I was delighted to see the publication of Critical Approaches to Science and Religion by Myrna Perez Sheldon, Ahmed Ragab, and Terence Keel (2023) and congratulate the editors on their efforts in compiling it. The collection advocates a new and potentially fruitful approach to the well-established field of science and religion and offers an array of individual studies that go a long way towards making good on its promise. Part of my enthusiasm owes to the fact that I think any well-established field benefits from the insights of new methodological approaches. But I also believe that in this particular case, the approach outlined in the introduction and many of the chapters can open up new avenues of investigation and inaugurate new conversations with the field of critical studies. Since the volume comprises fifteen chapters ranging over a fairly wide territory, my plan is to restrict my attention to some the methodological proposals laid out in the introduction and further elaborated in subsequent sections. I am particularly interested in Part 1, which deals with the theme of values, and to some extent Part 3, which addresses various narratives.

The introduction begins with a contracted survey of dominant approaches in the science–religion field, suggesting it can be characterized in terms of two themes: the conflict thesis and the complexity thesis (Perez Sheldon, Ragab, and Keel 2023, 1–2). The conflict paradigm traces its origins to the French Enlightenment, assumed its definitive form in the late nineteenth century, still attracts vocal advocates, and continues to command public opinion (Numbers 2009; Ungureanu 2019). The complexity paradigm was pioneered by historians such as John Brooke, Ronald Numbers, and David Lindberg, further developed by Bernard Lightman, and is now the standard orthodoxy among historians of science and many in the field of science and religion. It posits neither unremitting conflict nor harmony but rather local and contingent interactions that do not conform to any single overarching pattern (Brooke 1991; Lindberg and Numbers 2008; Hardin, Numbers, and Binzley 2018; Lightman 2019).

Setting up the field this way provides a rationale for a new trajectory of the discipline—a critical approach that moves beyond both of these paradigms. The conflict thesis, in spite of its ongoing popularity in certain quarters, has been rejected by virtually all informed commentators, and dispensing with it seems largely unproblematic. But the suggestion in the volume is also that the complexity thesis, while on the right track, suffers from significant limitations too. Its advocates are said to rest content with a corrective, descriptive approach, failing to move beyond this to offer normative prescriptions. This, then, makes for a difference with the proposed critical approaches:

But our desire is not for mere characterization; nor are we content with telling histories determined by the values of liberal tolerance and social pluralism. In other words we are committing ourselves to proposals for what we might do, what our political lives must be, and what our collective values might look like. Each of these chapters takes on an urgent issue and, in the process, makes a claim about value commitments that ought to shape the thinking of religion and science scholars. (Perez Sheldon, Ragab, and Keel 2023, 17)

The difference here, to invoke Marx, seems to be that while historical approaches have described the world, the point is to change it.

At this juncture, it is worth identifying an additional difficulty with the complexity thesis that its own proponents acknowledge. As Numbers (2010, 63) once ruefully observed, complexity “seems to have little to recommend it beyond its truth.” Mark Lilla (2007) has offered the related observation that “[h]istorians who offer ‘multicausal explanations’—and use phrases like that—do not last, while those who discover the hidden wellspring of absolutely everything are imitated and attacked but never forgotten.” The difficulty then is that a detailed and historically accurate picture of the past does not seem to add up to the kind of narrative that can motivate a change of attitude or opinion among nonspecialists. This is not altogether unrelated to the gap between description and advocacy the introduction proposes as an inherit limitation of complexity approaches. I revisit this issue later.

For now, let me briefly return to the way in which the book sets up the field in the introduction and make some additions to the exemplars of conflict and complexity that are used to establish the rationale of the new approach. Doing so, I believe, highlights additional opportunities for a new critical approach, linking it to ongoing historical work. At the same time, I think it also points to what, for me at least, are potential challenges to yoking the field to a more explicit normative advocacy and places in high relief the important question posed to the field of science and religion by this collection: What role should moral (or religious) judgments and commitments play in our scholarship?

