IN THE BEGINNING: THE ROLE OF MYTH IN RELATING RELIGION,BRAIN SCIENCE,AND MENTAL WELL‐BEING

Building upon the insights of scholars attuned to story, narrative, and myth, this article explores the relationship between myth, science, and religion. After clarifying the interplay of the three terms—story, narrative, and myth—and the preference for the term myth, this article will argue that myth can serve as a medium through which religion, neuroscience, and mental well‐being interact. Such an exploration will cover the role of myths in religion, the neurological basis of myth, and the practices of narrative psychology and bibliotherapy. The article will conclude with suggestions for understanding and utilizing the relationship between myth and the scholarly study of the relationship between science and religion. This article ultimately suggests that myth can operate as a methodological aid to the science‐and‐religion field.     

THE MODERN STUDY OF MYTH AND ITS RELATION TO SCIENCE

The history of the modern study of myth can be divided into two main categories: that which sees myth as the primitive counterpart to natural science, itself considered overwhelmingly modern, and that which sees myth as almost anything but the primitive counterpart to natural science. The first category constitutes the nineteenth‐century approach to myth. The second category constitutes the twentieth‐century approach. Tylor and Frazer epitomize the nineteenth‐century view. Malinowski, Eliade, Bultmann, Jonas, Camus, Freud, and Jung epitomize the twentieth‐century approach. The question for the twenty‐first century is whether myth can be brought back to the physical world, but in a way compatible with science. The case of the myth of Gaia will be considered as a possible way of doing so.     

ASSESSING THE FIELD OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION: ADVICE FROM THE NEXT GENERATION

The field of science and religion is undergoing a transition today requiring assessment of its past movements and identifying its future trajectories by the next generation of science and religion scholars. This essay provides such assessment and advice. To focus efforts on the past, I turn to Ian Barbour's own stock taking of the field some forty years ago in an essay entitled “Science and Religion Today” before giving some personal comments where I argue that much of the field has traditionally focused on the conversation between Christianity and the natural sciences. At present, however, we are beginning to see that the future of the conversation lies beyond the dialogue between the natural sciences and Christianity. I suggest that the future dialogue will and ought to expand in several directions: (1) into non‐Christian religions and theology, (2) into the human sciences, (3) into science and technology Studies, and (4) into the humanities more broadly.     

SOUTH DAKOTA AND ABORTION: A LOCAL STORY ABOUT HOW RELIGION,MEDICAL SCIENCE,AND CULTURE MEET

Telling the tale about South Dakota's recent legislative ban on nearly all abortions gets messy, complicated, and dirty. There are no innocent subjects and no simple plot lines. The story reveals other stories underneath and over the top of the others. Stories counter stories, revealing who is in the know and who does the telling. To “tell the old, old story,” as the song goes, is not as simple as it may seem. Religion and medical science are caught in the politics and cultural wars about abortion.     

SCIENCE AND RELIGION IN LATIN AMERICA: DEVELOPMENTS AND PROSPECTS

The state of the debate surrounding issues on science and religion in Latin America is mostly unknown, both to regional and extra‐regional scholars. This article presents and reviews in some detail the developments since 2000, when the first symposium on science and religion was held in Mexico, up to the present. I briefly introduce some features of Latin American academia and higher education institutions, as well as some trends in the public reception of these debates and atheist engagement with it in Mexico and Argentina. The primary conclusion of this article is that, even though the discussion is new to Latin American academic circles, it is gaining traction and will certainly grow in the coming years.     

UNCERTAINTY AND GOD: A JAMESIAN PRAGMATIST APPROACH TO UNCERTAINTY AND IGNORANCE IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION

This article picks up from William James's pragmatism and metaphysics of experience, as expressed in his “radical empiricism,” and further develops this Jamesian pragmatist approach to uncertainty and ignorance by connecting it to phenomenological thought. The Jamesian pragmatist approach avoids both a “crude naturalism” and an “absolutist rationalism,” and allows for identification of intimations of the sacred in both scientific and religious practices—which all, in their respective ways, try to make sense of a complex world. Analogous to religious practices, emotion and the metaphysics of experience play a central role in science, especially the emotion of wonder. Engaging in scientific or religious practices may create opportunities for individuals to realize that they are co‐creators of the world in partnership with God, in full awareness of uncertainty and ignorance and filled with the emotion of wonder.     

