 How fundamental is the conflict between science and religion? Is it true that the history of the church is a history of anti-intellectualism and the suppression of scientific inquiry? Is the cause of the tension between science and religion because of religious fundamentalism? And are there any rational truths in the domain of religion that science cannot answer? These are the questions I'm trying to answer on the 55th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. Hello my friends and enemies and welcome to episode 55. I'm speaking to you from Thailand right now, though the interview you're about to listen to was conducted in Brisbane, Australia, and boy is it a controversial subject. If you've been following the show for a while, you know that my default position on everything is a rabid skepticism. But in the modern world, skepticism has turned to a click. Instead of being an approach to knowledge, it's now a set of conclusions. People who identify as skeptics have to believe in accordance with a certain set of beliefs, atheism, materialism, empiricism, and the universal irrationality of any type of religious belief. In my opinion, this is not very skeptical. And if you investigate these topics with an open mind, I think you'll discover that there is truth to be found in religion. You just have to take a lot of the claims in a non-literal way. This is part of the discussion that I had with my guest this week, Dr. Peter Harrison, who teaches at the University of Queensland. He is the director for the Center for the History of European Discourses. Dr. Harrison has many professional accolades. Not only is he a practicing historian and an author, but he's the former professor of science and religion at the University of Oxford, where he was also awarded a Doctor of Letters, which is a higher doctorate degree that is given to exceptional academics. His most recent books are The Territories of Science and Religion, and Wrestling with Nature, from Omens to Science. So this topic is right up Dr. Harrison's alley. The sponsor for this episode is the company Praxis. My friends, the world has already changed. The job market has changed, industries have changed, academia and the credentialing system have changed. The old legacy systems are thankfully dying out, and they are being replaced by companies like Praxis. If you are like me, and you're somebody who has ambition, you have high standards, you're highly motivated to make an impact on the world on your terms, then I urge you to rethink the conventional wisdom surrounding getting a formal education in a university and start looking at alternatives. College is way too expensive. You don't learn practical skills. You don't learn correct theories about the world. For the vast majority of people, all you do is burn through a hundred grand and waste four precious years of your time, all the while having bad ideas pumped into your head. But until recently, there just wasn't a very viable alternative, and that's where Praxis comes in. They train you for three months about how to be a competent working professional and achieve your goals, and that's followed by six months of a paid apprenticeship usually at a startup. You don't need to burn the hundred grand. You don't need to waste your time. You can go straight into the real world. So that sounds interesting. Head over to steve-patterson.com slash praxis, P-R-A-X-I-S, and get more information. So I hope you guys enjoy my conversation about the tension between science and religion with Dr. Peter Harrison of the University of Queensland. So first of all, I want to thank you very much for sitting down and speaking with me today. That's a pleasure, Steve. I've got a few questions for you that I know this is kind of your area of expertise. From my background, when I'm talking to philosophers and I talk to people who are interested in science, a lot of them are very skeptical when you mention religion, even say the word religion, and they assume you're talking about some kind of superstition that has been historically very anti-intellectual. I think the church has this history of suppressing individual rational inquiry. And let's say I'm skeptical of their skepticism, and especially when they start talking about history. So there's kind of a simplistic story that a lot of people hear, which is the Catholic church, let's say in the West, actively for a thousand years or more, suppressed scientific inquiry. And it was only after the shackles were loosened that we see modern science emerge, and then there was objective investigation into the natural world, and before that it was pure superstition. Is that an accurate way of thinking about the history of this relationship between science and religion? Yeah, look, in a word, no. And for a number of reasons. And I think if you talk to historians, generally speaking, you'll get a very different view. And I think there are a number of components to what would regard us the true story. But one of the issues I think is to do with how in the past history has been divided up into various periods. And there was a longstanding view that the Renaissance was a genuine rebirth of learning, and what came before that was the dark ages, where there was no intellectual activity. What we know, of course, is that there was considerable vibrant intellectual activity in the Middle Ages, where we have the foundations of the first universities, they're set up in the Middle Ages, they're sponsored by the Catholic Church, and there's serious intellectual activity going on there. When we get to the next phase, when sort of modernity dawns from the Renaissance Reformation scientific revolution, again, there's a kind of myth that the modern age is brought about precisely, as you've said, when thinkers start to release themselves from the shackles of religion. But what we actually find in relation to science is that something like the contrary is the case, that in the medieval university, science