Ian Barbour and my sci-fi students

I’m in the middle of grading midterm exams for my 100-level “Religion and Science Fiction” course. The course uses science fiction as a lens onto different ways that people in modern societies understand the relationship between religion and science. Before we actually start looking at works of science fiction, I work students through a unit intended to give them a theoretical vocabulary for talking about science and religion. As part of that unit, we discuss philosopher of religion Ian Barbour’s classic fourfold typology for religion-science relations: conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration. I have students write short reflections articulating their own understanding of the relationship; then they have to classify their reflections using Barbour’s typology.

For one segment of the midterm exam, I presented students with (anonymous) quotations I had collected from a few of their reflections and asked them to tell me which of Barbour’s four models each quotation represented. The students whose exams I’ve graded so far have done well on this activity. I was pleased that all four of Barbour’s categories were represented among my students’ reflections: that fact helped drive home to the students how diverse people’s thinking about this question is–although if I’m recalling correctly, conflict and independence were the two most represented categories in this class by far.

If you’re familiar with the Barbour typology, can you match the students’ quotations to the correct category? Here are the quotations and instructions as they appeared on the exam. Scroll down to the bottom of the post for the answers.

---

On the next page you will find five quotations. Each comes from an Engagement reflection written by a student in this class. In the blank provided, write down which of the four models from Barbour’s typology the quotation exemplifies: conflict, independence, dialogue, or integration.

Note: There is at least one quotation to represent each of the four models. You will need to use one of the models more than once. If you would like to jot down a brief note to justify your answer, you may do so; but that is not required.  

I believe that religion and the scriptures from most religions are used for teaching moral lessons. While on the other hand, science is used to explain the physical world around us, and how and why it works in the ways that it does. . . . I do not see why these two very different entities need to have some type of connection or relationship.

5. ______________________________

As a science major I am always surrounded by and studying everything that my religion contradicts. . . . I am a strong believer that you either believe in creationism or evolution. I don’t believe you can have full commitment to both.

6. ______________________________

I myself am a very religious person and I still believe that God did create everything. I think that God created evolution. There is a way that evolution could be real and there is a reason for how everything turned out to be. God made everything in a certain way, from him creating the big bang to him creating evolution.

7. ______________________________

Many scientists believe that what occurs in our world can only come from science and that religion is somewhat of a superstition. Vice versa, religious people believe that science is very materialistic and that it refutes reality outside of the physical world. . . . [But] I do not think that heaven and hell and angels are superstitious [nor do I] think that every scientific teaching is correct, such as Darwinism. . . . This is where certain aspects of each must be carefully considered, and both sides must realize that not everything both believe can be correct.

8. ______________________________

I believe strictly in the Bible, and do not theorize or interpret anything that conflicts with what is explicitly stated in the Bible. For example, I disagree with theories involving a big bang or a god that uses a big bang to create a universe. I also disagree with the idea of evolution or a god that uses evolution to create humans.

9. ______________________________

 
5. independence   6. conflict   7. integration   8. dialogue   9. conflict

Exorcism, Skype, and the U.S. presidency

A few days ago, The Daily Beast ran an article about Bob Larson, an Arizona-based minister who performs exorcisms via Skype. He’d been featured in The Huffington Post a few days before that. The Daily Beast piece wasn’t quite as snickery as the Huffington Post‘s: the Daily Beast author, Scott Bixby, noted that exorcism has a “relatively mainstream presence in most Christian sects (ever been baptized? Congratulations–you’ve had an exorcism).” Huffington Post author David Moye ended his piece with a little whipped-up controversy by getting a rival exorcist–head of the International Catholic Association of Exorcists–to cast doubt on the authenticity of Larson’s exorcisms, on the grounds that a truly possessed person wouldn’t sit still in front of a computer screen.

A couple questions that occur to me:

1. Presumably I, the online reader, am supposed to be snickering that there are people living in the modern age–as driven home by the fact that they’re Skyping, OMG–who nevertheless believe in demonic possession. But what does it say about contemporary American culture that these online news stories treating exorcism as laughable exist simultaneously with a film industry that seems to be advertising yet another horror flick about possession every time I go to a cineplex?