Directly relevant to this question is what I think is a missing element in the initial description of the field, and that is works dedicated, with varying degrees of explicitness, to Christian apologetics (or, more broadly, a defense of theism against scientific naturalism). The work of one of the field’s pioneers, Ian Barbour (1923–2013), fits this mold, as does, even more obviously, the contributions of Stanley Jaki (1924–2009), Arthur Peacocke (1924–2006), John Polkinghorne (1930–2021), and others.¹ These works are worth noting because they do in fact make normative claims that go well beyond simple advocacies of liberal tolerance or social pluralism. The existence of this genre of science–religion literature suggests the field does not suffer from any intrinsic lack of those willing to promote value commitments. But it does raise the questions of whose value commitments are taken be the right ones and how we might adjudicate between them, especially if appeals to liberal tolerance and pluralism are regarded as suspect. The claim here is not that moral and religious advocacy are directly equivalent but that both are normative. It is not implausible to attribute a degree of universality to moral claims that many religious claims lack. But that attribution in turn needs some metaethical underpinning.

A second dimension that might be usefully added to the initial state-of-play analysis is the trajectory of historical scholarship, which I think has made some moves in the direction the editors of this volume suggest is desirable. Here, I think of attempts to expand the science–religion canon to consideration of other religious traditions and to take on board some of the implication of the roles played by both Christianity and the natural sciences in colonialism and racism. Brooke’s Science and Religion around the World (2011), Marwa Elshakry’s Reading Darwin in Arabic (2016), Lightman and Sarah Qidwai’s Evolution and Religious Traditions (2023), and to some extent, Donald Lopez’s Buddhism and Science (2008) and M. Alper Yalçinkaya’s Learned Patriots (2015) fit this mold. To these we might add, from a more explicitly Christian perspective, Mike Brownnutt and Keith Fox’s Global Perspectives on Science and Christianity (2024). These titles and others point to a growing recognition among historians that comprehensive histories of science must be global histories of science and that themes of empire, colonialism, race, modernization, and secularization are a necessary part of the story. In this context, we also encounter the issue of the status of traditional or Indigenous forms of knowing, another important theme of the present volume. There is another potential meeting point in the field of science and technology studies—Sandra Harding’s Objectivity and Diversity (2015) offers just one example. All of this suggests an important point of contact and perhaps overlap between history and critical studies. Happily, the collection has already begun such conversations with inclusions by historians of science (Erika Milam, Joanna Radin, Suman Seth, and Ahmed Ragab). Further development of these connections, along with conversations with the more sensible manifestations of science and technology studies, would add an important new dimension to the science and religion field.

Related to this, the introduction also helpfully draws attention to the way in which the West’s encounter with Islam shaped the former’s conception of a secular, liberal neutrality—a conception that may be more historically contingent and less disinterested than we often imagine (Perez Sheldon, Ragab, and Keel 2023, 8). Others have also drawn attention to this issue (Mahmood 2015; Yalçinkaya 2015; Akan 2017; Asad 2018). But questioning liberalism, now under attack from both sides of the political spectrum, leaves us with the questions of how we arrive at shared moral values and how we assess what I think are the undeniable goods Western liberalism has delivered (while conceding that there have been downsides).

This brings me back to the question of norms and the suggestion that we need to move the field beyond analysis to something like advocacy. Here is the proposal:

Rather, we intend to reorient the ethical trajectory of this field to a more overtly political framework that centers the raced, gendered, sexualized, and colonized natures of science and religion. Ultimately, our hope is to use the study of science and religion as a venue for imagining alternative futures where we might live better with one another. (Perez Sheldon, Ragab, and Keel 2023, 4)