and theology were separate faculties, and to some extent they had a considerable degree of independence. And in the 17th century, what we see is science and religion actually coming together as a kind of more cooperative, collaborative, mixed up enterprise. The category sometimes called physical theology, which is literally a kind of mix of physics or natural philosophy and theology, that never would have happened in the Middle Ages where they were kept quite distinct. So there are a number of problematic elements to a story that looks at the west as progressing away from religion towards science in a kind of linear fashion. So one of the questions we're interested in as historians is, well, where did this overarching myth come from? And it came from people in the 19th century, essentially, although, of course, the periodization of Middle Ages, Renaissance, goes back earlier. But here for the first time, I think you get progressivist accounts of history. And one of the famous ones is the positivist philosopher, Auguste Comte, who comes up with three stages of history, where history moves through these stages away from religious through the metaphysical to the scientific or positivist stage. And this became a very all-pervasive, powerful way of thinking about history. And it tends to lead people from the 19th century on to retrospectively construct history in this progressivist fashion, where progress is understood as moving away from religion towards something like a non-religious scientific present. Now, part of what underpins that, I think, is undoubtedly secularization has taken place. The influence of religion in the west has declined. But the question is where this is a kind of universal historical pattern. And I think what we see in the 21st century is that clearly that's not the case, that for better or worse religion is here to stay, and that there's not an obvious correlation between the advance of science and technology and the decline of religion. So when you were saying before there used to be these split disciplines and then they kind of came together and we saw the emergence, maybe, of the Renaissance, when I think about the modern division, there's definitely a strong division between natural sciences and any type of religious thinking. But now it seems like there's high productivity in the natural sciences, even with that split. So can you give me some more historical context for how it was and then how things changed? Sure, yeah. So I think you're quite right. If we look at the contemporary natural sciences, they're highly specialized. And this is indeed a mark of modernity, the high differentiation we get across the board. So it doesn't just happen in science. It happens in virtually every area of intellectual inquiry. So you get this high degree of specialization. So some separation between science and religion is a kind of specific case of that general degree of differentiation. But if we look at when modern science is undergoing its formative moments, and I'm speaking here of the 17th century and traditionally this period has been regarded as the period of the scientific revolution, which, in a way, I guess kicks off with Copernicus or after him Galileo and then we have Descartes and Newton and Kepler, these key, key figures. If you look at what these guys are doing, they're actually, they're religiously committed. There's no doubt about the sincerity of their religious commitments. So clearly for them, scientific activity is not something that is necessarily at odds with their religious convictions. And it's not just that they have private religious convictions and science goes on independently of those. What we see, and I'll give you a specific example, what we see is that religion plays a key role in motivating their scientific endeavors in providing religious presuppositions for the kinds of things they're involved in. To some extent, in particular cases, providing the content of the scientific, their scientific theories, also in underpinning scientific authority and even in underpinning specific methods of inquiry. So the motivation of one is easy. They say things like, I'm motivated to study nature because I can see evidence of God's wisdom and power. And they're not dissembling when they say that. It's pretty clear they're being sincere about that. So that goes to the motivation. It doesn't say anything about the content. If you look at the question of presuppositions, Descartes is quite explicit about this. One of the distinctive things about modern Western science as it begins in the 17th century is a conception of the regularities of nature understood as laws of nature. That's very different from a medieval period where Aristotelian science talked about the internal powers and qualities of things. So things derive their capacity to move and do stuff for Aristotle and the medieval period as a consequence of internal properties. In the early modern period, they are dispensed with, when we get a corpuscular or atomic matter theory that says, the particles of matter are inert. Where does the motion come from? In essence, it comes from God. And how is that motion understood? It's understood in terms of laws that God directly imposes on matter. So when Descartes first formulates the idea of a law of nature and the ideas of laws of nature in this mathematical sense is a modern idea that replaces this older conception, it's clearly a theological notion and Descartes' explicit about it. God instantiates laws of nature. And in the experimental or empiricist tradition in England, they have precisely the same conception of laws of nature. So for Newton, gravity, you've got this conception of gravity, universal laws of gravity. Why are the laws universal? Because God's activity is universal. Why are these laws immutable? Because God is immutable in his nature. Descartes says this, Newton will say something like it too. So that God instantiates laws of nature, he could have