2. Did you know that the Book of Occasional Services of the Episcopal Church–the church so modern that it can boast having ordained the first openly gay bishop in the Christian mainline; the church so socially respectable that it runs the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. and has produced more U.S. presidents than any other denomination–did you know that that church’s Book of Occasional Services, as published in 2003, includes a rite for exorcism? Well, more precisely, it contains a page explaining that exorcism is a rite of the church, so if a priest believes that someone is possessed, not mentally ill, then they should contact their bishop for directions about how to proceed. I would love to see those instructions.

Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham

My husband is in the other room, listening to the live stream of the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate occurring now at the Creation Museum, south of us. (We pass it every time we drive to the Cincinnati airport. I’m curious to go, but not curious enough to pay the $30 entrance fee.) I’m half-listening because I feel obligated, since I’m teaching two courses right now that this debate is relevant to. But I can’t actually sit and watch it–it’s too squirm-inducing.

I’m a bit surprised that Nye agreed to the debate, since by doing it he lends Ham a kind of validity, as contrasted to the strategy of acting as if creation science is beneath notice. In terms of the ongoing (it will never end) tension around teaching evolution in public schools, Ham’s proudly fundamentalist style of creation science is beneath notice, since the Supreme Court has already rejected it as unconstitutional. The more pressing challenge comes from intelligent design, which is more modest and not overtly Christian in its claims, although that movement, too, got slapped down in the federal courts a decade ago in Kitzmiller v. Dover.

I wonder: Could Nye be debating Ham in order to link creation science and intelligent design in the public’s mind–an association that intelligent design proponents have been keen to avoid? Or is that too generous a reading of Nye’s capacity for subtlety?

God in America: A New Light

A continuing review of the Frontline/American Experience documentary God in America. This post looks at part 4, “A New Light.”

Summary: This episode narrates conflicts between tradition and modernity in Judaism and Protestantism. Act I: Isaac Mayer Wise popularizes Reform Judaism, which appeals to Jews who want an Americanized and modernized form of Jewish identity. Although he hopes to unify American Jews under the banner of Reform, opposition to his reforms precipitates a split in American Judaism. Act II: Charles Augustus Briggs encounters Darwin and historical criticism of the Bible; goes public in calling American Christians to–as with Wise–unify under the banner of modernism; is tried for heresy. The modernist-fundamentalist controversy expands through American Protestantism. Act III: William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow square off in the Scopes trial. Whereas in the 19th century the great religious divide in America was over slavery, from henceforth Americans will be divided between conservatives and liberals.

Likes: I could definitely use this entire episode in my own introductory survey to American religious history; the (admittedly simplified) narrative it tells is basically the narrative I’ve been using. There’s fun, student-friendly drama here: the treyfa banquet, the Scopes trial. With the Scopes trial, we have the advantage of period footage, which shows how nakedly partisan and patronizing the national media’s descriptions of fundamentalism were. (The film doesn’t point critically to that, but it gives me material to.)

I especially like the transnational dimension to this story: In both Wise’s and Briggs’s narratives, the connection to modernizing movements in Germany is highlighted. (Briggs’s story, in fact, begins by locating him visually in Berlin.)

The Scopes segment made a point of framing the issue not as religion vs. science (the latter understood as “secular”) but as conservative Christians vs. liberal Christians. Before getting to Scopes, the documentary introduces us to Bryan as an important politician, a defender of the working classes; that’s good because it prevents him from being reduced to what he became in media coverage of Scopes.

Nice touches of social history, i.e., figures for immigration. (We got the same in episode 2, on Catholic immigration during the antebellum era.)

Dislikes: While I’m willing to use this episode in class (unlike most of episode 3), there are some things that make me grit my teeth a little. It irked me that during the treyfa banquet sequence–which is presented in the documentary as a Jewish equivalent to the Briggs heresy trial or the Scopes trial, i.e., a showdown moment between modernizers and traditionalists–the score was cutesy, whereas when Protestants are grappling over how to make sense of the Bible in relation to the new science, the score is serious and intense. So… when Christians are grappling with modernity, we’re supposed to share their sense of crisis; but when Jews grapple with modernity, that’s funny, cause, you know, it’s about whether or not to eat shrimp, which isn’t really a serious question.

