One of the most persistent myths, that keeps recurring in the history of science, is that there is some sort of fundament conflict or even a mutual incompatibility between science and religion. In the last couple of decades, the debate over these claims has not just reached boiling point but has violently boiled over enveloping the participants in clouds of scolding steam, following the emergence of the professed gnu-atheists with the so-called Four Horsemen–Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett–driving their unholy hordes into the fray. Some of the utterances uttered by these deniers of the faith have been so mind bogglingly stupid that it hurts.
Dawkins and some of his sycophants have even gone so far as to claim that it is basically impossible to be a good scientist if you believe in a god. The historian of science cringes when confronted by such inanities. Just to take one quick example out of my own area of interest, Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Robert Boole, and Isaac Newton, who have all been hailed as founding fathers of modern science, were all deeply religious. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to describe Isaac Newton as fanatically religious. I have actually been told by combative atheists when confronted with Isaac Newton’s deep religiosity that he could have achieved so much more in science if he hadn’t wasted his time and effort on Bible studies. This comes from people who have not even contributed 0.01% to the development of science that Newton did.
I should clearly state my own position on religion, before I continue with this blog post. As I have said often in the past on the Internet, I am the life-long atheist son of an atheist father and an agnostic mother. However, as my father, who was an archaeologist, historian, and anthropologist, explained to me in a discussion, when I was still a teenager, if you wish to understand this world and its history, you have to understand the influence that the religions have had on that history. Valuable advice that I have taken to heart as a historian of science. I continue to find it deeply ironical that I spend quite a lot of time and energy defending the contributions of deeply religious individuals and groups, such as the Jesuits, to the evolution of the sciences against the rages of ‘convinced atheists,’ who claim that such believers only blocked scientific progress.
All of the above is just a prologue, setting the stage, for a review of a comparatively new contribution to the ongoing debate, Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Religion and Science by Nicolas Spencer.[1]
I had no idea who Nicholas Spencer is and where exactly he is coming from in this debate, so I offer my readers this potted CV from the website of Theos, which describes itself so, Theos stimulates the debate about the place of religion in society, challenging and changing ideas through research, commentary and events.
Nick is Senior Fellow at Theos. He is the author of a number of books and reports, including Magisteria: the entangled histories of science and religion (Oneworld, 2023), The Political Samaritan: how power hijacked a parable (Bloomsbury, 2017), The Evolution of the West (SPCK, 2016) and Atheists: The Origin of the Species (Bloomsbury, 2014). He is host of the podcast Reading Our Times. Outside of Theos, Nick is Visiting Research Fellow at the Faiths and Civil Society Unit, Goldsmiths, University of London and a Fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion. He tweets @theosnick
Spencer’s Magisteria is an episodic, chronological survey of the changing relationship between science and religion throughout Western history from the Ancient Greeks down to AI, debunking the standard myths, Hypatia and Galileo for example, on route.
Some readers will probably recognise the title from the NOMA hypothesis of the palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002). NOMA is non-overlapping magisterial, this was Gould’s suggested solution to the supposed conflict, claiming that science and religion each represent different areas of inquiry, facts vs values, so there is a difference between the “nets” over which they have “a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority”, and the two domains do not overlap. For fairly obvious reasons Gould’s solution didn’t float. Spencer devote quite a lot of space to it in the appropriate section of his book.
Spencer’s book is in general an excellent, comprehensive introduction to a complex and much discussed, or better said, disputed topic. He clears away the accumulated dead wood and by carefully researched factual presentation shows that there is no monolithic explanation of the relationship between science and religion and certainly no fundamental conflict or war as it has been called. In fact, he demonstrates quite clearly based on the actual historical facts that the final combination in my multiple title offer, a cuddle muddle of numerous variations, is the correct assessment of that relationship.
On the whole reading through the book, I got the impression that Spencer was more at home, more attuned with, the life and social sciences–biology, sociology, anthropology– than with so-called exact sciences–mathematics, physics, astronomy. The sections on the former seemed to me to be deeper and with more understanding than the latter. An impression that was underlined by some bizarre errors that my pedantic alter ego simply could not ignore, all of which were related to the exact science. Maybe there are similar errors by the life and social science essays that due to my comparative lack of knowledge in these fields escaped my attention, but I don’t think this was the case.