chosen law A or law B in order to find out what he has chosen. We need to investigate nature empirically. But you also get a move away from causal explanation, which was the old Aristotelian view, to explanation in terms of laws. So we don't really know what gravity is. It's not some internal property of matter. And in essence, I think for Newton and certainly for Newtonian thinkers who came after him, the motive force in the universe was divine action, understood in terms of laws of nature. And this conception of laws of nature persists essentially until the 19th century. It's able to be redescribed in terms of laws intrinsic to nature. And that's essentially what we see happen in the 19th century where we start to get this clear divorce between science and religion for the first time. It's interesting you say that because one of the areas that I've investigated a little bit is modern physics, quantum physics that sometimes gets thrown around to say really remarkable things about how the world works. But it's especially interesting the question, why would it be the case that there are discoverable laws of nature? It's something that is a presupposition that you're doing empirical inquiry. I think everybody assumes that there are these laws out there, but why is that the case? And it's interesting that it seems like that was a religious presupposition maybe originally. And I don't know, I don't really have a good answer to why it would be the case that there are discoverable laws of nature to humans. What's especially interesting is I know that there's a very modern movement that says there are no such laws, it's all made up. It's all, everything is chaotic and we're just kind of making stuff up. Yes, well I think the other move we see in philosophers like Nancy Cartwright who had a famous book that went something like why do the laws of physics lie? Now what Nancy Cartwright argues is that partly because laws of nature have theological origins. If we no longer buy into the theological presuppositions we have no reason to think that there are laws of nature. So that's one of her arguments, but she wants to suggest, and there are others like her, wants to return to something like the old Aristotelian view that talks about the inherent powers of things. And for Nancy Cartwright, it's a very interesting view. There are no universal laws of nature. What we see are patterns of order and the order that we see in the natural world that we're able to investigate is a function of the internal properties that things have and not some imposed universal law-like nature stuff. So she has an interesting paper called No God, No Laws. If you don't buy the theological presupposition don't buy into the notion that there are universal laws of nature. And she's writing this from a standpoint, a non-religious standpoint. She's making this as a... It does precisely wrong. Because I could see that kind of argument be made by somebody with religious dispositions to argue for why you should believe in God. That's interesting that that would be the claim from somebody saying we shouldn't believe in God, there are no laws. But when you were talking about the history there you mentioned Galileo. Galileo is caught up in this story, this narrative of the demonstration of the anti-intellectualism and dogma of the church. That everybody knows that Galileo had this theory that the earth revolved around the sun. The church didn't like that, they said it's heresy and so they jailed them because of it. And then that's kind of, this is near the foundations of modern scientific thinking. Is that story correct? Again, in a word, no. Okay, so, but you're right to say that it's a key narrative in this story about the idea that there's a perennial opposition between science and religion. So, if we go through the facts, Copernicus comes up with a heliocentric view. It's relatively uncontroversial for 50 plus years. That in itself is interesting, right? It's relatively uncontroversial. It's only when Galileo starts to come up with some telescopic evidence that it looks like it might support the theory. That's part of the reason it becomes problematic. The other part I think is to do with the Protestant Reformation but I won't go into that in detail. So, Galileo is cautioned in 1616 and told not to support the Copernican Hypothesis. That is the Sun-Centered Hypothesis. He publishes a book, Dialogue on the Chief World Systems that looks like it might be subtly supporting it. So, he's placed on trial in 1632 and in 1633. He's found guilty, vehement suspicion of heresy and in teaching a system that's absurd philosophically, which is I'll come back to, and he's placed under house arrest. And that's the facts. Okay, is this a kind of classic instance of a conflict between science and religion? And I'd say no for two reasons. First of all, this was completely atypical of how the Catholic Church operated. The Catholic Church was the chief sponsor of astronomical research for this period and indeed for centuries before and for centuries after. So, this is not a typical thing for the Catholic Church to do. And as I kind of hinted to you, part of the context is the religious upheavals that are going on in Europe at the time and the fact that the Catholic Church and Catholic authority is under threat from Protestants. Okay, and that's why the biblical passages are gonna play a role. So, it's not typical of Catholicism. So, therefore it doesn't epitomize an overall approach. Is it a conflict between science and religion? It's not really. It is in part, but the key conflict was between two competing or actually three competing scientific theories. So, it's important to understand that at this time, A, the scientific consensus is not with Galileo. B, the evidence in favor of the Copernican system is not good. In fact, the weight of evidence is in favor of the earth not being in motion. So, scientifically, Galileo is in a kind of minority position and a position