This is one of those books where the reader has to want to read it in order to get through it. Stenmark is a philosopher, and he writes like one—well, to be fair, better than many but still like a philosopher. The prose is sometimes ponderous and in places requires multiple readings. The author also backtracks a good deal as he seeks to make each argument logical and linked to what has gone before and what will come next. More largely, the author constantly walks through lines of reasoning, presenting multiple options for each question he considers, and then seeks to arrive at the logical best response for each question. It gets tedious after awhile. I personally found the book disappointing in one important sense. Having waded through it all, I still don't know how Stenmark himself relates science and religion. He tells us something of the theory about how the two ought to relate to each other, but he himself doesn't take the next step and actually do some relating himself. That being said, How to Relate Science & Religion contains important points that make it worth the time if the reader is willing to do some of the work involved in getting to the points. Central to his presentation is Stenmark's observation that the relationship between science and religion is complex and multi-faceted. It involves several dimensions, and the two can have different relationships in different dimensions. The relationship also changes over time. Further complicating the relationship is the fact that science and religion are pluralistic entities in themselves, representing a variety of communities and approaches. Once we begin to poke at the "nature of science" and especially at the "nature of religion" we find a wide variety of approaches, understandings, and even values.
Now, one knows that religion is incredibly pluralistic to the extent that we wonder if the word actually names anything at all. Where Stenmark is particularly helpful is in emphasizing that science also is pluralistic. He repeatedly points to weaknesses in the arguments of the anti-theist critics of religion who generally fail to take the pluralistic, mundane, and sometimes highly contested nature of science into account as they attack theism. They also largely ignore the same pluralistic nature of religion.
Near the end of the book, the author does present a set of three matrices (pages 248-249) showing: (1) the approach that has traditionally been taken in the debate between religions and science; (2) an alternative proposed by those who take an ideological approach to the debate; and (3) his own more nuanced approach. Now, my guess is that Stenmark would respond that his goal was to describe these three approaches so that he does show us how to relate science and religion; to which, I respond that a fair amount of his painstaking march to the matrices could have been abridged so that he could show how he makes use of his own approach. As is so often the case in the debate over religion and science, Stenmark talks the theory, as I said above, but he himself doesn't go on to the application stage.
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| Prof. Mikael Stenmark |
Yet, in his own configuration, Stenmark concludes that in one crucial phase, the "justification phase," science should remain "worldview-neutral." That is, scientists should put aside their theological or ideological agendas when it comes to conducting research itself. They should not pre-judge research results and should be willing to adjust their concept of the truth accordingly. I'm not sure that Stenmark really needed 269 pages to get to this point, but even so it seems to be a fairly arrived at and important conclusion: religion and other worldviews can contribute to deciding what research subjects to pursue, articulating those subjects, and in the application of the findings. In the actual research, however, religion and other worldviews need to be put aside.
Stenmark thus makes a modest contribution to the debate over the relationship of science and religion in at least a couple of ways. First, he reminds us that the whole question of that relationship is complex and that any helpful contribution to the debate needs to take into account those complexities. He shows us that there are many more moving parts to the science versus religion debate than is usually acknowledged, and that much of the debate is based on a failure to take into account the complexities involved. Second, he himself approaches the debate with a reasoned, temperate attitude. He is clearly a man of faith himself, and there are points at which he criticizes the anti-theists especially for their rhetoric and their over-simplification of what is a complex issue. He does so, however, without rancor or a judgmental tone. Perhaps a third contribution that Stenmark makes is to inject an attitude of careful reflection, a reasoned approach that seeks to work through complexities rather than ignore them. The sad fact is that contributions such as this will receive little attention on the larger stage while much less well reasoned, reflective "offerings" will get media attention precisely because they are long on rhetoric and controversy, if short on careful thought and balanced assessment.
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Apart from the general comments above, I would like to respond to one line of reasoning in How to Relate Science and Religion, which exposes some of the difficulties the whole subject of science and religion poses for its protagonists. There is, I think, a real sense in which the debate between theists and anti-theists is futile given the state of our ignorance concerning both the nature of the universe and of God. We might just as well suspend the argument for some centuries or longer until we know what we're talking about.
On pages 164-166, Stenmark considers the argument put forward by some anti-theists that evolution all but proves that there is no divine providence guiding the development of the human race. It clearly takes place in a random way, and there is no inherent reason to think that a God is directing the process. If we started over, it would come out differently. Quoting various authors, Stenmark counters that God could well have created the process of evolution without planning for a specific outcome, planning only for the emergence of intelligent life of one sort or another. Indeed, Stenmark argues there is no reason to limit God's plan to a single planet. He writes, "I see no reason why Christians (or Jews and Muslims, for that matter) should think that they are committed to believe that the creation of the Earth was essential for God's plans." (p. 166) In other words, the apparently random nature of evolution does not in and of itself give us reason to think that it is not part of a larger divine plan.
That's fine. It is pleasant speculation. And that is all that it is. Stenmark is correct in arguing that evolution does not give the anti-theist skeptics actual reasons for arguing against God. While evolution operates randomly, it has direction and an underlying rationale such as could suggest some kind of higher guiding force, principle, or divine "person". Or maybe not. Either way, it is pure speculation—apart from an underlying faith. For those without the faith, there is no reason to think that God is behind evolution. With faith, there is every reason to believe so. The anti-theists for all of their vaunted rationality have no more reason to think there is no God than do people of faith to think there is a God. This is especially the case because most of the time most of the hardcore anti-theist writers spend most of their time attacking a fundamentalist version of God that functions as a convenient straw man for them to knock down.
In any event, Stenmark's line of thinking about God maybe having a plan for the emergence of some kind of intelligence somewhere in the universe is just so much idle speculation—and a waste of time. Those who do not believe in God are surely not going to be persuaded, and those of us who do find it entirely reasonable to think that God seeded the Earth with life fully intending that humanity would arise. As an analogy, when we plant tomato seeds we fully expect that we will get tomatoes. If God is God, then it is hard to believe that God would not know what would come of this vast garden God has seeded with life.
As people of faith, we begin with what is rather than what might have been. We are theistic realists. The Earth is. We are. Experience and reason persuade us that the universe has a "ground of being" to which we can pin the label of God. This ground of being in some sense relates to us such that we feel that it is a personal relationship (we would because we ourselves are persons). Christians see and experience this ground of universal being in Jesus Christ. Jews experience it ("him") in the sacred history of God's people and in the Torah. Buddhists don't believe in a personal god of any kind, but they know this ground of being in the Dharma especially as reflected in the teachings of the Buddha. And so forth.
We do not have a clue what this "ground of all being" actually is. What plans does it have? Does "it" even have plans? We don't know. All we know is that "something" Beyond us touches us in ways that we can experience and that we find reasonable. Others don't, but that is neither here nor there for us. So long as we believe that God created the universe, it is reasonable to also believe that God created the Earth, life on Earth, and us. If God did this through evolution, then there is probably a good reason that "he" did so. Maybe we are programmed into evolution and what seems random is not actually as random as it seems. It only seems random because of our ignorance. Or, maybe God is running this thing as an experiment and programmed into it some general parameters and then stood back to see what would come of the experiment. We don't know. How could we?
My point is, all of this speculation is fine so far as it goes, but we should stop taking is so seriously. A good deal of the debate concerning science and religion is just so much idle speculation. It is ape chatter, we being the apes. The best thing we can say for it is, it sells books.