Despite these errors, which I will highlight shortly, I heartily recommend Magisteria to anyone and everyone with an interest in the topic be it professional, semi-professional or simply curiosity.
The book is divided into four parts the first of which with the title, Science and Religion Before Science and Religion, has five subsections, the first of which The Nature of Natural Philosophy: Science and Religion in the Ancient World, opens with one of the two most famous clashes between science and religion, Hypatia.
Spencer does an excellent job of dispensing with the myths but here delivers up his first major questionable statement in the exact sciences, when he writes, Hypatia was by all accounts, a fine astronomer and a first rank mathematician… and …her father [Theon], an equally formidable mathematician…. I have already dealt with this in a separate post and won’t repeat myself here. However, I will add the judgement of G. J. Toomer, the leading expert on Ptolemy’s Almagest, which Theon edited and wrote a commentary on:
Theon was a competent mathematician for his time, but completely unoriginal. He typifies the scholastic of later antiquity who was content to expound recognized classics in his field without ever attempting to go beyond them.
The rest of this chapter is a good brief summary of the relationship between natural philosophy and Christianity down the John Philoponus in the sixth century, revealing it to be multifaceted. He does, however, having declared, correctly, that astrology was a science, devotes some space to the Holy Fathers rejection of it. It seems that Spencer has something against astrology as he only mentions it couple of more times in his book, each times negatively. Interestingly having featured the Holy Fathers rejection of astrology he makes no mention of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, who were responsible for establishing Aristotle as Catholic science in the Middle Ages, having re-established and legitimised astrology within the Catholic Church.
Staying on the same topic, in the third chapter, Ambiguous and Argumentative: Science and Judaism, Spencer mentions that the prophet Isaiah warned his people against consulting astrologers. The term that is translated as astrologers in the King James Bible is, in fact, viewers of the heavens and as Isaiah is here thundering against the Babylonians in the eight or seven century BCE, he is referencing Babylonian omen astrology which is a very different beast to what we now understand under the term astrology. Later Spencer, quite rightly, introduces the twelfth century Jewish scholar, Maimonides, and amongst other things writes, “he was to be remembered, however, but as a scholar and prolific author, witing on logic, astronomy, astrology (which he dismissed) and medicine. At the end of the chapter, he briefly introduces Gersonides, Levi ben Gerson (1288–1344), and writes, “And yet in spite of his tough-minded scientific approach, Gersonides was unlike Maimonides, a firm believer in astrology, which he credited with a determinism over human affairs.” A clear anti-astrology value judgement on Spencer’ part. However, that is not the reason I have emphasised these quotes, later in his book in the Early Modern Period, when nearly all tough-minded scientists, such as Kepler and Galileo, were practicing astrologers and astrology played a very central role in the relations between science and religion, Spencer makes absolutely no mention of it whatsoever.
Sticking with astrology, going back a chapter we have, A Fragile Balance: Science and Islam, on the whole a reasonably done debunking of various myths, Spencer delivers up a gob-smacking false statement with relation to astrology. He writes, “In astronomy, through accurate instruments, precise and repeated observations and a willingness to disentangle the subject from astrology…!” Astrology lay at the heart of Islamic astronomy and was one of the principal reasons for their engagement with the subject. We are talking here about the ‘Abbāsid Caliphate, which basically created the climate in which Islamic science grew and flourished. The Abbasids commissioned not just one but two horoscopes from leading astrologers to determine the most opportune moment to lay the foundation stones of their new capital, Baghdad. Spencer gives no reference for his strange and totally false statement but a few pages on he does reference Dimitri Gutas’ excellent Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ’Abbāsid Society. I must ask if Spencer actually read it, because in his book Gutas emphasises the central role that astrology played in Islamic science and in particular the lead role it played in the ’Abbāsid determination to appropriate Greek science.
