What If We Stopped Fanning the Flames?

Introduction from Isaac:

Hello, I am Isaac Alderman, a Sinai and Synapses fellow. I am a PhD candidate at the Catholic University of America focusing on Hebrew Bible in general and more specifically on an interdisciplinary approach that draws on the study of cognition and emotion in the process of writing and reading religious texts.

I’d like to share with you a conversation I had with Dr. Chris Cotter regarding the dialogue between religion and science. Rather than participating in the dialogue, Chris is more interested in understanding the dialogue itself as a social phenomenon.

Dr. Chris Cotter is the Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He is also the co-founder of the Religious Studies Project, which is a podcast has been running for six years, with over over 250 podcasts dealing broadly with the social scientific study of religion. His primary focus is non-religion in the United Kingdom.

I highly recommend checking out Chris’ podcast, and you can find a link on the Sinai and Synapses website, or just go to religiousstudiesproject.com.

How does the religion/science dialogue differ in the UK?

Yes. So we, well, we certainly have a caricatured view of how things are in the States, and that sort of gets across the Atlantic, certainly. And it seems that your debate is quite inflected around things like creationism and evolution and perhaps the teaching of these things in schools. And this, to my ear and in a UK context, it’s quite a non-issue, really. Although you wouldn’t think that necessarily, because of the way that certain British Atheist writers tend to write about things. And the times that it would tend to come up, not necessarily around science/religion so much, but there are a few major sort of social flash points surrounding religion, which I imagine are quite similar in the West, over things around gender equality, sexual equality, and sort of LGBT rights and so on, abortion, contraception. And then things like dignity in dying as well.

So in my own context of Scotland, we have the Humanist Society of Scotland, and two of their major sort of campaigns, sort of anti-religious campaigns, focus upon euthanasia and assisted dying, and then also on abortion as well. So they frame both of those things around autonomy, bodily autonomy. In terms of other sort of big conflicts between science or religion, I mean, those are the ones I would see as being most prevalent. The stereotype of worry about science being undermined by religious teachings and all that sort of thing, it’s not something that’s got major cogency. Faith schooling comes up, you know, a lot of schools in the UK context are nominally faith schools, so in England it would be the Church of England. A vast number of schools or Church of England schools. We’ve then also got, you know, a lot of Catholic schools, a few Jewish, a few Muslim schools. And you know, some non-religious folk will get a bit worked up about this whole notion, why are we allowing this, school is supposed to be secular, but even in those contexts you don’t hear about these sort of major things, like inaccuracies being taught or anything.

What about debates over climate science in the UK?

Again, it’s just not really something that one hears about. And again, I’m aware that climate science is a big deal in a US context, and my own familiarity would be, say, the Church of Scotland here in Edinburgh, and everything is very much, you know, stewardship for the planet and you know, fully onboard with environmentalism in that respect.

Now, that being said, when one would get to say – and I don’t want to orientalize them in a sense, but there’s sort of the remoter fishing villages around the north coast of Scotland, where everything does get a little bit different. The communities there are quite… apocalyptic in a sense, as communities associated with the sea tend to be, life is much more treacherous, et cetera. And so there you would find the European Union being castigated very much as the devil, you know, doing the devil’s work, because they’re trying to interfere with the fishing traditions and trying to – you know, all these various environmental things.

But that’s, again, it’s not mainstream in any sense, and I don’t want to – I’m wary about creating a stereotype of these groups. The discourses are there, but very fringe in a way that it doesn’t seem to be in the States, certainly.

How do you see your role as social scientist?

Yeah, unpack that a little bit. Well, one thing I just thought of in the run-up to this is that actually, my degree at university was initially in physics, and I did a couple of years of studying physics, and it wasn’t for me. And through a process of elimination, I came to – “oh, religion sounds interesting,” and ended up going down this route.

And every time I tell this story to people, people go, “oh, I suppose that makes sense, you know, the transition from, you know, physics, the big questions, to religion, and the big questions, and then…” And that always gets under my skin a little bit. I say, “no, no, it’s really not that at all.” I tend to – when I’m introducing my perspective, I now tend to frame it as the critical social science of religion. And there are a few key components in there. So the social element, right, regardless of what the various beliefs or practices associated with religion are – it’s a social phenomenon, religion exists through people. And I study those people.