The talking heads’ examples of the problems in the Bible that drove modernists to their conclusions are so simplistic that I have to think an evangelical student watching that part of the documentary would think, “But that’s so easy to answer. What’s the problem?”

Along a similar line, the dramatized confrontation between Bryan and Darrow during the Scopes trial wasn’t quite fair to Bryan, I felt; the filmmakers wanted to make clear why he lost in “public opinion” (meaning: the Northern media), so he had to be played as more inept than he might have been. On the other hand, Bryan does get the last word in a nice little speech that drives home what he saw as the stakes for American society. It’s a poignant moment, but not as compelling as it might have been because it’s understated: I sense the filmmakers don’t want us sympathizing too much with him.

Catholics and evolution?

I just finished reading through a batch of short response papers for the course I’m teaching on religion and science fiction. We’re using science fiction as a lens onto different ways that people in modern societies understand the relationship between religion and science. In that vein, one of the students referred in their paper to attending a Catholic school where, at least as the student understood it, they were taught that the theory of evolution was incompatible with scripture.

I’ve had at least one other student who I can recall recently making the same claim–i.e., that as a Catholic they were taught to disbelieve evolution. While this  doesn’t seem implausible to me, it is unexpected. Stephen Jay Gould has a widely read essay, which I’ve used before in classes, in which he touts conversations with Jesuit scientists who are evolutionist and commends recent popes for issuing statements accepting evolution as the means by which life came into being. I’m also reminded of the Catholic Biblia Latinoamericana I encountered some years ago, which had a short prologue, titled something like “Before the Bible,” offering a one-page history of the cosmos from the Big Bang to the evolution of intelligent hominids on earth capable of responding to their Creator.

So, I’m left wondering: We normally associate opposition to evolution with Protestant fundamentalists and evangelicals. But how extensive is anti-evolutionary sentiment among American Catholics? I presume it’s a minority phenomenon, probably numerically, certainly in the sense of being marginalized in official church discourse. But how vigorous a minority phenomenon is it?

Andrew Cohen and evolutionary enlightenment

I’m teaching a course this semester on religion and science fiction, which I’m using as a lens for helping students recognize various ways that people in modern societies conceive of the relationship between religion and science. As we get started, I’m introducing students to Ian Barbour’s now-classic typology of different ways to conceptualize the science-religion relationship: conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration. As I write this, I’m in the middle of preparing an in-class exercise where I’ll give students selections from recent American texts representing Barbour’s four categories; students will then categorize the texts.

The Barbour text we’re using to introduce the categories points to Christian examples of integration (natural theology, process theology), but I wanted to give students something that would represent more of a New Age approach–discourse about evolution and spirituality, the interconnectedness of nature, energy flows, etc. As I was poking around online for an example, I found my way to the work of Andrew Z. Cohen, whom I had never heard of but who is apparently big enough that the Huffington Post was willing to give him a platform. As a cultural artifact, his work intrigues me because it is bent toward integrating evolutionary biology with the soteriology shared by Hinduism and Buddhism, i.e., enlightenment/liberation as an escape from the endless cycle of death and rebirth (moksha). Basically, Cohen argues that science has disproved the notion of cyclical time, although he bows to traditional doctrines of moksha as a kind of culturally appropriate partial grasping of the truth; enlightenment should therefore be reconceived, not as liberation from the world but as participation in the transformation of the world, what Cohen calls Evolutionary Enlightenment. He overtly touts this new approach to enlightenment as superior to the old not only because the new is compatible with modern science but also because the new approach, unlike the old, is not escapist (an appeal which points to the premium placed on activism in American culture).

