Secularity and Science

I know for some people these "debates" between so-called religion and science are really difficult but I confess to always having found them very tedious and artificial. In the hands of many, the problem may be found in treating "science" as some kind of omniscient ideology rather than the epistemically circumscribed set of methods it really is. Once you stop treating "science" like some kind of oracle, many problems disappear. Still, for those for whom these are live issues, a just-released collection looks like it contains some fascinating research in a multi-authored volume: Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About Religion by Elaine Howard Ecklund, David R. Johnson, Brandon Vaidyanathan, Kirstin R.W. Matthews, Steven W. Lewis, Robert A. Thomson, Jr., and Di Di (Oxford University Press, 2019), 352pp.

Here is the description supplied by the publisher:

Do scientists see conflict between science and faith? Which cultural factors shape the attitudes of scientists toward religion? Can scientists help show us a way to build collaboration between scientific and religious communities, if such collaborations are even possible?

To answer these questions and more, the authors of Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About Religion completed the most comprehensive international study of scientists' attitudes toward religion ever undertaken, surveying more than 20,000 scientists and conducting in-depth interviews with over 600 of them. From this wealth of data, the authors extract the real story of the relationship between science and religion in the lives of scientists around the world. The book makes four key claims: there are more religious scientists then we might think; religion and science overlap in scientific work; scientists - even atheist scientists - see spirituality in science; and finally, the idea that religion and science must conflict is primarily an invention of the West. Throughout, the book couples nationally representative survey data with captivating stories of individual scientists, whose experiences highlight these important themes in the data. Secularity and Science leaves inaccurate assumptions about science and religion behind, offering a new, more nuanced understanding of how science and religion interact and how they can be integrated for the common good.

And here is the Table of Contents:

Chapter 1: From "Carriers" of the Secular to Religion in Scientific Work

Part I: West
Chapter 2: The United States- Scientists Respond to Evangelicals
Chapter 3: United Kingdom- "Impotent Anglicans" and "Dangerous Muslims"
Chapter 4: France- Don't Ask, Don't Tell
Chapter 5: Italy- Everyone's Catholic and Nobody Cares

Part II: East
Chapter 6: Turkey- The Politics of Secular Muslims
Chapter 7: India- Science and Religion as Intertwined Intimates
Chapter 8: Hong Kong and Taiwan- A Science Friendly Christianity and Buddhism

Part III: Looking Forward
Chapter 9: An Integrated Global Science and Religion

Horrors in the Annals of Psychiatry

In the late 1990s, when I was living with other grad students in the magnificent Somerset House in Ottawa, one of my house-mates was in medical school. I've never forgotten something he said with reference to chemotherapy: in a hundred years time, he argued, people will look back on what is today cutting-edge treatment of cancer and be utterly horrified by the barbarity of it all. Chemotherapy, he said, is in many ways a terribly destructive way to treat cancer, but in some cases it's all we've got.

The same thing could equally be said about psychiatry. I continue to read the lives of psychoanalysts in the United Kingdom, and recently finished R.D. Laing's Wisdom, Madness and Folly: The Making of a Psychiatrist. Laing seems to have been no moral exemplar, at least in his family life, and some of his ideas are rather farouche. But his basic sense of humanity and decency, and his willingness to buck the consensus (e.g., against putting so-called schizophrenics into insulin-induced comas from which not all of them returned alive) of the time in favour of trying to reach people written off by the medical establishment, must be counted unto him as righteousness.

Wisdom, Madness, and Folly is a short but harrowing set of memoirs especially of immediate post-war psychiatry in Glasgow and beyond. It is, among other things, a reminder that so-called scientists are as much herd animals as anybody else, and "scientific consensus" often comes at the expense of science properly so called, one of whose most crucial practices must surely remain that of verifying, and if necessary falsifying, conclusions taken for granted. Otherwise we end up doing horrible things to people we have written off as "unreachable" or "unworthy."