Now, before I go further, I've been talking about religion or Christianity like it's one thing, and we cannot really understand conflict unless we get into more detail about religion. Again, I'm gonna focus on Christianity because that's the dominant group in the public sphere, at least in the North American context. I'm going to talk about these groups official stance towards the knowledge produced by religion and science. I want to put official, in quotation marks here, because while Catholicism has a close to official way of making claims, most of Protestantism doesn't. So, I take official to mean the preponderance of opinion within these groups. So, let's start with Catholicism. There is an official teaching about fact claims here. So at least officially, Catholicism incorporates scientific discoveries into its theology, often with a time lag, and modern Catholic leaders have long claimed that they have no methodological conflict with science. So, for example, every Pope since the 1930s has affirmed the autonomy of science. Similarly, Catholic teaching holds the doctrine of two truths – the scientific knowledge cannot contradict with religious knowledge since they both come from the same source. So, this has been long supported by papal statements, I'll just read one for you here, this is Pope Pius XI in 1936. "Science, which consists in true recognition of fact, is never opposed to the truths of the Christian faith." And then 50 years later, John Paul II says, "Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.". Of course, Catholicism believes in all sorts of fact claims that do not make sense with the contemporary science, such as the idea that Jesus arose from the dead. The best way to put this is that Catholicism is not in conflict with any fact claim that any scientist actually cares about. The resurrection does not matter to contemporary science. Another group I'm just gonna lump together are conservative Protestants. In the US, these people are called evangelicals and fundamentalists. This is perhaps 25 percent of the American population. In the UK, you would use the term here Conservative Evangelical. In Scotland, these people are not quite clearly represented by reform theology, the people who wouldn't be part of the Church of Scotland, but the Wee Frees and people like that. It's extremely difficult to distinguish between an evangelical and a fundamentalist, because the people in these communities are not even clear about the use of these terms themselves. So, I'm gonna lump them together. But in general, in this tradition, there'd be support for the idea that the Bible is true in what it says about the natural world. It's extremely important in this world to defend the truth of the Bible. One way to identify Protestant fundamentalists, for example, is that they're more likely to not try to accommodate scientific research at all. They would say that since the Bible says that humans were created distinct from animals, that's true and the scientists are simply wrong. End of story. Another way would be that they want a super plain reading of scripture with as little apparent interpretation as possible. Evangelicals who are sort of more liberal in their interpretation than a fundamentalist, would still want to say that the Bible is true, but also want to say that science is true. This has led to all sorts of efforts to make scientific claims compatible with a transparently read Bible. For example, some evangelicals say that what the Bible says about Adam and Eve is true, it just took a lot longer than one day and the God who has caused these evolutionary changes all along. Or another example would be that if you look carefully at the Bible, you would see that it doesn't talk about days, each day actually means, you know, length of time. In general, if you find a religious leader saying that Darwin is wrong, they're most likely from this conservative Protestant tradition. Another group are liberal Protestants or mainline Protestant. In Britain, I would say many Anglicans would fit into this category. In Scotland, in general, the Church of Scotland would generally be in this category. In contrast to the conservative Protestants, this tradition has basically embraced each scientific claim as it has emerged and modified theology to make this all fit into one seamless piece. A very nice interpretation is by historian Jon Roberts, who says the "Mainline Protestants have maintained that the progress of scientific investigation required Christians to make significant revisions in their apologetics, doctrine, and biblical interpretation. This is one of the defining features of the liberal Protestant tradition in the first place.". To return to the Genesis account, a liberal Protestant would just dismiss the factuality of it and simply say this is an account of the biblical writer trying to understand the mystery of God's creation, but you're not supposed to take this literally. Like Catholics, it's extremely rare you'd find any mainline Protestant or liberal Protestant leader who disagrees about any scientific fact claim that any scientist cares about. Again, liberal Protestants would still believe in things like the resurrection, but since there is no scientific department of anti-resurrection studies, it doesn't really ever matter for any relationship between religion and science. So, for religion and science, it's important to know that many of the divides we see among Protestants – I just labeled these different types of Protestants for you – these were essentially caused by debates about enlightenment knowledge, in general, and science, in particular. By the Enlightenment, I mean these ideas that emerged in the Enlightenment era in Europe, which emphasized the idea that we should be able to determine facts about the world through our own observation and reason. But if you go back to the 19th century, again, most of the North American context, Protestants were divided over things that are not really relevant today. There were Lutherans versus Methodist, Baptists versus Presbyterians. Nowaday, you really have to be an expert to know what those differences mean in terms of theology. What eventually became to happen was that within each group there was a debate over biblical knowledge. How do you know what the Bible really says? While one group influenced by Enlightenment thought said, "We should use our observation and reason to decide what the Bible really says," another group rejected that view. So, the classic debate at the time – this is like the end of the 19th century – was, you know, was Jesus born of a virgin or not? Well, you can go back to the original Hebrew and decide, well, does that word mean virgin or does it mean young woman? etcetera. The Liberals were the ones who would look back to the original Hebrew and decide what the word actually meant at the time. This divide caused the schism within Protestantism that exist to this day. The divide between Lutherans and Methodists and alike is largely gone in society, and you're split into these groups about debating over knowledge. And so essentially, this divide is described between conservatives and liberals is not only about knowledge itself, but also due to debates about science. For example, the liberals are the ones who are accommodating to Darwinian views, and the conservatives were ones who were not. Let me make one other little bit of history here to finish up my story, which is, as I just said before, there was in the late 19th century, there was this sort of unified conservative Protestantism splitting off from what was liberal Protestantism in North America. In the 1940s or so, these conservative Protestants split into what are now called fundamentalists and evangelicals. The evangelicals are a compromise movement between what they saw at the time of the rigidities of fundamentalism and the wishy-washiness of the liberals. That theory hit the cultural sweet spot in American context and evangelicals then becomes, by far, the dominant group. Fundamentalism remains a fairly small minority, and liberals somewhere between the evangelicals and fundamentalists in terms of size.
