Questioning the Science and Religion Question

Varieties of Geological Experience:Religion, Body, and Spirit in Tennyson's In Memoriam and Lyell's Principles of Geology Michael Tomko (bio) After surveying the strata of recent critical schools, Herbert Tucker makes an appeal for combining a vibrant neo-formalism with cultural studies. His lapidary reading of aural elements of In Memoriam's section 33 unfolds into a cultural critique that troubles Tennyson's "suave apology" for the Victorian "secular state and liberal society." I wish to extend Tucker's analysis of In Memoriam by applying a culturally aware formalism not only to Tennyson's poem but also to another "nuanced cultural artifact," Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology.1 These texts—the scientific laureate's lay and the geologist's poetic apology—warrant similar formal consideration because they participate in the same cultural sphere, intervening in questions of religion, metaphysics, science, identity, and nationalism. While Sarah Gates and Denise Gigante have focused on desire and identity in other excellent cultural formalist readings of In Memoriam, I will address the common critical assumption that its geological sections participate in a Victorian war between science and religion, which Harvard scientist and historian Stephen Jay Gould has described as a "cardboard legend" of an "old (and basically silly) model of 'warfare between science and religion'" that creates a "misleading caricature of geological beliefs" in the early nineteenth century.2 My analysis has two goals: first, to modify the persistent meta-narrative of a polarized Victorian culture that views science, especially geology, as the efficient cause of a desperate, precipitous decline in religious faith between 1831 and 1859; and, second, to explore the renegotiation of faith by Lyell and Tennyson that advocates a stark, defensive rupture between the body and spirit. In reexamining the relation between geology, religion, and literature, I will view Lyell and Tennyson as engaged in similar, not contradictory, projects that revise Paleyan natural theology into a dynamic spiritualism that draws an absolute and prophylactic barrier between the physical [End Page 113] and spiritual world. The countervailing characterization of this interaction (scientists causing an earthquake of doubt and despair for theologians and Victorian believers) has been so pervasive that even a critic as sophisticated as Isobel Armstrong limits her reading of Lyell's influence on Tennyson's In Memoriam to the "uncomfortable and transgressive."3 In Robert Bernard Haas's reading, Lyell's "disconcerting" work channels directly into Tennyson's construction of a locus lacrimosus, a place of despair.4 Instead, I will argue, following J.M.I. Klaver, that geological writing is often a strange melange of awe and analysis.5 Redefined and negotiated by scientists, theologians, and poets, the terms of belief about immortality, the supernatural, as well as the relation between body and soul, did change significantly in the nineteenth century, but the move of Victorian society and literature, at least in the prominent works of Lyell and Tennyson, was not, as in David Dean's paraphrase of George Meredith, simply from "geology to despair."6 This reading has often relied on the assumption that Tennyson's poem is a chronicle of experience somehow more authentic than scientific texts and the assertion that, within this autobiographical account, the Principles of Geology is a source of emotional crisis over the religious issues of immortality and belief. While I certainly do not wish to deny the biographical importance of Tennyson's grief for Hallam, critics have sometimes let this overshadow the public, argumentative nature of Tennyson's published 1850 text.7 This perspective, however, needs to be balanced against Steven Gill's presentation of a Tennyson who succeeds Wordsworth as the spiritual voice of the age, interpreting intellectual trends for the reading public. I will not, therefore, read In Memoriam as a journal, a grief observed, but as a text offering an explanation and an interpretation, to the nation. Second, Lyell's work is often read only as a source of overwhelming anxiety for Tennyson, as a baldly atheistic list of theories or a dreadful set of facts, rather than as a complex, culturally aware, religiously astute text. While Armstrong's reading of the ambivalences of In Memoriam as a "massive double poem" torn between troubled and conservative...

This article reports a seed corn pilot study that presents a moment of the collective consciousness of an RE department in the midst of curriculum change. It records their concerns about the impact of increased content on depth in a new exam course, and the particular consequence this has for the kind of learning happening around texts. It reveals concerns about the representation of religion in the curriculum, the distance between that representation and teachers’ perceptions of pupils’ spiritual and religious lives. It also identifies teachers’ sense of fear and guilt about the challenge of fulfilling their duties to pupils, the secular authorities and the Catholic authorities, and reveals insights around the question of science and religion. In this single focus group, the collective consciousness of an RE department captures and illuminates many key issues of significance in RE today.

This essay focuses on the notion of complementarity between science and religion. Oliver grounds complementarity in relativity theory and quantum theory. He appeals to metaphysics as the basis for his relational paradigm, reassessing its Aristotelian legacy, which assumed the subject/object structure of the Greek language and produced the substantialist thesis that reality ultimately consists of things, whereas relations between things are accidental. To Oliver, the cosmos is a grand unity of relations, with subject and object, mind and brain, and ultimately God and World, existing as derivatives from this fundamental relatedness. Oliver then proceeds to argue that religious language is not referential, but symbolic of relational reality. It is when this relational reality is reduced to its derivatives that religious language is changed from mythical to referential discourse. In the case of science, Oliver argues that science aims for the most economical way of speaking of the world, versus the rich metaphorical language of religion; ultimately, though, religion and science are about the same domain of human experience. Oliver then considers the question of science, religion, and truth, cautioning against saying that certain scientific theories may be “true,” and arguing instead that it is preferable to consider that well-established scientific theories add to our experience of reality. In the case of religion, Oliver cautions even more strongly against truth as referring to the independent existence of an object, religious “truth” being realization or experience of relational reality.

Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation is one of the central texts in the history of Western philosophy. It is one of the last monuments to the project of grand synthetic philosophical system-building, where a single, unified work could aim to clarify, resolve, and ground all the central questions of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, religion, aesthetics and science. Poorly received at its initial publication, it soon became a powerful cultural force, inspiring not only philosophers but also artists, writers and musicians, and attracting a large popular audience of non-scholars. Perhaps equally importantly, Schopenhauer was one of the first European philosophers to take non-Western thought seriously and to treat it as a living tradition rather than as a mere object of study. This volume of new essays showcases the enormous variety of contemporary scholarship on this monumental text, as well as its enduring relevance.

When thinking about the current state of the study of Latin literature and about where the field might be heading next, the obvious place to start for this review is Roy Gibson and Christopher Whitton's Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature. At more than 900 pages, it is a very substantial and exciting read. In fifteen chapters, plus an introduction by the editors and an envoi by Mary Beard, the contributors – all well-known and established experts in their areas of research – discuss the canons (Peirano) and periodizations (Kelly) of Latin literature, some of its key questions and methodological tools (‘author and identity’, Sharrock; intertextuality, O'Rourke/Pelttari), as well as its relationship with adjacent fields: medieval Latin (Stover), Neo-Latin (Haskell), reception (Uden), linguistics (Clackson), material culture (Squire/Elsner), philosophy (Volk), political thought (Lowrie), Roman history (Lavan), Greek (Goldhill), as well as the national traditions that shape the discipline (Fuhrer) and, one of its key tasks, the editing of Latin texts (Huskey/Kaster). As the editors themselves admit in their introduction, the topics covered in the volume are by necessity selective and could very well have included others that are now only touched upon in individual chapters, such as questions of gender, rhetoric, religion, education, science, or law.

Habermas is known for being at the forefront of the second generation of Frankfurt School theorists. His work is an on-going response to the critical theory of the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists. ‘Habermas and Frankfurt School critical theory’ outlines the history of the Frankfurt School and the beliefs of those who belonged to it. It started off as a group of philosophers, thinkers, and cultural critics who were active around the time of the Second World War. They were an intellectual minority. They looked at questions of morality, religion, science, reason, and rationality. What part did Habermas play in the Frankfurt School?

A Centre of Wonders provides early Americanists with an illuminating introduction to this burgeoning interdisciplinary field. While most historians of the body concentrate on gender, essays here also engage questions of conquest, strategies of colonization, and constructions of race. In an excellent and refreshingly brief introduction, Janet Moore Lind-man and Michele Lise Tarter provide a crash course in the analytical paradigms grounding the history of the body. Following the trajectory established by Anthony Pagden, among others, they point out that this transitional period saw not only changes in scientific knowledge and religious theology but also a new, concrete knowledge of other worlds and other peoples. The relationship between the new, particular knowledges and the construction of the body “universal” frames explorations of the social and political decisions impacting the bodies of Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans in North America. Cultural theory is important to these scholars, and a few writers allow their engagement with theory to obfuscate their points. Most, however, build upon a theoretical base to address questions of science, religion, politics, and social structures. While social historians may be inclined to dismiss such scholarship as smoke and language, they might well remember that little is as material as the body. Bodies reproduced and engaged in sexual contact; they experienced disease and starvation; they endured pain and death at the hands of warriors, masters, and the colonial state. Trudy Eden, for example, sees the starvation of Jamestown colonists as an ideological resistance to the consumption of indigenous foods for fear that such foods would make them less English, less civilized. Within that nexus of materiality and cultural production lies the excitement.

This essay is a critical examination of Joseph Agassi’s article “On Explaining the Trial of Galileo,” which was a critical examination of Arthur Koestler’s account. It focuses partly on several of Agassi’s insightful substantive theses. These involve Galileo’s skill in the art of reasoning and critical thinking, reflected in Agassi’s claim that Galileo was “the greatest logical mind of his age”; Galileo’s technique of strengthening opponents’ arguments before criticizing them; and his efforts as a Catholic reformer. The essay also focuses on several of Agassi’s fruitful methodological approaches. These concern the principle of “charity,” when interpreting actions and arguments; an emphasis the role of logic in science and culture; and an approach to questions of science vs. religion that can be labeled “para-clerical,” meaning a secular orientation holding that some religious questions are too important to leave to religious believers.

Religion and science are often set up as polar opposites in Western philosophical and religious discourse and seen as representing different epistemological perspectives that juxtapose rationality with faith. Space exploration is largely viewed as a scientific and engineering problem and, thus, has tended to set aside the issue of religion as it relates to human movement off-planet. However, as we have moved increasingly toward the idea of colonization of the Moon and Mars, social scientists and philosophers have increasingly come to recognize that human movement into space also needs to be understood as a social phenomenon. As a social phenomenon, there is an inherent necessity to consider how religion may play a role in or influence the process of human exploration and settlement of space. However, what do we mean when we say “religion?” One of the fundamental problems of thinking about the relationship between religion, science, and space exploration is that the meaning of the word religion is rarely well-defined. Do we mean faith-based religions such as Christianity or Islam? Or do we mean practice-based religions such as Shinto and some forms of Buddhism? This paper will explore the question of religion and science from the perspective of Japanese religions as a way of problematizing the manner in which we think about and define religion as it relates to the practice of space exploration.

Scholarly studies of the science and religion question tend to take their cue from the subjective attitudes of individual writers. A potentially more useful approach focuses instead on the logical relationship between scientific and religious statements. Such a strategy generates two main types: a compatibilist model concerned only to show that religious and scientific claims are mutually consistent and an integrationist model that posits a strong correlation between theological and scientific language. Investigation of the two models' strengths and weaknesses suggests that a compatibilist approach is more consistent with the way in which Christian language is deployed on the ground.