Chapters four, Science in Christendom, and five, 1543 and All That are on the whole good with one small exception. Concerning Osiander’s ad lectorum in De revolutionibus, Spencer writes, “Rheticus arranged the publication of De revolutionibus with Osiander…” This is simply wrong. There was no contact on this topic between Rheticus and Osiander. Rheticus was ordered to take up his new position as professor in Leipzig by Melanchthon, making it impossible for him to see the manuscript through the press. Johannes Petreius, the printer publisher, appointed Osiander, with whom he already had a working relationship, to edit the manuscript.
Chapter six deals with Galileo Galilei and is on the whole done reasonably well except where he writes on the final page, “But Galileo’s work continued to draw less attention than his life. Newton praised him in his Principia Mathematica, but his own mathematics and astronomy clearly surpassed those of the man on whose shoulders he stood.” Spencer is here perpetuating a widely spread myth. Galileo and his work hardly feature in Principia at all, there are no shoulders being stood on here and Newton doesn’t praise him anywhere in the book. In half a dozen places where he utilises the parabola law of projectile motion or the law of fall, Newton acknowledges, in a couple of words, that the theorems are from Galileo and otherwise doesn’t acknowledge him in anyway whatsoever.
In Chapter eight, The Perils of Perfect Harmony, Spencer, unfortunately, delivers up the Newton Annus mirabilis myth without actually using the term, he writes:
“Newton had emerged from the Aristotelian shadow in which Cambridge still lay within a few years of his arrival in 1661, and by 1664 he was reading and critiquing Descartes. He spent the following two years back at home in Woolsthorpe, after Cambridge closed on account of plague. It turned out to be a rather profitable sabbatical. Having effectively taught himself mathematics, he invented calculus (or ‘the method of series and fluxions’), the way of calculating continuous change by means of summing infinitesimal differences; split out the constituent elements of white light; made initial associations of planetary motion with terrestrial gravity; and nearly blinded himself by conducting experiments with a bodkin in his eye.”
Almost all of this is ahistorical hogwash as I have systematically analysed in an earlier post, so I won’t repeat myself here. Spencer’s “nearly blinded himself” is a wonderful flourish but unfortunately has no basis in fact. At least he correctly says bodkin, which is flat and blunt, as opposed to many of the shock horror brigade, who incorrectly say needle, which is pointed and sharp.
Chapter twelve is titled, Globalisation, and fairly logically starts with the seventeenth-century mission to China, where they used their superior astronomical knowledge to gain access to the highest levels of Chinese society in order to try and convert the Chinese to Christianity. Here Spencer drops a clangour. He writes:
The accuracy of the Jesuits’ science was impressive, despite the fact that, with only a few exceptions, the missionaries propounded Tycho Brahe’s geo-heliocentric model, the Copernican one being, of course, banned. It soon became clear to them that the Chinese calendar needed correction. The court was, at first, resistant to outside intervention in this, so vital to the performance of Chinese rites and the authority of the emperor was the calendar.
A couple of minor details, firstly the Tychonic geo-heliocentric model was, at that time, the one best supported by the available empirical evidence, so yes that was the one the Jesuits used. The Copernican model was not banned, one could use it hypothetically, which many Catholic astronomers did, but could not state that it represented realty. Interestingly the Jesuits did introduce the Copernican heliocentric system into China. More importantly, it did not become clear to the Jesuits that the Chinese calendar needed correction. As Spencer says, calendar reforms were a central element of Chinese imperial court culture. There was a calendar reform carried out by Imperial Bureau of Astronomy whenever a new emperor was enthroned in order to be able to make accurate astrological prognostications. The Jesuits merely claimed that they could do it better than the Chinese astronomers.
Chapter fifteen is titled, Entangled and Uncertain, and deals with the new physics and astronomy in the early twentieth century. Dealing with Einstein and his theories of relativity there are several “minor” errors. We start off with an obvious attempt to be politically correct, Spencer writes:
Prepared to doubt Newton’s authority (at least in extreme conditions), Einstein and his wife Mileva Marić combined Maxwell’s equations with the idea that the speed of light was a constant irrespective of the speed of any observer, to argue that the absolute and uniform nature of space and time inherent in Newton’s mechanics was not entirely accurate.