that it's hard to support. And I'll give you some of the scientific evidence in a second. But the other thing that Galileo leaves out is a third competing hypothesis that has a stationary earth, but the planets revolving around a sun that in turn revolves around the earth. And that third option was the option of Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer. So, you've got three hypotheses. The old Ptolemaic earth-centered model, which with crystalline spheres and so on, a Copernican model that has the sun at the center and all of the planets revolving around the sun. And then a compromise model, which has the planets going around the sun and the sun going around the earth. Now, empirically, these last two were more or less equivalent. The Tychonic model would give you pretty much all of the observations of the Copernican Galilean and the phases of Venus and so on was consistent with the satellites of Jupiter. But it had the, what at the time was sort of the virtue of the earth not being in motion. Now, there's evidence against the earth not moving. And that evidence is evidence of parallax. That is to say, the relative positions of the fixed stars don't seem to move if the earth was in motion, they should. If they're a long, long way away, it might be possible that the earth's in motion and parallax could not be detected. Now, in fact, that is the story. Parallax was eventually detected in the 19th century when we had instruments that were sophisticated enough to pick it up. But at the time, because telescopes made stars look bigger than they actually look, it was thought that they were closer than, in fact, they are. And this was very, one example, very, very strong empirical evidence against the motion of the earth. So the Catholic Church actually backs what looks like a fairly respectable scientific position at the time. And in that case, it doesn't look like a conflict between science and religion. What it looks like is a conflict between competing scientific models with Catholicism or the Catholic authorities, perhaps unwisely, buying into the argument and putting their weight behind the view that at the time actually had more scientific support than the position that Galileo was advocating. I think the wrench that gets thrown into it, especially, is the heresy charges, because it's one thing to say this is an inferior scientific theory, but then the religious claims do get brought into the next where we start talking about heresy. Correct. So that's right. And here, the issue of the interpretation of key biblical passages becomes important. And what Galileo does, quite cunningly, I think, he wrote a famous book called A Letter to the Duchess Christina, where he amassed the biblical arguments and showed that you could actually use the Bible to support his own view. And it was pretty clear that Galileo was getting a lot of help from, he had numerous friends within the Catholic hierarchy. They were feeding him the biblical passages and indeed the views of the great churchfather Augustine, who Galileo cunningly uses in this book. But it was a kind of misstep, because what Galileo does in claiming to be able to interpret the Bible for himself starts to present a position that's essentially a Protestant position. And the Protestant position was, we retain the right to interpret scripture for ourselves. We don't want the church dictating to us the meaning of scripture. So there's a key principle that came up at the Council of Trent about who gets to interpret scripture. So Galileo fell foul of the Catholic church on this point about who gets to interpret scripture. And you're quite right to say, it wasn't just that the view he was defending was found to be absurd in philosophy. It was found to be heretical. And that certainly does look like a question of religion. But let me just say this one thing. If we look at the arguments that are mounted against Copernicanism, and these were interestingly compiled by a Jesuit guy called Richioli who puts together this book that's got all of the arguments in favor of Copernicanism, all of the arguments against it, and the weight, and a number of the arguments that were actually in favor of the Tychonic model which I mentioned. There are only three religious arguments, I think, against it, considerably fewer than the natural philosophical arguments. And together, the weight of this relatively small proportion of religious arguments with the great bulk of scientific arguments was significantly more than the interesting number of arguments that were in favor of Copernicanism. So Richioli's book, The New Almagest, kind of represents, I think, pretty well the position of that scientific orthodoxy at the time there were religious arguments against it. The bulk of arguments were scientific and there were a few scientific arguments in favor. On balance, it's scientifically not respectable. So are there any other examples of kind of popular cases of the church versus religion that have the same, that are oversimplified in the popular understanding? Sure, look, I think there's a few. I mean, Darwinism would be an obvious one. I think that Darwinism's clearly still today kind of problematic. We could probably identify a few others. One was in 1266, going way back when the Bishop of Paris issued condemnation of 219 propositions of essentially Aristotelian science. So you could say, well, that looks a bit like, it's more religion versus philosophy in that context. But again, paradoxically, some historians have argued that this event way back in 1277 actually was a spur to scientific thinking because it pushed people to think counterfactually and thinking counterfactually is really a key part of modern science. So for example, nothing we observe in the terrestrial environment keeps moving, everything stops. Think of Newton's laws of motion. Things will continue, will either remain at rest or they will continue in motion. We don't ever see that in nature. But we