NATURE, REALITY, AND THE SACRED: A MEDITATION IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Abstract. Many scientists now recognize the participation of the knower in the known. Not many admit, however, that scientists rely upon intuitions about reality commonly attributed to philosophy and religion: that sensory experience relates us to an order in nature congruent with our minds and of value congruent with our fulfilled being. Nature has disclosed itself to scientists—albeit fragmentarily—as power, life, order, and unity or meaning. In science these remain limit questions, raised but unanswered. In the unity of these qualities, assumed by science, the sacred begins to appear. Addressing the limit questions, not only of scientific but of human experience, is the province of philosophy and religion.     

BURHOE AND SHAPLEY: A COMPLEMENTARITY OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Abstract. The development of Ralph Wendell Burhoe's philosophy of religion and science occurred in the shadow of the continuing dialogue about the place of science in American society. Like his friend and mentor, Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, Burhoe was distressed and intrigued by the troubled postwar relations between science and religion. Unlike Shapley, however, Burhoe sought to create a new modernism, a blend of religion and science that would allow each to develop and complement the other.     

BELIEF, PRACTICE, AND RELIGION

Abstract. How to reconcile belief in God with the worldview generated by modern science is a concern for those who see such belief as the essence of religion. Some religious traditions emphasize correct behavior, including observance of ritual, more than belief. Others stress individual pursuit of inner tranquility without prescribing particular beliefs or rituals by which that is to be achieved. Theological issues relating to "the God question in an age of science" are relevant to Christians, whose religious emphasis is on right belief as necessary to personal salvation; but science does not raise such issues for religion generally.     

A WAY FORWARD FOR SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH ON SCIENCE AND RELIGION: A REVIEW AND A RIFF

John Evans’s new book Morals Not Knowledge pushes scholars to rethink contemporary debates about religion and science by moving past the rhetoric of societal elites to examine the perspectives of everyday Americans, identifying the moral conflicts at the heart of debates. We review Evans’s key contributions while also extending and challenging his arguments, urging consideration of how renewed moral debates might be informed by a broader set of U.S. “publics.” Drawing on empirical research, we highlight four sets of voices that are missing from Evans’s analysis. Specifically, we highlight the voices of racial and ethnic minorities, religious communities (as opposed to individuals), members of minority religious traditions, and everyday religious scientists. Through doing so we offer avenues for future research on these diverse publics that will help facilitate a broader set of better and more informed debates about moral conflict between religious and scientific communities.     

RELIGION AND RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AS EVOLUTIONARY ADAPTATIONS

Scholars employing an evolutionary approach to the study of religion and religious beliefs search for ultimate explanations of the origin, propagation, and persistence of religious beliefs. This quest often pairs in debate two opposing perspectives: the adaptationist and “by‐product” explanations of religion and religious beliefs. The majority of scholars prefer the by‐product approach, which is agnostic and even doubtful of the usefulness of religious beliefs. Despite this pervasive negativity, it seems unwarranted to deny the great usefulness of religious beliefs—particularly concerning their past utility. Instead, adaptationist explanations of religion and religious beliefs must be re‐established as interesting and useful approaches to the study of religious beliefs.     

SCIENCE AND RELIGION AS LANGUAGES: UNDERSTANDING THE SCIENCE–RELIGION RELATIONSHIP USING METAPHORS,ANALOGIES, AND MODELS

Many scholars often use the terms “metaphors,” “analogies,” and “models” interchangeably and inadvertently overlook the uniqueness of each word. According to recent cognitive studies, the three terms involve distinct cognitive processes using features from a familiar concept and applying them to an abstract, complicated concept. In the field of science and religion, there have been various objects or ideas used as metaphors, analogies, or models to describe the science–religion relationship. Although these heuristic tools provided some understanding of the complex interaction, they failed to address the broad nature of science and religion as well as the multifarious relationship between the two in a sociocultural context. Unlike the previous candidates, the concept of language, including the notions of linguistic worldview, linguistic identity, dialects, power, and bilingualism, offers a unique and comprehensive window through which science, religion, and the relationship between the two are seen with clarity.     

IN DEFENSE OF PUBLICS: PROJECTION,BIAS, AND CULTURAL NARRATIVES IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION DEBATES

John H. Evans's recent book Morals Not Knowledge is a timely argument to recognize broader social and cultural factors that might impact what U.S. religious publics think about the relationship between science and religion and their attitudes toward science and/or religion. While Evans's focus is primarily on what can be classed as moral issues, this response argues that there are other factors that sit within neither the older epistemic conflict model approach nor a moral conflict model approach that also merit further investigation. There is a significant need for further research that examines the social, psychological, (geo)political, and broader cultural factors shaping people's social identities in relation to science and religion debates. When undertaking such research, we need to be wary of creating a binary between scholarly and public space discourse. Social scientific research in this field should be led by public perceptions, attitudes, and views, not by concepts or frameworks that we project onto them.     

