Interaction between science and religion
If I had not been familiar with Sinai and Synapses,* I might have dismissed this special issue of an obscure journal as yet another attempt to use science to rationalize religious beliefs. It is nothing of the kind. The entire issue consists of essays by Fellows who have been supported over the years by the Sinai and Synapses organization, about which I have said a few words below, in an Endnote. The Fellows are experts in their fields and mostly faculty at secular universities. All of them, I am certain, know what they are talking about.
The front matter contains helpful synopses of all the papers. Sometimes, I admit, the synopsis was all I wanted. I learned, however, that a second-century CE rabbi, Judah ha-Nasi, had noted that “pestilence” often transferred from pigs to humans, so Rabbi Judah recommended fasting whenever pigs suffered pestilence. I wondered why on earth such an influential rabbi would care one whit about pigs, so I naturally turned first to the article, “Zoonotic pandemics and Judaism’s early-modern turn to science,” by Jonathan Crane of Emory University. I was relieved to find that Rabbi Judah did not raise pigs, but he had nevertheless noted the similarity between pigs’ organs and humans’. More strikingly, he recognized that diseases could be contagious and could be transferred from pigs to humans. Rabbi Crane introduces us to later Talmudic scholars who, in addition to citing earlier scholars and relying on their expertise, adduced their own evidence and required confirmation. Specifically, medieval Jewish scholars such as Maimonides accepted the scientific knowledge of their day, and the early modern period found Jews embracing “exogenous knowledge as well as the emerging means to discover and develop it.” Rabbi Crane continues, “To be precise, scientific method and evidence matter when it comes to physical issues like medicine and public health.”
Why do I find this article important? Because if the ultra-Orthodox Charedim, in both the United States and Israel, can be convinced that the sages accepted and indeed embraced the medical knowledge of their times and even understood zoonotic diseases, then we may have hope of getting them vaccinated and otherwise contributing to the battle against Covid.
The need to convince people about scientific realities is not limited to the ultra-Orthodox. I next read the article, “Communicating with skeptical audiences,” by Matthew Groves. Mr. Groves is a high school science teacher and a faith educator who lives in rural Appalachia. His article primarily concerns convincing evangelicals of the reality of climate change. The data, as he says, are clear, “so how can people remain unconvinced?” He learned (slowly, I infer) to employ “the communication skills [he] developed as a teacher and a pastor and have found significant successes with audiences of all ages, denominations, and acceptance levels of climate science.” In short, language matters or, perhaps more precisely, terminology matters, and he has learned to strictly avoid technical terms and scientific jargon. The bottom line, to me, was somewhere in the middle of the article:
To get around [the vocabulary problem], oftentimes I completely avoid using these terms [climate change vs. global warming]. I often finish a full hour Sunday School class without using either, but end up in a place that’s much closer to where I want our conversation to culminate. We spend time talking about humanity’s relationship with God, each other, and nature, and therein I’ve been able to spark much more interesting conversations, which are fundamentally tied to climate change, than if I had started with throwing in those words initially and triggered someone’s sensitivities. If we can arrive at the conversations we want without tripping people up, all the better! This isn’t being dishonest, it’s just smarter communication. In my own work, if I walk into a church and trigger every audience member by leading with the climate-related issues that are sticking points for this community, no one will listen to me. This is true regardless of how central those tangential topics really are to solving the climate crisis – like its intersections with race, economics, gender, etc. When I plan my lessons, I think to myself: “Here are the 8 words that will stop half of the audience from listening to me. How can I cover these concepts without saying those words?” [Italics in original.]
Finally, Mr. Groves notes that people may be “alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful, [or] dismissive,” and his job is to move them up the ladder one rung at a time, not all in one jump.
As I read the articles by Rabbi Crane and Mr. Groves, I began to wonder, in order to get through to religious conservatives, do you have to be one? Perhaps not, but it helps an awful lot to know how to sing the appropriate song.
The last article I have read, so far, at least, is “Overlapping magisteria: Motivated cognition and the places where science and religion mingle,” by Jonathan Morgan of the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Prof. Morgan introduces Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of Non-Overlapping Magisteria, or Noma. Prof. Morgan argues that, if the magisteria do not overlap, then at a minimum they encroach on each other’s properties (a claim that I made myself here). The article is fairly dense and concentrates on areas where science may encroach on religion, as opposed to religion encroaching on science, which he says has been amply covered elsewhere. I will discuss only a very small part of it. The author devotes several paragraphs to free will, mostly demonstrating that a belief in free will may have practical consequences. Studying the consequences of believing in free will is not the same as asking whether we have it or not, but the author criticizes the studies for using science as a sort of default condition. I cannot disagree, though, that those of us who claim that we do or do not actually have free will may be leaving the domain of science and entering religion or philosophy, even as we think we are doing science. Are we engaging in motivated reasoning? Probably. Is it a problem? I will let Dr. Morgan explain:
…when science communicators venture onto metaphysical grounds, they risk threatening broad swaths of the public who hold different theological views. …[W]hen people were presented with a highly credentialed scientist who was advocating for a position with which they disagreed, they were significantly less likely to rank that scientist as an expert. In other words, they did not dismiss the argument, they dismissed the source.
When science communicators are representing capital “S” Science while staking out metaphysical disagreements with religious worldviews, they risk undermining a broader sense of trust in the expertise of science. This is risky because there are plenty of other issues around which scientists are making well-founded inferences that people may still dislike–evolution, climate change, and vaccinations are among the most well studied. We make it more difficult for public buy-in on these contentious issues when science communicators are also making threatening incursions onto terrain where they cannot actually stand on solid empirical ground.
Again, I think we can infer that the best people to talk to groups like vaccination, global warming, or evolution deniers are members of those groups or at least people who understand them implicitly. Then, to return to Mr. Groves’s categories, we work them up the ladder one rung at a time.
I will eventually read more of the articles and will comment only if I think they are important enough. In the meantime, any readers who want to read one or more of the contributions are invited to discuss them in the Comments.
*A word about Sinai and Synapses. I think it is fair to say that it is a religious organization that is interested in scientific inquiry. It has been “incubated” by Clal – The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership and provides education and seminars. I have listened to a few interviews presided over by Geoffrey Mitelman and attended two or three sessions of Scientists in Synagogues and found them at least mildly interesting. Scientists in Synagogues is partly funded by Templeton. I do not think Sinai and Synapses has any hidden agenda such as trying to mount a scientific defense of religion. And they have an exceedingly clever logo:
You may find more about them on their website, above.