The science aspect, and this is where the whole science/religion debate becomes interesting, is because as a scholar within the academy, one has to operate within a certain set of norms, and so those norms are in a sense “scientific,” which then causes issues for some who are engaging in this study.

And the critical aspect is just – it’s asking questions about, you know, who benefits, who wins and loses. So in the science/religion debate, you know, what is at stake there now?

One way I tend to frame it is – you cannot prove that nations empirically exist, right. Nations don’t exist empirically, they exist because lots of us believe that they do, and act as if they do, and orient our lives around them. And there’s institutions, and there are consequences if you don’t behave in certain ways. I tend to think of deities and the supernatural in a similar way, right. You can’t take empirical facts and prove that they exist or don’t exist, but lots of people act as if they do. And then I study those social manifestations. Similarly, is the weather a force for good or bad in the world? You know, like the weather is just the weather, right, so similarly, asking “is religion a force for good or bad in the world?” – it’s there, and it exists as a phenomenon, and things happen, so.

How do you approach the specific topic of the religion/science dialogue?

On the science/religion debate, yes, there are a lot of people who are very, very invested in this being a contest, and who spend a lot of their time thinking about it, which is, I think, what you guys do as part of your work. And then there are some people for whom it doesn’t seem to enter into, you know, “it’s just that there’s no conflict at all, it’s just – they’re doing different things.” And other people answer various perspectives in between.

I tend to think more about, well, what is the social and political impact of the debate? So what does deeming something religious, as opposed to scientific, what does that do? Does that mark it out as something that should be given special reverence, that should be not subject to the same critique, or does it mean that it’s something that’s infantile, or, you know, something ridiculous that we can cast aside?

Similar with scientific, so the deemings, the way people talk, “this is scientific, this is religion” the way they construct those boundaries, they’ll have asocial effects or a set of of meanings to people. And I’m more interested in how that manifests in group dynamics and in the individual lives, who wins and loses, what are the power plays, than in necessarily sort of stepping into the fray.

And just finally on this question – I remember Elaine Howard Ecklund, I’m sure you’re aware of, she was in Edinburgh a few months ago,  and you know, I didn’t agree with quite a few things that she said, but I also agreed with some other things, and she made a great point, in that in terms of the whole science/ religion debate, hey, there are only a couple of things that really cause problems. And you mentioned them, you know, things like climate science and creationism. People aren’t going around saying “we shouldn’t refrigerate our food because that’s scientific and [our] religion doesn’t agree with the science of refrigeration,” you know.

Science and religion, the question doesn’t even come up in the vast majority of cases, but these few issues, such as those two, and then such as things like reproductive science, abortion and end of life and medical care, it’s these flashpoints where things do come up. But I guess that need not be the case, right?

As a bit of an outsider, what’s your response when the science / religion debate gets very heated and moralistic?

So that in a sense I would be doing with these debates, which aren’t debates that I particularly study myself, but it would be just looking at the actors involved, the questions that are being asked, what contests are happening when and why, rather than necessarily getting too focused on, I guess, on the sort of substance of the contestation. Because then you’ll end up with people talking past each other, whereas maybe if you can step back to the side and think more about all these other factors, it might help that.

And there are – everyone has normative commitments, right. And another problem with this whole conflict is, particularly on the scientific side, that notion of “we don’t have normative commitments, we’re entirely value free and everything that we’re doing is just recursive. And actually trying to undercut that sort of founding myth and go, “Okay, well maybe there are some underlying value commitments here that aren’t being articulated here, let’s find out what they are, then we can discuss them.”

Just another point I wanted to make – I mentioned founding myth there. A scholar of science and religion who you’re probably aware of, Peter Harrison, has done a lot of excellent work looking at the historical relationship between these two apparent spheres. And he points out that the whole conflict between Galileo and the Catholic Church – you know, that wasn’t really what we think it was, and much of it was to do with competing science rather than religion suppressing science, but you’ll time and again ear that Galileo story told and retold as like, the founding of science – “this is when the break happened”. And a historical and a critical look at, well, a) that wasn’t actually the case, but then b) looking at the function that serves – so, retelling of that myth actually sort of serves some of the same functions that other founding myths in other communities that may or may not be labeled religious has.

