THE QUESTION OF COMPLEMENTARY RELATIONSHIP
Let us, then, try to examine the question: In what sense is it possible, and in what sense it is desirable, that science and religion supplement or complement each other?
A. The antireligious thinkers, such as Russell, readily acknowledge that, for fulfillment of life, science is not enough.
We need friendship, and we need arts; we need all sorts of things apart from sicence. Religion was claimed to be a substitute for sex, for instance. Science was never seriously claimed to be such a substitute. At most, the claim of science was that of a means by which to achieve enlightenment - plus the subsidiary claim that religion cannot bring enlightenment. For instance, this is how Kant puts it in his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone: It is only when religion claims to fulfill the function that science or reason also claims to fulfill, that the clash arises. And in each such clash, says Kant, science must win and religion lose.Kant, in his desire to write a very liberal and tolerant book, was even willing to concede that one can be reasonable while believing in virgin birth, which he personally considered idiotic. Yet at the end of the book he says that whenever religion claims to do what reason claims to do, it is phoney. Against his intentions, against his temperament, when it came to the relation of religion and science, Kant was an enemy of established religion. Religion can only win in cases in which science cannot even start to compete! This was the situation until very recently.
For example, Michael Faraday, whose life was dedicated to science, was also a profoundly religious man, who (outside his church) rarely alluded to his religion; the rare exceptions were cases of enormous pressure. And yet he found no difficulty in alluding to all other nonreligious complements to science. In a moving passage in a letter to a friend (Schonbein), he says, “After all, though your science is much to me, we are not friends for science sake only, but for something better in man, something more important in his nature, affection, kindness, good feelings, moral worth.”
B.
Religious assertions were often dismissed by scientific leaders, if not as superstition, then at least as highly problematic and in need of much interpretation. This did not exclude even Robert Boyle, who was the most religious leader of the scientific community, of the commonwealth of learning, to use his phrase. He was, for instance, the man who instituted the rule that in scientific circles people should not argue about religion. He was deeply religious - he gave most of his money for religious purposes of missionary works (especially spreading the Bible) and of charity - and he was said always to have paused for about one minute after he used the Sacred Name in speech, with the result that he tried to avoid using it because it became a burden on his audience. Also, one must add, he was an unusually honest, frank, and sincere man. His philosophic doctrine was that there are two faculties of mind - reason and emotion; that justice belongs to reason and mercy to emotion: and that God gave us the ability to comprehend him by reason alone, as justice requires, but that out of pity for those of us who are a bit dumb or stubborn, he created miracles, which have a merely emotional appeal. It might seem strange that a man so deeply religious should have thought so, but so he did, and he was heard by many. He has also written that theological questions are beyond reason, and, therefore, that we should leave them to religion; but he never meant this to express the idea that religion is a complement to science. This would have been quite impossible anyhow, sine in his view religion is not another form of understanding. Perhaps he meant to suggest that since religion is ot a form of understanding, let religion try to handle the incomprehensible.Until the twentieth century, the rule was that whenever science and religion disagreed, science won and religion proved to be wrong. Russell still held this view in 1935. The Bible says that the hare chews the cud and the biologists say it doesn’t chew the cud; and, of course, it doesn’t.
I don’t know why it is so important to Russell to insist that the Bible says that the hare chews the cud, that the biologists disagree, and that the biologists are right. I suppose it is a remnant of the reaction to medieval science. It is not uncommon to hear even nowadays such claims; we are still told repeatedly that the religious leadership was against inoculation which scientists recommended. In truth, many scientists were against many inoculations - sometimes correctly, sometimes not - and many religious people, as missionaries who went to the bush and administered inoculation, were for most advanced medicine, and even contributed to medical science in their small ways. It is, in my opinion, often difficult to know when and how and why established religion clashed with science, and precisely on what issues. And science is not always right in such clashes. It is even often unclear what is meant by the claim that science is always right in such clashes. Even the greatest clash - between the Church of Rome and Galileo - has turned out to be not half as obvious a case as most writers a century and two ago would have us believe.C. Somehow, the question of how, exactly, do science and religion compete, belongs to history. By now established religion in the West has entirely capitulated on this issue. By now no religious leader in the West, not even the fundamentalists whose parents forbade the teaching of Darwinism in their public schools, not even the pope, would dare clash openly with science on any issue. What they offer is, they claim, what science cannot offer.
V.