A. Eisen – Science, Religion and Society. An Encyclopedia

Автор: A. Eisen
Название книги: Science, Religion and Society. An Encyclopedia
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Политология и Социология
Страницы: 911
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

This unique encyclopedia explores the historical and contemporary controversies between science and religion. It is designed to offer multicultural and multi-religious views, and provide wide-ranging perspectives. “Science, Religion, and Society” covers all aspects of the religion and science dichotomy, from humanities to social sciences to natural sciences, and includes articles by theologians, religion scholars, physicians, scientists, historians, and psychologists, among others. The first section, General Overviews, contains essays that provide a road map for exploring the major challenges and questions in science and religion. Following this, the Historical Perspectives section grounds these major questions in the past, and demonstrates how they have developed into the six broad areas of contemporary research and discussion that follow. These sections – Creation, the Cosmos, and Origins of the Universe; Ecology, Evolution, and the Natural World; Consciousness, Mind, and the Brain; Healers and Healing; Dying and Death; and Genetics and Religion – organize the questions and research that are the foundation of the enormous interest, and controversy, in science and religion today.

Seven years ago we sent out an open invitation to the faculty at our university
to participate in a science and religion reading group. We hoped to attract a
dozen or so colleagues to share ideas and readings over weekly lunches for a
semester. More than sixty professors from disciplines as diverse as medicine,
physics, ethics, public health, biology, and religion wrote us back, eager to
attend. As we have discovered, more than a casual interest in interdisciplinary
ideas inspired such a surprisingly large response. From this beginning came
more faculty reading groups, undergraduate courses, grants from within and
outside our institution, publications, and several well-attended public symposia
—all around topics lying at the crossroads of science and religion. And this is
just our work at one university; many others at our school and other universities
have established centers of scholarship and initiated rigorous research
programs in mind and body, complementary and alternative medicines, and
other areas where science and spirituality overlap.
The interest extends far beyond the bounds of the university, too. The public
is hungry for material that explores how religion and science overlap, as
well as how the tensions between them are negotiated in political, legal, scientific,
and theological terms. The volatile debates around evolution, the extraordinary
discoveries in physics, the spiritual dilemmas faced at the end of
life—these are just a few of the familiar issues that have recently captured the
public’s attention and demanded increased collective reflection on deeply fundamental
questions about human existence.
Why has there been such an explosion of popular interest in science and
religion in the last few decades? A major reason we developed this encyclopedia
is to find answers to this question. At least four very general answers
have emerged to help explain what is driving this significant societal interest:
• People are more aware of the influence of science in realms of human
life that have traditionally been considered personal and spiritual—endof-
life decisions and fertility, for example—and many are concerned
about therapies that might affect complex human behaviors and diseases,
such as brain analysis techniques, pharmaceuticals, stem cell research,
and gene therapy.
• In the United States especially, the science versus religion discussion,
usually within the realms of politics and education—evolution versus creationism
being the most well known—polarizes communities and creates
well-trodden media stories that do not capture the complexities and confusions
surrounding what are presented as antagonistic perspectives.
• Recent research has probed the deep mysteries of the mind and the
cosmos—resulting, for example, within the study of consciousness in
the development of the new fields of neuroethics and neurotheology,
and within the study of physics in the emergence of profound questions
about the makeup of the universe.
• The science and religion conversation has opened up to include more
voices from around the globe and more awareness of other perspectives
—for example, the relationship between the two terms that is perceived
by someone in India who is contending with postcolonial linguistic and
political realities and has a non-monotheistic point of view.
In this encyclopedia we focus on the collaborative angle, to discover how
to bring the best of both science and religion to the table to address these and
other issues. As readers will discover, there is much to learn from a collaborative
approach that bridges disciplines but also religions and regions of the
world.
The science and religion discussion is richly multidisciplinary; scholars
from nearly every field have performed research in the areas examined in
these volumes. We learned from our initial reading group that engaging a
broad spectrum of disciplines and traditions in the discussion is vital; thus,
contributors to these volumes include clergy, physicians, art historians, psychologists,
geneticists, ethicists, theologians, historians of science, physicists,
and philosophers, as well as scholars from the fields of religion, physics, neuroscience,
biochemistry, history, ecology, evolution, and cosmology. And contributors
are Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Taoist, as well as
agnostic and atheist, and from African and Native American traditions. With
all of this in mind, we thought it best not to claim that the encyclopedia is
working with one specific definition of each term, “science” and “religion.”
One of the most striking impressions from reading all of these essays is the
divergence, as well as occasional convergence, in how writers understand the
meanings of each term separately and both together.
To make it easier to examine the diverse and varied responses these essayists
provide, we divide the encyclopedia into eight topical sections, fully aware
that these divisions are in some sense arbitrary and also create artificial differences
as well as areas that overlap with other sections. Each section opens
with an introduction outlining its major themes and framing that section’s
essays, trying to highlight commonalities between them but also recognizing
the particularities of each one.
The first section, General Overviews, is a good starting point for readers
who want to explore some of the larger, more wide-ranging perspectives on
science and religion. With broad personal and scholarly stories from an array
of viewpoints, essays in this section provide a road map for exploring the
major challenges and questions in science and religion. This section is followed
by Historical Perspectives, which grounds these major questions in the
past and demonstrates how they have developed into the six broad areas of
contemporary research and discussion that follow. These sections—Creation,
the Cosmos, and Origins of the Universe; Ecology, Evolution, and the Natural
World; Consciousness, Mind, and the Brain; Healers and Healing; Dying and
Death; and Genetics and Religion—represent one attempt at organizing the
questions and research that undergird the enormous, unabating interest in science
and religion today, an interest we think is more compelling when it is
informed by a multitude of views and a variety of positions.