more engaging and coherent.
Through the “Theos Think Tank” project you’ve talked about the relation that exists between beauty, science and religion. What can you tell us about this correlation between the three elements?
– This was part of a bigger project that the Catholic University of America started. I did a small element of the UK research, because I had a particular interest in aesthetics.
The rule of thumb is that there is some deep resonance between the true and the beautiful. Some famous researchers do think that beauty is a guide to truth. That has a lot of resonance but in some scientists, rather than others. Physicists are more likely to say that. And it also depends on a particular understanding of beauty, which is aesthetically a bit questionable. It treats beauty as synonymous with elegance, simplicity and symmetry. And a lot of theorists of aesthetics think that is not a particularly accurate definition of beauty.
So the research was an attempt to know how much of a resonance there is. And the response is that there was some, but it was heavily qualified. Beauty can be used as a heuristic in scientific endeavors, but if so, it needs to be handled with extreme care.
What is our responsibility as Christians towards science?
- The short answer is to celebrate and support. The long answer is to pay careful attention to what happens, because in a sense there is no such thing as science, there are scientists. There are times in history when Christians have been adamantly opposed to science and totally wrong, and there are other times when they were absolutely right. So the longer answer is to examine carefully because not all science is equal.
Do you think that religion works as a marker of the limits for science? Would it be possible to have those limits without religion?
– The first thing to say is that you can absolutely limit science without religion, and there are examples of atheist societies limiting science, quite wrongfully, but there was no problem in limiting science. Similarly, there are innumerable committees of ethics around the world that question and place limits in the practice of science today.
Broadly speaking, I’m very pro investigating through science. Limits should be on how one does it, rather than in the fact of doing it. And then, crucially, the limits on the use of what one does with the information one acquires.
So, yes, there should be some limits on science, but we should do that tentatively.
You are a person with a broad perspective when it comes to the dialogue between religion and science. Knowing all the advances that are being made, do you feel hope or fear when you think about the future?
– That question is almost always answered by knowing what kind of person you are. I’m not optimistic by nature, therefore I’m not optimistic about the future, but that says more about me than it does about the future.
But as a more precise answer, I’m not anxious about Artificial Intelligence becoming conscious and sentient. What I’m anxious about is the way in which AI will be used by nefarious actors who wish to manipulate reality. I’m not worried so much about what new technologies will do to us, but about what other human beings will do to us with new technologies.
