- Email: [email protected]
Religion and narrative building in the history of science
Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 286–289
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa
Essay Review
Religion and narrative building in the history of science Jason M. Rampelt The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge CB3 0BN, UK
When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
Quakers, Jews and science. Religious responses to modernity and the sciences in Britain, 1650–1900 Geoffrey Cantor; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, pp. xii+420, Price £59.00 hardback, ISBN 0-19-927668-4. ‘Science and Religion’, as an academic area of study, has thrived most within the study of the history of science. But the history of science brings its own historiographical problems which have yet to be resolved within its own disciplinary boundaries: grand narratives are accused of being Whiggish, and micro-studies have the obvious drawback of no application beyond their painfully limited scope. Science and religion, taken together, is able to help overcome this tension, since religious traditions have their own continuity and perpetuity built in. Geoffrey Cantor attempts to find the middle way between the grand narrative and the synchronic micro-study with his new book Quakers, Jews, and science. In this way, studies in science and religion may have something to offer back to their ‘host’ discipline, the history of science. Although there are divisions within these religions, there is no question that Jews and Quakers are communities worth consideration as groups. Consequently, Cantor devotes the first half of the book to revealing those social relations as they appear in the communities themselves (Chapter 2), education (Chapter 3), scientific institutions and societies (Chapter 4), and careers in science (Chapters 3 and 5). These chapters show that entering into a career in science, or even the study of it, was as difficult for a Jew or Quaker as entering society in general. This bar was high in the eighteenth century when the Royal Society suffered from cronyism, religious tests were still part of British law, and religious prejudices in general were strong. In the nineteenth century, when the Royal Society was reformed, religious tests were removed from the state and universities, and the rise of the industrial bourgeois class helped restructure society, Jews and Quakers found a more friendly home in British science. The book follows a two-part division: the first looks from a more sociological perspective, and the second part with a more intellectual one. The most interesting segment of the sociological part of this book is Chapter 5, ‘Trajectories in science’, which exE-mail address: [email protected] 0039-3681/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2008.03.012
plores the various career paths of Quakers and Jews in the sciences. By including travelers, traders, amateurs, industrialists, educators, and even social scientists, Cantor captures a large part of the scientific community who might otherwise go unnoticed, either because they are not a part of establishment science, or happened to serve only the interests of their religious community. The final section of this chapter is certainly the best, where Cantor describes the statistical work of John S. Rowntree (Quaker) and Joseph Jacobs (Jew). Rowntree, working from the wealth of statistics kept by the Quakers themselves, won a prize essay posted by the Quakers, where he used statistical arguments to explain the decline of the Quaker community, and how it should be remedied. Joseph Jacobs, trained in Francis Galton’s methods of racial statistics at the University of London, argued statistically against accusations that Jews were the bane of society. But Jacobs also argued against assertions of fellow Jews that their race was somehow superior, either innately, or by improved health under Mosaic corporeal regulation. Here, Cantor shows some significant connections between the particular religious identities of Quakers and Jews, and their scientific work. This excellent chapter is only marred by the publisher’s failure to typeset correctly the footnotes on pp. 204–224, putting many on the wrong page, and leaving four missing at the end of the chapter. At the end of the book, Cantor admits that the conclusions drawn from his sociological research were not particular to science (p. 354). This result is not so much an oversight of Cantor’s as it is a demonstration that religion has been widely misunderstood in academic discussions about it. Religion is not merely, or even primarily, a collection of social practices, but must include individual intellectual commitments. These beliefs may then have social ramifications, but they are first intellectual beliefs. Granted, this is contested territory, but it does clarify matters and raise new questions. So, for example, Cantor’s analysis is most acute when he describes how the split between evangelicals and moderates within nineteenth-century Quakerism affected attitudes towards Darwin’s theory of evolution. The insular ghettoization of the evangelicals, and thus failure to confront Darwin’s ideas, is not explained by their insularity, but is the manifest result of their strong biblicism. The
J.M. Rampelt / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 286–289
revised theology of the Quaker evangelical gave less attention to the Inner Light, but stayed inward by redirecting that attention to the biblical text. This did not result in opposition to Darwin, but shows how the uniquely Quaker biblicism prevented many from really having an opinion at all. Here, the Quaker theology and mindset provide the foundation for understanding their organization as a social group and also their attitude towards science. The reader may draw such a conclusion from the book, but the overriding sociological focus would not encourage him to do so. The result of taking belief at the fore in studies of ‘Science and Religion’ is that intellectual history will inevitably require some primacy. According to the author, the historiographical goal of Quakers, Jews, and science is: to develop an approach in between the big picture narratives of Merton and Hooykaas and the micro studies provided by biography. Between these two extremes lies an intermediate perspective constituted by religious communities, such as churches, sects, and denominations. (P. 3) That Cantor has successfully described the various ways in which science touched upon the lives of Quakers and Jews in his period, there