What do people believe about science and religion?
The Landscapes of Science and Religion: What Are We Disagreeing About? (Oxford University Press) by Nick Spencer and Hannah Waite
This is an intelligent, important book. At the same time it’s exasperating, as the two old antagonists, “science” and “religion”, are once again pitched against each other – especially for those of us who feel that only one side has a case to answer. That said, Nick Spencer and Hannah Waite are not after a fight. On the contrary, the purpose of their book is to identify points of conflict with a view to smoothing them over – to ask if the differences are as stark as we often suppose, and to propose, where possible, common ground.
Written under the auspices of the think-tank Theos, the Templeton Religious Trust and the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, The Landscapes of Science and Religion is built around a remarkable two-phase research programme. For the first, the authors interviewed 101 experts from across science, philosophy, religion and communication. The list includes Philip Ball, Angela Saini, Brian Cox and Adam Rutherford on the science side, and prominent theologians such as Celia Deane-Drummond, Neil Messer and Mark Harris on the religious one. Interviewees’ views are quoted liberally and anonymously. An additional, quantitative study of the views of 5,153 adults in Britain – normal people, for want of a better phrase – was carried out by YouGov. The findings of this study are no less valuable, but they are presented here primarily to augment or contextualise the professional contributions.
There’s a broad and fascinating spread of views on display here, across the fields of metaphysics, methodology, cosmology, evolution and so on. Few, naturally, are ground-breakingly original – although I shared the authors’ surprise at the prominence of “panpsychism”, the belief in consciousness as a property of all matter. Each submission is handled with care, intelligence and good manners. Perhaps too good on occasion, where a more sceptical (or cynical) analysis might have found more room for the roles played by bad faith, intellectual dishonesty and moral cowardice.
Only very occasionally are the authors spiky. One subset of interviewees earn a rebuke for resorting to “crude caricatures” of religion, in a section on ethics. While it’s true that generalisations are seldom helpful, it’s also the case that “nobody really thinks that!” isn’t half the argument it once was – it’s never been easier than it is today to find a religious believer (on YouTube, in Silicon Valley, in a megachurch, in the White House) who absolutely does really think that.
Religion has always been an elusive opponent. When backed into a corner, it can somehow always find another, smaller corner; the ghost can always crawl a little deeper inside the machine. A frustrating feature of the discussion is the impulse to cry “straw man” at every turn. It seems almost an affront to many people of faith today to be accused of literally believing in a god, or acknowledging clerical authority, or following established religious tenets. We hear from one interviewee, for example, that the idea of the soul is “a Greek imposition upon the Bible”.
But this isn’t the fault of Spencer and Waite. Similarly, they had no real choice but to spend some time footling in obvious dead-ends (no, a scientist’s “faith” in a respected predecessor’s findings is in no way the same thing as religious faith.) These things are part of the landscapes of science and religion. They remain living landscapes, and this book gives us valuable insight into the terrain.
This article is from New Humanist’s Summer 2025 issue. Subscribe now.