can think counterfactually if situations where that might obtain. And this ability to think counterfactually becomes a key part of modern science. So some people argue that, well, low on the face of it, that the 1277 condemnations look like anti-science. And they might have been, they were never universal across Europe and they might have actually had the consequence of being a spur to science. So that's one. Giudano Bruno is often brought up because Giudano Bruno is martyred, burnt at the stake. But he's burnt at the, and he has heterodox religious views that multiplicity of worlds was the big one. But really he wasn't executed for holding heterodox scientific views. He was executed, and no one's saying this is a great thing, but he was executed for having heterodox religious views. So he wasn't a martyr of the science. So that would be another one. Now were those religious views with Bruno? So when you say he was persecuted for the religious views, were those religious views derived from his scientific views though? Well, again, probably not. But here, again, here, this raises a whole other question of, at this time, what counts as science and what counts as religion? Yeah, right. And really, you know, I'd say the categories, the categories are 19th century ones. And what you're dealing with here is not not science as we would know it, but natural philosophy. And clearly the boundary, and clearly there's a lot we could say about this category, natural philosophy. But the short thing we can say is it's not science. It's significantly different from science. And one of the things that makes it different from science is its relation to theological conceptions. And the boundaries between natural philosophy and science were more porous than they are. So for example, God was actually one of the topics of natural philosophy in a way that he's not clearly from modern science. So to go back to your question about Bruno, it's somewhat artificial to make a hard and fast distinction between what's gonna be a scientific view and what's gonna be a theological view. But insofar as we can kind of make a rough and ready distinction, it seems that his views, the key things that they got him on were theological and not scientific. Insofar as we can make that distinction. Okay, so let's return to Darwin. We went from Galileo, touched on Darwin for a second, back to Bruno. What about Darwin? That is probably the most controversial figure at least that I can think of in terms of the science, religion, debate that is with us at present. Yeah, all right. So interestingly in the Galileo case, there wasn't much religiously at stake with a sun-centered cosmos than on the Earth-centered one. So some people argue that there's a kind of demotion of human beings from the center of the cosmos. That's just not the case. The center of the cosmos was the last place you wanted to be because it was furthest from the heavens. So that's why, and if you think about Dante's Inferno, Hell's actually located right in the very center of the cosmos. So there's nothing much religiously at stake and don't buy the idea that there's demotion of human beings in the Galileo story. But Darwin, actually, there's a lot at stake religiously. If you buy a little literal sense of Genesis, and historically in the Christian tradition, not that many people have, but if you do, clearly there's a human origins, the literal story of Genesis seems to contradict the Darwinian account. Then you've got the questions about where does human morality come from? Are human beings distinctive in any way? Or if there's just a gradation in the created order, it looks like we're not special, which seems to be a key part of Christian teaching that human beings are created in the image of God. What about traditional Christian doctrine like the fall that says we were originally created perfect and we fell away from that? So again, even if you don't accept a literal account of Genesis, there's some kind of story there that seems to account for why the world is not as perfect as we might otherwise think. Now, I think all of those are at stake in a Darwinian account of evolution by natural selection. Right, so is it then when Darwin publishes Origin of Species in 1858, does this precipitate conflicts between science and religion? In part, yes it does. There's a religious reaction against it and for some of the reasons that I talked about. But the part of the story you don't hear is how Darwin had significant religious supporters. And one of the most prominent was Asa Gray, who was the Professor of Botany at Harvard at Presbyterian, but a very strong supporter of Darwinian evolutionary thinking. And in a sense, Darwin's representative in America, so quite a fan of Darwinian thought. So Darwin has key religious supporters as well as religious opponents. And it's probably worth saying, he also has scientific opponents as well, just as if you think back to the Galileo case. So there's also a science versus science issue here too. So it's a little bit more complicated, but it's probably a better example if you're scratching around for an example of the science-religion conflict. But I think as in all of these cases, what you can't say is that there's some sort of global relation between science and religion that gives us the key to understanding history and that we can understand all of history in terms of this conflict. So you pick the Darwin case apart, what you find is that there is conflict there, but it's much more complicated than the kind of global story about the forces of religion being opposed by the forces of science. Young Earth creationism, which we're familiar with and you've referred to as the kind of contemporary manifestation of this conflict, actually turns out to date not from the 19th century when Darwin published Origin, but from the, in part, the early 20th century, but really from the 1950s on, young Earth creationism becomes a thing. So it's not as if there is