What have you found non-religious folk in the UK to be like?

Yeah. Percentage-wise, we’re talking – I mean, it depends which survey, what the questions are asking, but you know, it’s sort of anything between 30 and 70 percent in terms of identification, and then we’re getting into practice and values and beliefs and such, and the percentages go a bit crazy.

But there are a huge number of people who don’t have a connection to religion, as we may commonly understand it, but don’t necessarily identify particularly strongly one way or the other. They also may participate in various – because, you know, in the U.K., this weird, as you’ll know, this officially Anglican, there is the established church, so people will quite frequently participate in sort of civil religious events with no underlying framework for that necessarily.

I just wanted to say two things here, really. So for my master’s project back in 2010, I was looking at students at the University of Edinburgh here, who distanced themselves from the category of religion [for] whatever reason. They didn’t necessarily have to identify as atheist, but they said they were not religious. And I went on a sort of foolish exercise – I see it as foolish now – but I put them into types. Classifying people into types is never a very good thing – but what I did, I would now tend to speak of this as sort of types of discourse rather than types of individual, but there were five prevalent ways of talking about religion that I discovered. One was highly inflected by family and relationships. But the other four, what did they call them– humanistic, spiritual philosophical and scientific, these were the sort of four different ways that people were talking about religion. But each of those was very – it was implicated in some way in a science/religion thing. So philosophical was all about, you know, [forever] asking about the meaning questions, why are we here, what’s going on, what does life mean, and which had intersections. Humanistic – you know, how should we treat other people, but that was still intercutting with all these rights issues that we’ve been talking about, those human autonomy things I was bringing earlier.

But then, as my studies progressed, I started to come more and more to the conclusion that is due to the questions that I was asking at the time in my PhD research, which was situated in this area of Edinburgh that I’m speaking to you from right now, so it was more ethnographic study. And it involved people who might be parsed as religious or is not religious from a variety of different backgrounds.

What I actually found there was that sort of, all this talk around science – meaning, morality, mystery, mortality, you know, that is an element of what people talk about when when they’re talking about religion. There is this whole host of other stuff – I mean, that was one of eight different groupings of things, so there was national identity, there was family relationships, there was built environment, there was inner experience, personal identity, there were all these other aspects that didn’t touch on it.

I think I’ve started to come more and more to the conclusion that a lot of studies about religion, or about secularity or atheism – the scholars that are involved are coming in asking questions [like], “where do you find meaning?” or “what do you believe?”. And these questions will produce, you know, a certain kind of answer. But there’s a lot more going on there, and I think that those meaning questions, those belief questions, yes, they’re very tied up in the science/religion supposed conflict, as it were. But there’s a whole lot of other stuff going on about who we are, what we do, what we enjoy, our lived experiences, that don’t really touch on it. And you know, just as someone who works in a laboratory may be technically a scientist, but they’re not going to be a scientist their entire life – you know, that is one small aspect, and they’ll live in a very different way outside of the lab. Similarly, you could argue that someone who is religious – that won’t necessarily affect every other aspect of their life.

But I’m going to make a final point, because I’ve just found myself making a fallacy, which I don’t like. I’ve just compared a lab scientist to a religious person. And you find that happening in a lot of literature, they’ll go, “well, let’s talk about scientists who are religious.” And then they’ll talk about other people who are religious. I don’t know what the comparison would probably be– you know, would it be between religious leaders and lab scientists? Would that be a valid comparison? I’m not entirely sure.

Equally, everyone – if you’re going to start doing that comparison, everyone is a scientist. We all empirically assess things as we go about our day-to-day lives, and everyone behaves in manners could be construed as religious. I’m not going to say the phrase, I’m not even going to say it – “Everyone is religious” is in scare quotes. But you know, people behave in these ways. Some could be classified as scientific, some as religious, and I think by dichotomizing, we’re missing a lot, and sort of playing into the identity politics of the discourse, which hasn’t always been that way. There hasn’t always been this perceived conflict. It is, historically, very recent. And I don’t know whose interest it serves, but it is serving an interest to keep sort of fanning the flames, so I try and not.