is no doubt. But it is not clear that he has provided a unified view of those groups. Certainly, his exposition of the Quakers comes out better, particularly in the way that he linked their self-conscious insularity (social perspective), their doctrine of the Inner Light (intellectual perspective), and their propensity for individual investigative and empirical scientific research. Cantor’s analysis here is reminiscent of the best parts of his biography of the sectarian physicist Michael Faraday.1 However, his presentation of the Jewish community is less illuminating if we judge him according to the aims set forth in his Introduction. Part of the reason may be that the Jewish community was already divided along their own cultural lines before ever arriving in Britain, and thus established independent communities when they arrived. Yet, even within these separate groups, Cantor has not been able to articulate a convincing synthesis of Jewish social context, religious ideology, and resulting scientific practice. Perhaps Cantor’s comparison of Quakers and Jews could have come out differently if he had given more attention to another segment of the Jewish population in Britain. At various points throughout the book, he makes brief references to the wave of Jewish immigrants from Europe settling in Britain who had practices far different than the existing Jewish population: They established their own small synagogues and Yiddish newspapers, their voices rarely heard in the Jewish Chronicle or Jewish World. The traditional, even primitive, forms of Judaism practised by these immigrants shocked many within the establishment. (P. 336) Cantor does not say more, but leaves the reader wondering about their perspective on science. The more bookish life of these chasidim, where social insularity and ostracism is a virtue rather than an obstacle to be overcome, is a sharp contrast to the established Jewish aristocracy discussed by Cantor. His conclusion that in a large part Jewish interest and attitudes in science came through a desire for professional success and social mobility is a direct result of limiting his view of Judaism to this London majority. On the face of it, the chasidim seem more intellectualist in the practice of their religion and might prove a useful test case for comparing Jewish and Christian attitudes towards science. This would, however, require a scholar who reads Yiddish.
1 2
287
One is thus left at the end of the book with a familiar conclusion about the fate of minorities. In general, science will go unchallenged among religions where the religion is toned down. Cantor does suggest some conclusions about the unique contact between Quakers and Jews with science: Quakers felt at home with empirical work and Jews with the theoretical, but he does not develop this idea. For the most part, science and religion did not meet very fruitfully in either context because there was little to be gained on the part of science—its institutions, schools, and practitioners— from religion. And religion, in the particularly low-intensity forms of Quakerism and Judaism discussed, had little to lose in accepting science, and socially had more to gain. To be fair, the book does not set out to describe the interrelations between science and religion in the traditional sense. That is, Cantor’s primary goal is not to show how science played a role in religious thought or practice, or religion played a role in scientific thought or practice. So, even though he does entertain some of these issues, they are not the main point. Rather, he is interested in the historiographical question of how to bring together the thematically broad and diachronic with the local and synchronic in the history of science in Britain from 1650 to 1900. If we consider some larger narrative themes in the history of science such as state and religious control of institutions (such as universities), social stratification and mobility, and industry and technology, we can safely say that Cantor has successfully provided a bridge principle to the lives of some scientists in describing the role of two longstanding British religious communities. Cantor has informatively linked individual scientists to their religious communities, and those communities to the larger scientific community. This gives the simultaneously wide and narrow perspective possible when religion is used within the architecture of the study. Religion, perhaps uniquely, cuts across a wider range of cultural profiles, much as a biography of a scientist does, yet also has the capacity to speak for a larger number of individuals at the same time, in a way that a biography cannot. There is one respect, however, in which Quakers, Jews, and science does not meet its historiographical aim. When Cantor gives examples of the ‘big picture narratives’, he named Robert Merton (1938)2 and Reijer Hooykaas (1972). Indeed, their claims were much wider: Merton argued that modern science owed its origin to Puritanism and Hooykaas more broadly to Christianity in the West. Merton and Hooykaas were interested not only in the social structures which came with religion, but also, if not more importantly, in the religious mindset which purportedly brought about modern science. Their grand narratives were decidedly intellectual ones, much in keeping with the Scientific Revolution historiography, if not in a large part continuous with it. In the second part of Quakers, Jews, and science, Cantor does connect certain pieces of religious ideology with the ideas, motivations, or methods of some scientists in those traditions, but the upward connection does not carry on from that level to a wider intellectual history of science. That is to say that there seems to be a piece missing from the analogous analysis he provides at the sociological level. From a sociological perspective, Cantor successfully builds a bridge from the specifics of individual scientists, through their religious community, and on to wider social themes in a larger national and cultural narrative. But from the perspective of intellectual history, he builds a bridge between the ideas of individual scientists to their religious community—yet there the bridge stops. It does not continue onwards into any larger intellectual narrative. So, as a historiographical middle stage between the macro and micro, the intellectual side of this study has connections between the
Cantor (1991). See in particular Ch. 8, ‘Faraday on scientific method’. It is likely that Cantor has in mind the Mertonian legacy—the ‘Merton thesis’—when speaking of Merton here.