a longstanding tradition going right back to the first days of Christianity that wants to believe in a literal six-day creation and an Earth that's only 6,000 years old. In fact, one of the early Christian fathers, Origin, famously said, well, who's going to be silly enough to believe that God in this kind of anthropomorphic way creates like a farmer. He says, creates the world in six days. Nobody believes that. So there have long been allegorical readings of Genesis. Many religious thinkers believed, except of the geological story about the age of the Earth, which long predated Darwin's theory of natural selection, incidentally. So to a large degree, the sorts of conflicts we see today around evolutionary thinking and its opposition by religious fundamentalists is relatively recent. And the other thing we can ask about this is whether it's genuinely a science-religion conflict. And I think it clearly is in part. But what fundamentalist Christians find most problematic, I think, about evolutionary thinking is that they regarded as part of a kind of secularist package that has a set of associated moral values that, in their view, devalues human life and human purpose. So for them, it's not so much that they object to the science. In fact, insofar as they generate their alternative science, they have a high view of what science can do. That's why they invest their own religious views with the scientific status. But what they find objectionable about evolution with a capital E is they see it as the bearer of secular values and anti-humanistic values. So for them, it's a moral problem as much as it is a kind of issue to do with science. Do you think it's fair to maybe view things more clearly this way, that we say, if we can speak in very broad brushstrokes, religious ideas themselves, if understood in a non-fundamentalist way or in taken as more allegorical, do not pose any kind of tension with scientific inquiry. What I see, because my background might grew up in a Christian evangelical fundamentalist household, had lots of experiences with people who would be young Earth creationists, the trouble is when there is a conflict between the scientific claims, the naturalist claims about the nature of the world with the biblical literalist claims, they do side. They do side strongly on the biblical side and then they cite scripture to give their evidence and that kind of thing. I think that's right. And so here, you wouldn't want to deny that there is conflict. But again, I would say, science, religion, conflict, if the claim is made, you always have to look at the specific context. And here, I think there's a clear case where you've got something that looks like conflict. You've got individuals who believe, who hear it not only from their own Christian circles, but when you get advocates for science or advocates for scientism, and I'm thinking here of people like Richard Dawkins or the new atheists, who also want to say, evolutionary thinking is not compatible with religion, you've got a disjunction that these people are facing and they themselves believe, they hear it from the other side and when forced to make a choice, they choose what's most important to them and that's their religious convictions. And at some degree, you can see why they would make that choice. Not that I'm advocating, but I am suggesting we need to understand what motivates it. Yes, I think so, based on my conversations then with the other side, many aggressively, I would say, anti-religious people and they base their hostility towards their understanding of religion which is exclusively as a fundamentalist religion. They think what religious ideas are is something like a biblical literalism and you see it also like with Islam. The Islamic fundamentalists also have an issue with evolution. I think that's also an error on that end because there's this whole, this is an area of thought that I'm discovering kind of in real time after moving past the upbringing that I had and kind of saying this is a bunch of nonsense. Now I'm discovering there's a lot of truth to be found in allegorical understandings of religion that in no way is incompatible whatsoever with scientific inquiry and in fact is harmonized very nicely if you think if the world is operating according to universal law and that type of thing. Yes, so to put this another way, it's possible to tell some story about science and religion being in conflict if you define what counts as religion narrowly enough and you define what counts as science narrowly enough, you can make that, you can make that work but if you actually examine the phenomena themselves and that's what historians do really well I think. They actually look at how this stuff functions on the ground, you get a very different and much more nuanced picture. Now you said historically this more literalist religion was not as popular that this is kind of a recent phenomena. I've never heard this before and I'm totally ignorant on this topic so is it the case that for a large part of let's say church history they were, they did treat the Genesis story let's say as allegorical and not literal claims about how the earth came into existence. Yeah, well look, from the early Christian period right up to the Reformation in the 16th century the main way of interpreting the Bible was allegorical in fact there was what was called a four-fold method of interpretation and the first sense was the literal sense and the others, we don't need to bother the topological, anagogical and allegorical, right? But the last three were all non-literal. Now having said that the literal sense was really important because you needed to understand what the words meant but you needed to understand what they meant in order to construct the higher levels of interpretation on top of those. So allegorical reading was kind of a standard reading throughout the Middle Ages. Now interestingly the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation lead to a much greater focus on the literal sense of the Bible and the intention of the author and then we get the development of historical biblical criticism which looks at the historical context and attempts to understand the meanings. So you get a kind of scientific account of the meaning of scripture whereas the medieval sense was much more a kind of literally spiritual reading where you're not interested, it's a kind of devotional exercise in part. So it's not just that you engage in allegorical interpretation but the Bible functions in quite a different way and Protestantism makes a key difference because after Protestantism to some extent the Bible becomes a source of information and that actually sets up the potential for a conflict between the kind of information that you might find in the Bible and the kind of information that science is going to generate. Now all of that said scientific creationism emerges as a movement in the US from Seventh Day Adventism and that begins to happen around the beginning of the 20th century and then there's a famous book published called about flood geology in the middle of the century that then becomes a kind of foundation document for scientific creationism. So when you said that it's a really interesting way of putting it that some of the ideas in Protestantism could generate conflict if we take the Bible as something that is telling us information about the natural world that if you take that you're going to have conflict generation. So let me ask you then going back kind of where we started this conversation does it make sense then to say in so far as we understand religion it must be taken allegorical and it must be taken non-physical so that we have the split between science and religion so that the final say in naturalistic matters about the material world is the science. Well you could say that, you could say that. Look I would again nuance this slightly differently and I'd say two things, one about science and one about religion. Religion is not primarily I don't think historically across its various manifestations it's not primarily a proposition generating exercise that's attempting to generate propositions that give us a true reflection on the natural. That's not what it aims for. Now there are implications that might have they might have implications for what the natural world should be like but that's not the main game. So the point here is that science and religion are not competing to do the same kind of work. Now some advocates, a number of advocates of science-religion conflict constructed in precisely that way so religion just becomes a poor version of science and that if you set it up that way you're gonna get the result you want so that's what I'd say about religion. Let's not think about religion as an attempt to generate a scientific view a poor attempt to generate a scientific view of the world. Okay, science do we give science the last word on nature? Well I'm inclined to think for the most part yes but let's remember this. Science is a moving target and again if we look at the history of science it's very very clear that successive scientific theories about the world are not consistent with each other. They're not actually converging on some truth. So when Newton takes over from Aristotle he's not refining Aristotle he's throwing it out completely and starting again with and again if we look at an Einsteinian conception of the universe it might look like to incorporate Newtonianism within it and it does in terms of how you might calculate do Newtonian calculations but in terms of what Einstein postulates about what's really there it's a very different set of realities to Newtonian conceptions of mass and force. Okay, you've got space being warped by mass and so successive scientific theories don't look like they're converging on some ultimate truth about how things are out there they're giving us a better purchase they enable us to do more stuff but the realities they postulate differ systematically. So I'm quite happy for scientists to have the last word with that proviso that we understand that science is a work in progress and in a way if you're wanting to have a tight reconciliation between science and religion it's a mistake to make that too tight because science is on the move. I very much like that point because from my perspective is not fundamentally theological it's not fundamentally scientific it's philosophical, it's logical it's kind of theoretic as one step prior to the empirical analysis I think you have to have a theory prior to even examining the world to make sense of it and very essential to this way of thinking is avoiding dogmatism which my criticisms of the fundamentalist religion is that it is absolutely dogmatic when they have a conflict with scientific data instead of engaging it in a false civic way it's just, well this is dogma but you also see this with the crude scientists of scientism where they say well these claims couldn't possibly be right because this is the modern orthodox advanced way of understanding of the world I find that equally as dogmatic except that one comes with the veneer of being intellectually sophisticated because you're repeating the orthodoxy of the modern experts. Exactly, exactly so in a way you've got a kind of fundamentalism on both sides that gives rise to this conflictual situation, yeah. So last question I want to ask you then is about a way that we can think of religious claims not being claims about the natural world but still having truth value to them. So just in your own worldview do you see, I imagine you don't really see tension between science and religion it's just kind of two other, two areas of thought what are those, what are the questions that you think can be meaningfully answered and talked about in a intellectually respectable and reasonable way that just aren't naturalist in nature or aren't material in nature? Sure, look, I think all of the interesting