Because of this, we lead the volume with a part on values. In it, the contributors ask, How do we live well with one another? By raising this question, they challenge existing expectations of what histories of science and religion are meant to do. We are inspired by the willingness of scholars like Ronald Numbers, David Livingstone, Janet Browne, and Peter Harrison to think beyond philosophy and polemics in their accounting of these categories. But our desire is not for mere characterization; nor are we content with telling histories determined by the values of liberal tolerance and social pluralism. In other words, we are committing ourselves to proposals for what we might do, what our political lives must be, and what our collective values might look like. (Perez Sheldon, Ragab, and Keel 2023, 17)

Without wishing to seem overly defensive, especially given the generous estimation of the contributions of historians of science, it is worth saying that historians do have normative commitments that are not simply reducible to liberal tolerance. Colleagues in the history of science, many of whom I have worked with on collaborative ventures of various kinds, may not have shared common religious or even political values but were nonetheless passionately committed to the truth, in the sense of wanting to provide an accurate account of what had actually transpired in the past. This approach was understood, perhaps tacitly, to require the adoption of a moral comportment that called for a bracketing of personal values, which is to say, a setting aside of any specific identity as Jewish, Catholic, agnostic, atheist, Protestant, etc., with the goal of producing an account of the past that, to the extent possible, was untainted by personal bias. An unspoken premise was that the ideological uses of history were a problem that had given rise to distorted understandings of our past in the first place, and that rectifying this would give us a better understanding of the present. Such distorted accounts would include both constructions of historical conflict in order to provide some legitimating account of secular modernity and its converse, the harnessing of history to support various forms of religious apologetics. I take this to be a different conception of how norms operate in the way we do history than that advocated in the collection.

That said, the actual histories in the “Narratives” section of the collection are not significantly at variance from the stance just outlined. The introduction to this section offers this characterization of its goals: “What ethical and political work has been done with narratives about science and religion? [The authors] examine instances when a distinction made between science and religion animates different ethical and political agendas” (Perez Sheldon, Ragab, and Keel 2023, 12). I take this to be the work of history proper. Historians ought to be doing this and in many cases are. So, I wonder about the difference between the historical treatments in the volume and those we can already find within what we might call the “standard” history of science. This again goes to the question of whether history and critical studies operate on different (but perhaps equally legitimate) sets of methodological and/or ethical commitments. Alternatively, the suggestion may be that historians have largely accomplished their goals, and it is now time to move on.

All of this leaves me with four questions about critical studies approaches to science and religion. First is to ask whether there is a tension between the two kinds of moral comportment expected of the historical enquirer and whether the new critical approach advocated in this volume would not be simply a matter of building upon previous historical work and adding a normative component, or whether the proposed approach entails an actual rejection of the implicit normative stance of preceding historians of science, a stance I take to be an aspiration to a form of objectivity (all of this bearing in mind, as noted, that notions of neutrality and objectivity can themselves be subjected to critical scrutiny and that protestations of neutrality can be sometimes serve as a mask for covert normative agendas).

A second way of getting at this issue is to ask how we get from the history itself to “proposals for what we might do, what our political lives must be, and what our collective values might look like”? This is a kind of “is/ought” question. It is not clear to me whether the relevant values emerge from the scholarship or whether they are brought to the scholarship. I do not have a problem with the latter, but as already suggested, it does raise questions about the source of the relevant norms—especially if they are meant to be “collective values”—and how the scholarship is meant either to ground them or lend them legitimacy. Further, if scholarship becomes a form of moral exhortation, how does this differ in principle from the apologetic mode of scholarship we also see in the field of science and religion? To be sure, the values themselves are different, but is it possible to escape the line of criticism apologetic harmonizers faced—namely, that their historical narratives were fashioned in ways intended to support preexisting commitments?

