Mike Brownnutt and Keith R. Fox, eds. Langham Global Library, 2024. 296 pages.
Reviewed by Tom James
Theology and the natural sciences tend to make universalizing claims about the cosmos and our place within it. In our post-Enlightenment era, we have seen many attempts to curb these tendencies, stressing the particular, the local, and the contingent. Theologians and pastors are now well accustomed to asking about the limitations of their own cultural conditioning and about how beliefs they hold owe something to their particular historical, cultural, and social locations. This represents a significant shift in how theological truth claims are assessed, adjudicated, and lived.
Working scientists have faced similar questions and challenges to their own universalizing habits of mind, though there are good reasons for them to resist drinking too deeply from the wells of postmodernity. The natural world, they assume, is governed by universal laws, after all, and these can be known experimentally. Though all scientific knowledge invokes some kind of theory that goes somewhat beyond the facts, these theories are nevertheless subject to confirmation or disconfirmation, as the case may be. In other words, there is a realist impulse that necessarily guides scientific activity.
The ways science is done, and the ways it is received and appropriated, inevitably vary across cultures
As this volume shows, however, science, too, is done by human beings who live in particular places and times and who inhabit particular cultures. This means that, even though scientific laws may claim universality at least in principle (though they are always subject to redescription in light of new knowledge), the ways science is done, and the ways it is received and appropriated, inevitably vary across cultures. Consequently, debates about how science as a sphere of human activity interacts with other human spheres, like religion, need to take these variations into account.
Global Perspectives on Science and Christianity is a series of essays evoked by a set of questions arising from a particular institutional matrix. An organization called Christians in Science, having operated for decades in the UK, led to the founding of similar organizations across the world, in nations characterized by differing degrees of secularization and different religious histories and make-ups. These differences invite a more fine-grained examination of the possible relationships between Christianity and science than we often find in standard accounts that seem to assume highly differentiated, secularizing, post-Christian societies with nevertheless strong institutional supports for religious reflection and theological inquiry.
The editors put out a call for essays from countries outside the UK, addressing the particular challenges, opportunities, and social and cultural dynamics of the interactions of science and Christianity in each country. The result was a volume of essays addressing issues in the UK, Canada, Brazil, Greece, Hong Kong, Kenya, New Zealand, and (though no single essay was dedicated to it) the US. What emerges, as we might imagine, is quite a bit of diversity. To begin with, there are broad cultural differences, which may also be termed a variety of worldviews. The essays from Hong Kong and Kenya highlight this factor. There are also variations in degrees of secularization and of the institutional power and influence of established churches. There are the contingencies of local and regional histories of the reception of Darwinian theory, for example, or of the influence of materialist views of the world in modernity as well as resistance to them. These factors set up particular kinds of power dynamics, differing priorities in investing in research (and in what kinds of research are invested in), and (not surprisingly for academics) struggles over what are the purposes and goals of universities where the sciences (and perhaps theology) are done.
In a helpful introductory essay, co-editor Mike Brownnutt argues that the relationships between Christianity and science, if we try to characterize them across cultures, are more like rice than Big Macs. Though rice is similar in many respects across cultures, there are dramatic variations in how rice is grown and consumed around the world. In contrast, Big Macs are intended to be the same everywhere. Brownnutt suggests that a problem with religion-and-science literature is a strong tendency toward the Big Mac model. What we need, he urges, is a rice model, mining similarities as well as differences globally.
Brownnutt’s own contribution, “The Blurred Boundaries of ‘Science’ and ‘Religion’ in Asian Thought,” is an outstanding example. His essay notes that Western approaches to the problems of relating the two realms make use of two rather static columns of contrasting ideas: subjective vs. objective, values vs. facts, private vs. public, untestable vs. testable, etc. Moreover, in the Western imagination, when a person holds a view on one “side” of a pair of contrasting ideas, that strongly suggests he or she should also take positions on the same “side” of other dissimilar pairs of ideas. So, science has to do with objective, testable, public facts, while religion is consigned to the column of subjective values that are privately held and untestable. Brownnutt’s argument is that a comparison with Asian healing practices, such as acupuncture, shows the difficulties with the two-column system. We need a way to consider the relations between science and religion that is more supple.
An essay by Kostas Tampakis and Efthymios Nicolaidis, “Darwin’s Dragons: 150 Years of Greek Orthodox Apologetics and the Challenge of Darwinism,” on the history of Darwinism and the church in Greece, raises another set of questions. Here, the issue is the difficulty of carving out institutional space for relating science and religion because of the hostility to Darwinism held by prominent leaders within the Greek Orthodox Church, more or less since Darwinism arrived in Greece. These Orthodox theologians associated Darwinism with a philosophical materialism deeply antagonistic to their understanding of Christian teaching, an antagonism only heightened by the further association in Greece of Darwinism with Marxist thought. A different sort of history is evident in Nicola Hoggard Greegan and Karaitiana Kimi Matu’s article about religion and science in New Zealand: “Doing Science and Theology in a Secular, Siloed, Multicultural New Zealand Society.” There, a self-consciously and aggressively secular society, with minimal institutional support for advanced theological reflection, has also made it difficult to establish a forum for relating science and theology. The authors point hopefully to the status of indigenous Māori religious traditions in New Zealand, which seem to escape the enforced secularity of the society and thus may allow new conversations about spirituality and science to emerge.
Other essays explore the particular issues arising from efforts toward creation care in Canada, African perspectives on healing that undermine the Western dichotomy of science and religion analogously to the way Asian practices of acupuncture do, and regional and national contexts of the proliferation of AI technologies.
More like rice than Big Macs
Global Perspectives on Science and Christianity is a significant contribution to ongoing conversations between Christian theology and the practice of the natural sciences. It offers nuanced attention to cultural and historical details about quite distinct contexts that often eludes these conversations, and it advances a persuasive argument in favor of careful, case-by-case navigation of overlaps, tensions, etc., rather than a one-size-fits-all “model.” The essays are quite different in style and aim, ranging from careful philosophical investigation of concepts, assumptions, and arguments, through historical analysis, to nearly autobiographical accounts of particular struggles and challenges to host meaningful conversations about religion and science. As a result, the collection makes for some uneven reading. Still, for those looking for information and analysis of how religion-and-science conversations are faring in different parts of the world, and how those conversations invite deepened self-awareness about how they might be approached, the book will prove to be a valuable source of insight.