questions actually fall into that category and those interesting questions are questions about value but I think we also have to ask what is it that makes science possible? What is it that makes mathematical reasoning possible? What is it that underpins our values? And it seems to me that science cannot answer the question that relates to its own success. What is it about human minds that has a capacity to get to the nature of things insofar as it can? And what's interesting I think is that evolutionary theory actually is totally unhelpful in answering that question because it suggests that there's no reason we should think that's the case at all. So I think that most of the interesting questions about meaning and value and about the success of our scientific endeavours are themselves non-scientific questions. And if we don't acknowledge the possibility of asking those questions and at least attempting to provide some answer to them then really the scientific enterprise itself I think sits on very fragile foundations. Now, when you're investigating those questions that also seems like an interesting area of just pure philosophy. So if it's not just pure philosophical inquiry, why look at any religious arguments? Well, I think some religious arguments are already philosophical for a start. But I would say more than that, any line of questioning that's looking at evidence must come to a stop somewhere. And then we get back to the question of, you know, as someone like Alvin Plantingham say what beliefs are properly basic? And that I think ultimately is not a scientific question. It's partly a philosophical question, but I think it's also partly a religious question. So I'd say that. I think the other thing that as a historian, what I see in the religious traditions is a long tradition of kind of congealed wisdom that I don't subscribe to the view that people in the past were stupid or that they were somehow less intelligent than us or that the ideas they came up with are necessarily going to be inferior to ours. And I think this is a good attitude for historians to take because it's very easy to misunderstand the past if we treat it with condescension. And so I think part of my attitude to religious ideas and religious traditions would fall into that category of attempting to respect the views of other people and the views that the vast... If you think about history, and this includes philosophy as well, the vast majority of people in history have been religious. They've held strong religious views and this applies to the philosophical tradition in the West as well. Now, unless these people are complete idiots, it seems to me, there's going to be something in these ideas that's worth exploring and worth pursuing. I think that's especially true if you split what areas of thought you're talking about. So it's also the case that most people throughout history held bad ideas about how the world works. True. And that will probably be in the fullness of time be true of our period as well. That's definitely the case. When you were saying just a minute ago, though, maybe in closing here, what's really fascinating in my own pursuit is that I've investigated what I have dubbed irrationalism. That's what I call, there's a philosophic, the scientific cultural movement which says reality is unknowable. There are logical contradictions and paradoxes all around us. Human reason is fundamentally flawed. And what's interesting is how many of those people think that is the height of scientific and rational inquiry is to realize that your mind is this hunk of meat inside the skull of a mammal that for evolutionary reasons, we have no reason to believe has any access to truth. I think you can discover truth about the world. I think you'd discover some very limited set of certain truths about the nature of the world. And it's actually really hard for me to import that into my metaphysics because then I now have to give an explanation. Okay, what does that say about the nature of the mind? If it's true that I can know some limited things, that's a really weird thing to try to grapple with. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, to go back to your point about skepticism based on evolutionary thinking, it's again, paradoxically self-defeating because our whole evolutionary way of thinking is itself based on an evolution. So it's the old Pyronic skepticism versus academic skepticism that a thoroughgoing skepticism ultimately undermines itself. And this is why I think there's, there have often been interesting partnerships between versions of skepticism and Christian faith. And I think to some extent, we see this in Pierre Bale. To some extent, I think we see this in Kierkegaard. I'm not recommending it, but I'm saying it might seem streets away, but actually those views about ultimate skepticism can be quite close to certain religious Christian views that say in light of this, the only way out of the circle is some kind of faith or some kind of revelation. So you can get to that point through philosophical reasoning. Well, on that note, I really appreciate the conversation. This has been great. Good, thank you, Steve. Good to talk to you. All right, that was my conversation with Dr. Peter Harrison from the University of Queensland. I hope you found that insightful and engaging. I've got much to say on this topic. I'm really looking forward to breaking down this interview. I think with controversial subjects like this, there's so much misinformation, there's so much dogma, there's so much emotion that's running through people who find themselves on both sides of this issue. That the rational middle ground, I think, can be really hard to find. So that's what I'm trying to do. That's what I'm trying to do, not just about this topic, but in all these areas of thought that I'm investigating. I'm trying to cut through all the crap and really get down to the truth. 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