I am not suggesting in all of this that normative positions have no place in the science–religion field, or in any academic discipline for that matter. But in historical terms, normativity has become a “known problem” within critical theory (at least of the Frankfurt School variety—and I would be interested, as side note, to understand how the critical theory represented in the volume situates itself in relation to this original form). It can be plausibly argued that critical theory in this previous register failed to provide a satisfactory account of its own normative commitments, hence, the “normative deficit” to which the work of Jürgen Habermas (2003) and, more recently, Peter Gordon (2019) have alerted us. Habermas (2005), at one stage at least, resorted to a kind of non-transcendental Kantianism to ground his normative proposals. Leaving aside the question of whether this is a coherent enterprise, it is surely indebted to the tradition that was itself under critique. In this context, I wonder, in light of the editors’ concerns about the limitations of “the values of liberal tolerance” (Perez Sheldon, Ragab, and Keel 2023, 17), what alternative normative grounding is being appealed to. How do the proposed “collective values” differ from the “liberal tolerance” beyond which it is suggested we move, and what is the justification for holding those values?

My third question follows on from this by taking up another way in which values have been introduced into historical enquiry. Both the idea of “immanent critique” (again adverting to the Frankfurt School) and historical genealogy offer potential (and related) ways of introducing normative judgments into historical enquiry, while at the same time avoiding some of the difficulties that attend the explicit advocacy of specific normative positions (Harrison 2023). The latter seems to call for some kind of meta-ethical justification, without which normative commitments would reduce to a form of emotivism and/or relativism, which would undermine their capacity to enjoy broad appeal. Immanent critique seeks to expose the inherent tensions within cultural movements that emerge from historical developments at odds with some original and perhaps forgotten normative stance. In simple terms, this could be an inability to instantiate in practice what are supposed to be fundamental moral commitments, or a failure to understand the full implications of such fundamental commitment. Critique in that register would imply, for example, that Christianity’s implication in racism resulted from a failure to live up to its own moral standards—notwithstanding the fact that we can also tell histories illustrating how Christianity was at the same time the source of practices and narratives that contributed to modern racism. Critical genealogy can function in a similar way by showing how a culture’s moral commitments have outrun an original rationale that is now ignored or denied. Think in this context of Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of utilitarianism, which, on his analysis, advocated what, content-wise, were indistinguishable from Christian values, even though the Christian foundations that would make those commitments coherent were denied by utilitarians. The advantage of immanent critique is that the critical work is done not by an overt moral advocacy (which then needs its own justification) but simply by highlighting the moral contradictions that inhabit particular cultural practices.

Fourth and finally, the volume helpfully broaches the question of Indigenous forms of knowledge and practice and rightly insists that the science–religion field must contend with them. I am fully convinced this is essential for our field. At the same time, it is not clear to me that we presently possess the analytic tools that would enable this, and I wonder whether critical theory can help. Demarcation questions, I think, are directly relevant here: What gets to count as “science” and what as “religion”? I would like to think that historical work on the construction of these concepts in the West is pertinent—just as it is to the issue of religious pluralism. At present, however, it is difficult to see how the great diversity of Indigenous knowledges might be accommodated and given their due within our present frameworks, and how a situation of radical pluralism could be entertained without entering into a self-defeating relativism (how, e.g., might the creation stories of Indigenous traditions be granted a status some have argued is denied to Jewish and Christian creation narratives). This quandary parallels, to some degree, what I see as a normative difficulty within critical studies. The issue of the status of Indigenous knowledges is, in my view, a genuine and pressing question our field must confront. If critical studies can help, I would be interested to learn more.

In sum, then, this collection offers prospects for the expansion of the field of science and religion in exciting new directions. At the same time, it raises crucial questions that do not admit straightforward answers about the role values play in scholarship. These need not constitute a barrier to adopting the approach advocated, but I think they do need to be confronted. My focus on these normative questions has come at the cost of neglecting the good number of excellent and thought-provoking contributions to the volume. These have much to offer, whatever we might think about the more general methodological issues, and I would encourage readers of this journal to thoughtfully engage with them.

Notes

1. Two recent, and mostly theological, approaches could be added to round out the picture: “science-engaged theology” and “after science and religion.” For the former, see John Perry and Joanna Leidenhag (2021) and Perry and Leidenhag (2023); for the latter, see Peter Harrison and John Milbank (2022) and Harrison and Paul Tyson (2022). [^{^}]

References