The claim that Mileva Marić somehow co-authored the special theory of relativity, which was propagated several years ago, has been thoroughly debunked. Also, Maxwell’s equations, if true and it was assumed that they were, had already shown that Newton’s physics couldn’t be correct, and Einstein provided the solution to this contradiction.
Moving on, Spencer writes:
Over the following decade, Einstein applied these ideas to gravity to form his theory of general relativity, which fused and mathematically described the three dimension of space and one of time. The theory made predictions about an anomaly within the orbit of Mercury, and when these were confirmed by Eddington’s observations in May 1919 [my emphasis], both theory and theorist achieved global fame.
The first time I read the emphasised sentence above I thought I had somehow misread and went back and read it a second time, but it really does say what it says. The anomaly in the orbit of Mercury existed in Newton’s theory of gravity and was well known. To quote Wikipedia, quoting Abraham Pais, “Einstein showed in 1915 how his theory explained the anomalous perihelion advance of the planet Mercury without any arbitrary parameters (“fudge factors.”). Beyond this general relativity predicted that sufficiently large bodies would deflect or bend light. Newtonian gravity does too, but the degree of bending is significantly different in the two theories. In 1919, Arthur Eddington led an expedition to the island of Príncipe off the west coast of Africa to observe the solar eclipse of 19 May. His observations showed that the Sun bent starlight to a degree consistent with Einstein’s theory and not that of Newton.
Having done my usually hatchet job pointing out the errors that I spotted in Spencer’s book I will now briefly mention three of the nineteen chapters that most impressed me personally, not because there are intrinsically better than the others, apart from the errors mentioned above the quality of his explanations is consistently high, but because I learnt something new.
The first two are related and are connected to the reception of Darwin and evolution, which is apparently one of Spencer’s areas of expertise, to judge from his other publications. The topic is, of course, a central one in the whole religion contra science debate. In chapter eleven, The Balance, Spencer delivers a sober up to date account of the infamous 1860 Oxford debate on evolution during which Samuel Wilberforce is said to have clashed with Thomas Huxley. I say said to, because as Spencer points out there was, in earlier accounts, very little direct evidence of what was actually said.
Chapter fourteen, The Trial of the Century, is devoted to the equally infamous Scopes trial in Drayton, Tennessee in 1925. I’m quite happy to admit that all I knew about this episode in the history of the reception of the theory of evolution was that it was about the ban on teaching the theory in schools. I was not even aware that it was the defenders of evolution who provoked the trial. Spencer delivers a clear and very detailed account of the whole episode and of the fall out. A superb piece of contextual history of science writing.
I grew up during the era of the “space race.” I was five years old when, to the horror of the Americans, the USSR launched Sputnik I, the very first artificial Earth satellite, on 4 October 1957. One of my earliest memories was being woken up by my mother and taken out onto our front lawn to view this marvel of technology. I was seventeen when the Apollo Lunar Module, Eagle, landed on the Moon on 20 July 1969 and Neil Armstrong took that first historic step onto the lunar surface. I never knew until I read Spencer’s seventeenth chapter, Storming the Heavens, that the early years of that superpower technological rivalry also had a powerful religious element–atheist Marxist Soviet technology vs In God We Trust American technology–delivered in the form of a propaganda war. For me this was a truly fascinating story that somehow, I had earlier missed although I lived through it.
The book has endnotes that basically only references the sources used for each chapter. There is no separate bibliography but a comprehensive further reading guide for the introduction and each of the four main sections of the book. For the areas that I know well, mostly excellent lists but I did baulk at his recommending Jim al-Khalili’s Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science, which is in my opinion not a good book. I also found it strange that he recommended Walter Isaacson’s questionable Einstein: His Life and Universe rather than Abraham Pais’ far superior Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein. The book closes with an extensive index. Each chapter features a grayscale frontispiece related to the content of the chapter, a couple of which I have reproduced above.
Despite my negative comments above on selected statements in the book, it is very well written, very accessible and a stimulating and highly informative read, which I once again recommend to anybody and everybody with an interest in the subject.
[1] Nicolas Spencer, Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Religion and Science, Oneworld Publications, London, 2023.