Andrew Z. Cohen, “The Evolution of Enlightenment” (Huffington Post)

Paul Broun and the 46 percent

U.S. Rep. Paul Broun: Evolution a lie ‘from the pit of hell’ (L.A. Times)

My reaction to this story is a big eye roll. That gesture is intended to communicate weary disdain both for Broun’s creationist posturing and for the predictable expressions of horror from people who just can’t fathom how there can be Americans in the 21st century who don’t believe in evolution–much less how such Americans could be walking the halls of Congress.

Yeah, well, that’s just the way the world is, folks. Stop being jaw-on-the-ground shocked about it, and accept it as part of the political facts-of-life you have to live with in this country.

In his L.A. Times piece, reporter Matt Pearce observes that “according to the latest Gallup poll, 46% of Americans think God made humans within the past 10,000 years.” If you find that number eyebrow-raising, take some comfort, perhaps, in this:

If it surprises you to find that nearly half of Americans are, basically, young-earth creationists–that’s because the 46% don’t have cultural influence anywhere close to proportional to their numbers. That’s what I find surprising. Certainly I understand why the existence of the 46% causes scientists and rationalists to sweat. But I don’t see that they have that much to worry about.

Evolutionary science enjoys a position of cultural privilege in America that I’m inclined to call “hegemony”–not that I’m using that Marxian term in a technically correct way, but I like its connotations of domination. Evolutionary science dominates American culture, in such a way as to render the 46% largely invisible. That’s why it’s shocking to people when a member of the 46% pops up in a place like Congress.

But why shouldn’t you find the 46% in places like Congress? If creationists were proportionally represented, nearly half of Congress would think like Broun. The fact that the number probably isn’t that high (though it might be higher than you would like) is a sign of creationist disenfranchisement–or, alternatively, perhaps, a sign that most creationists aren’t inclined to be activists. They’re reconciled, it seems, to living in a culture where their views aren’t taught in public schools, or represented in government, or aired in the media, or accommodated by the courts, as much as you might expect the views of 46% of voters and consumers to be. They seem reconciled, that is, to their dominated status.

I said I intended these remarks to be comforting. By that I meant that if you’re alarmed to learn that 46% of Americans don’t believe in evolution, you can take some comfort in knowing how effectively the 46% are dominated. Like any dominated group, they make trouble from time to time–they start little revolts which have to be stamped down–but evolutionary science clearly has the upper hand in this conflict.

But of course, that’s comforting in a backhanded way. Because I’m asking you to recognize, oh anxious outraged members of the 54%, that you are in fact members of a dominating class. I’m there with you, by the way, in case you were wondering. But I feel just guilty enough about it to reap a pleasant feeling of moral superiority over those of you who hear about Paul Broun and get discombobulated.

Religion and space exploration

Maybe a month ago, while I was working out at the gym (that’s an expression I’ve been able to drop only as of this summer), the thought occurred to me that if someone hasn’t already written it, a book on religion and space exploration would make a fascinating addition to the study of religion and American culture.

I wasn’t thinking about the intersection of religion and people’s ideas about space exploration–that work’s already out there. I taught a course last fall in that vein, on religion and science fiction. No, I found myself curious, as a historian, about the ways that religious practice has intersected with actual American space exploration. Chaplains praying with crews before they go into flight. Astronauts performing religious practices in space. Perhaps the role of religious symbols and rhetoric in hyping space flight for the American public. American religious bodies’ responses to the reality of space flight: I know, for example, that Episcopalians added a line to the Book of Common Prayer interceding for the safety of those who travel by space. What did American denominations or theologians have to say in response to the moon landing? Have American religious bodies intervened in the politics of space exploration? For instance, have theologians ever questioned the ethics of directing so much money to space exploration that could be used to feed hungry people? And what about the cultural politics of American religion–i.e., which religions first got access to the final frontier?

Speak of the devil. Just before sitting down to write this post, I popped online to see if someone’s already this book–and discovered that an article on this general subject appeared in the Atlantic a few days ago. The article is a child of the secularization thesis: What do ancient religions have to do with a modern phenomenon like space flight? I’m professionally obligated, and entitled, to strike a snootily blasé pose in response to the author’s wide-eyed professions of incongruity. Muslim astronauts praying in space, or Russian Orthodox priests blessing space shuttles–well, yes, of course, who finds that surprising?