[world-vedic] A Lovers Quarrel

[Guest guest]

The Story of Religion and Science in the West

 

HARVEY COX Ph.D

Harvard Divinity School

 

 

I have been asked to provide a kind of bird's-eye view of the kaleidoscopic

interaction between science and religion as it has unfolded in the West. The

assignment has a certain comic grandioseness. Everyone in this gathering knows

that articles, monographs, books — indeed, whole libraries — are devoted to the

subject. But I find the very impossibility of the task to be, paradoxically, a

great liberation. I can hardly be chided for leaving something out, and it would

be the pinnacle of redundancy to begin with an apology. So, rather than

apologize, I have chosen to begin instead with an "apologia," which is something

quite different.

 

In the course of reading about science and religion for many years, beginning

with a doctoral dissertation written twenty-five years ago, from which I

occasionally fled and returned to somewhat furtively, I have gradually come to

view this complex saga in a quite different light than when I began. Little by

little, a controlling metaphor has begun to inform my reading, a metaphor which

is at some variance from those one normally encounters. Thus I do not find it

helpful to speak of the relation of science to religion in terms of

"confrontation" or "alienation" or "isolation" or "rivalry," to say nothing of

"warfare" between the two. I choose, rather, to speak of a "lovers' quarrel,"

and my apologia will, as apologias are supposed to, set forth the reasons why I

am drawn to this metaphor.

 

I grant immediately that there have been times when one or an- other of the more

negative figures of speech mentioned above seemed more germane. I believe,

however, that in the very long run, these dark episodes constitute more the

exception than the rule. I see the story not as a tragedy but more as a

melodrama. For over two millennia now, science and religion have been engaged in

an ongoing series of tiffs and altercations — some serious, some trivial, some

dragged out, some quickly forgotten, some all too real, others imaginary — but

always between partners who know at some level that they really need each other

and have something to offer that the other needs as well. Indeed, I believe that

this recognition was still there even during those tempestuous moments when,

like irritated lovers, one or another of the partners was telling the other to

get out of his or her sight and never come back.

 

The simile could be extended. Sometimes one or another of the paramours stalks

off in a huff. Sometimes sharp and hasty words are hurled. But eventually the

separation — whether brief or extended — becomes too much to bear. The lovers

make up, both realizing that this is certainly not the last wrangle.

 

A lovers' quarrel? What better time or place to probe this trope than in India,

and in celebration of the five-hundredth anniversary of the first appearing of

Lord Chaitanya. It is he, after all, who has helped millions of people through

five centuries to see the profound truth hidden beneath the lovers' quarrels of

Lord Krishna and his consort Radha. They loved. They quarreled. They came back

together. They parted again. But always, they loved. I offer this re-reading of

an often perplexing and confused history, then, as my small garland presented to

that eternally luminous couple whose loving quarrel and quarreling love invoke

the timeless dance of the cosmos and of life.

 

The lovers' quarrel of science and religion is hardly new. We can trace it from

the very beginnings of what historians today are willing to call "science." But

we must take up the story somewhere, so I suggest that we begin with that robust

citizen of Periclean Athens, Anaxagoras, not just because we must start

somewhere, but because he is the first person many historians are willing to

call a "scientist."

 

The Greeks, of course, never developed experimental science as we know it. But

they had Euclid, and therefore they had geometry. And they had medicine, which

was at least a careful effort to apply scrupulous observation and inference to

the solution of pressing human problems. Was that "science"? In this story we

will soon learn that it is pointless to quibble over the use of words. After

all, during the medieval period it was usually only theology and philosophy

which were permitted to be designated with the title "scientia," whereas the

forerunners of what we now call science were thought of as "art" or "technique."

One of the world's most famous lovers once remarked, "A rose by any other name

would smell as sweet." Like Juliet, we are more interested in what they were

doing than in what they called it.

 

Anaxagoras (500-428 B.C.) did write a book entitled Peri Physeos (On Nature) and

was the teacher of Pericles, a statesman, and Euripides, a dramatist. He may

even have been the teacher of Socrates, but we cannot be sure. In any case, this

first scientist, or protoscientist, started a long trend. He was charged with

"impiety" fully 1500 years before Galileo fell afoul of the guardians of the

theological and scientific orthodoxy in his day.

 

 

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