The ideological uses of science

This morning at Templeton-Cambridge, we heard a fascinating lecture by Dr. Denis Alexander, a prominent Cambridge biochemist, on the history of science in the West. The main point was that the idea that science and religion are in irresolvable conflict is historically unfounded, and ideologically suspect. He called likened this "conflict" theory to the infamous "Whig theory of history," saying that the narrative pitting scientists as light-bringers engaged in a death struggle with religious obscurantists began to develop in Revolutionary France, as a useful anticlerical narrative, and was extended in Late Victorian England as a way to undermine the clerical hold on scientific education. In fact, Dr. Alexander showed, the history of science and religion is much more complementary, and indeed natural science developed out of certain key Christian concepts. He wasn't arguing that there is no conflict between science and religion, only that the relationship is historically far more complex than many people believe -- and that there are people who have ideological reasons for distorting this history.

We talked briefly about how Darwinism wasn't initially opposed by Christians, but an American pacifist working in German-occupied Belgium during World War I (before the US joined the war), and who spent a lot of time with German officers, was horrified by how the Kaiser's officers used evolutionary theory to justify their brutality and militarism (survival of the fittest, etc.). He wrote a book about it that became popular in the US. William Jennings Bryan became so alarmed over the political misuse of Darwinism, to justify exploitation of the poor, that he made his misguided attempt to stop the teaching of evolution. That's a different story from the received idea that Bryan was a desperate religious believer who would stop at nothing to protect his worldview. It doesn't justify his error, of course, but it does put it in a certain context -- especially if you consider that the eugenicists of the era built their own malign theories on Darwinism.

At one point, we all got to discussing Creationism. I had not realized that in the contemporary era, so-called "Young Earth Creationism" dates to the 1960s -- specifically the 1961 publication of a book called "The Genesis Flood." In light of Dr. Alexander's discussion of how social and political events affected the interpretation of scientific facts and claims, it seems reasonable to conclude that the cultural revolution the US went through starting in the 1960s, especially the end of segregation in the South, could well have put religious conservatives into a moral panic of the sort that led them to embrace YEC. Similarly, it's not hard to locate moral panic over the failure of religion to die, and the support of religious conservatives for George W. Bush and other right-wing politicians of which they disapprove, at the heart of Hitchens' and Dawkins' strident secular fundamentalism. At the very least, it's interesting and useful to think about how what we think is the dispassionate consideration of scientific facts is actually more conditioned by our culture than we may realize.