INTERFACING RELIGION AND THE NEUROSCIENCES: A REVIEW OF TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF EXPLORATION AND REFLECTION

Abstract. Exploration and reflection on the interfacing of religion and the neurosciences in the last twenty-five years provide a unique point of convergence on the relationship between science and religion. A focus on two streams of consciousness characterized the first phase in the 1970s. Scholarship suggested correlates between the styles of analytical steps and synthetic leaps of imagination and the belief patterns of proclamation and manifestation. The use of lateralized consciousness was critiqued as covering too much as well as not attending to evolutionary developments and philosophical and theological foundations. A shift to whole brain functioning with more differentiated investigations came during the second phase in the 1980s. Empirical studies corroborated the earlier analytical speculations in neurotheology and advanced the heuristic value or using the whole brain as a metaphor for understanding religion. By the third phase of the 1990s, meaning-making and integrating consciousness emerged as shaping the agenda between religion and cognitive neuroscience. The emerging methodology combines analogical continuities among levels of complexity and metaphorical leaps of inferential patterning.     

GOD AND THE WORLD OF SIGNS: INTRODUCTION TO PART 2

We introduce the second part of a two‐part collection of articles exploring a possible new research program in the field of science and religion. At the center of the program lies an attempt to develop a new theology of nature drawing on the philosophy of C. S. Peirce. Our overall idea is that the fundamental structure of the world is exactly that required for the emergence of meaning and truth‐bearing representation. We understand the emergence of a capacity to interpret an environment to be important to the emergence of life, and we see the subsequent history of biological evolution as a story of increasing capacities for meaning‐making and ‐seeking. Theologically, we understand God to be the ground of all such meaning‐making and the ultimate goal of the universe's emerging capacity for interpreting signs. Here we summarize the articles in Part 1, which focused on scientific and philosophical aspects of the research program, and introduce Part 2, which turns to the theological outworking of the project.     

COSMOLOGY, RELIGION, AND SOCIETY

Abstract. It is a mistake to assume that science and religion are competing accounts of the same subject matter, so that either science supersedes religion or religion anticipates science. Using the question of cosmic origins as an example, I argue that the basic task of religion is not the scientific one of establishing the most accurate acccunt of the origin of the universe. Rather, as illustrated from Jewish, Hindu, Chinese, and Buddhist thought, religion uses a variety of cosmologies to help specify the necessary terms and conditions on which human social life is possible in particular ecological niches.     

DARWIN AND CHRISTIANITY: TRUTH AND MYTH

In recent years many historical myths about the relations between science and religion have been corrected but not always with sensitivity to different types and functions of “myth.” Correcting caricatures of Darwin's religious views and of the religious reaction to his theory have featured prominently in this myth‐busting. With the appearance in 2017 of A. N. Wilson's depiction of Darwin himself as a “mythmaker,” it is appropriate to reconsider where the myths lie in discourse concerning Darwin and Christianity. Problems with Wilson's account are identified and his provocative demeaning of Darwin is contrasted with an image gleaned from Darwin's friend and colleague George Romanes. The article concludes with a brief reference to the problem of suffering and to the work of Christopher Southgate.     

MODELING THE COSMOS: TRANSFORMATIVE PEDAGOGY IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION

This article reflects on the classroom pedagogy promoted by Christopher Southgate and its implications for the science–theology conversation. It highlights several important aspects of Southgate's pedagogy. The use of models of God, humanity, and cosmos emphasize relationality while encouraging the synthesizing of ideas. The promotion of holism in theological reflection is vital for nurturing students to become theologians themselves through the active reevaluation of key doctrines and ideas. An emphasis on ethical considerations reinforces synthesis between theology, science, and ethics, and is vital for perspective transformation. These aspects of Southgate's teaching should be recognized as vital for promoting intellectual independence, partnership, and theological transformation, all of which are essential to good science and theology pedagogy.     

WHY RELIGION MATTERS AND THE PURPOSES OF HIGHER EDUCATION: A DIALOGUE WITH HUSTON SMITH

This article examines Huston Smith's critique of and remedy for modernity from the perspective of a college professor who adopted “Why Religion Matters” (2001) as required reading for undergraduates. Smith's heartfelt plea to consider, if not embrace, the common wisdom of traditional religious worldviews deserves a hearing. But Smith's approach is also in need of qualification, supplementation, and critique. This article, ironically, finds the needed qualification, supplementation, and critique in Huston Smith's much earlier publication, The Purposes of Higher Education (1955). This article provides the dialogue.