288
J.M. Rampelt / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 286–289
middle and the micro, but not the middle and the macro. The bridge is present for individuals such as Rowntree and Jacobs mentioned above, but not for their respective religious groups as whole social bodies. There are several possible reasons why Cantor does not extend this bridge in the way we might have expected. More space devoted to ideological synergies in science and religion might have given the necessary material to finish that bridge. As discussed above, this may mean greater consideration for the chasidim among the Jews, and perhaps also those who left Quakerism, but not Christianity. These even smaller minorities may not figure greatly in a social sense, but may have been more significant to their traditions in an intellectual way. A second possible reason why Cantor does not finish the proposed intellectual micro/ macro-history bridge may be the primarily sociological definition of religion. This naturally makes it harder to provide a link between a religious community and a larger narrative about philosophy, theology, or more generally, the history of ideas. A third reason could be the more extreme position which rejects even the possibility of any larger intellectual narrative altogether, making such a connection impossible or unwarranted. Although Cantor takes pains to show that the study of religion must not ignore sociological factors, he does not believe religion is comprehended by them (Cantor, 2001). So this last, more extreme position can be eliminated in Cantor’s case. The reason for the missing link on the intellectual side of the book is most likely the second reason, which ultimately leads you to the first as well. Cantor certainly did not ignore completely the ideological aspect of the groups he discussed, but spent much less time exploring this; around thirty percent less, judging by page numbers. And if he had allowed intellectual principles more into the definitions of these groups in the first place, he might have been better equipped to complete the picture in the second half of the book. The titles of Chapters 6 and 8 are revealing. Although they are devoted to the relevant points of religious ideology among Quakers and Jews, they are named, ‘Attitudes and practices’, not ‘Theology’, or more vaguely, ‘Religious ideology’. This points out a weakness which is increasingly evident not only in studies of ‘Science and Religion’, but also in the academic study of religion more broadly. The very preference for the name ‘religion’ as opposed to ‘theology’ illustrates the point. As universities in the West over the last few centuries became concerned with ever widening areas of knowledge, their primary function as divinity schools became diluted. This was not necessarily a move against religion. That did not manifest itself fully in the universities until around the turn of the century, when theology departments were turned into religious studies departments.3 In this shift, religion became more and more a study of peculiar social phenomena, like other social phenomena, and not a science of God. Further, it was necessary to realize the equal place of other religions, and so Christianity became one among many. For the historian, this means a shift in how we tend to think about religious people and their communities. By rejecting any personal commitment to the reality of a supernatural realm and reducing religion to sociology and psychology, theology becomes less important as a category of historical interest. Theology is an important category only if we assume that holy texts really do contain eternal truths given by God, and that these tell people what to think and how to behave. With that assumption gone from the historian’s own set of beliefs, religious dogmas move into the background, often forgotten in the overall presentation of a religious character or group. The loss is significant since religious dogmas are the chief intellectual component of religions. It
3
See, for example, Hart (1999).
is a rather obvious statement to make, but lately it seems to need saying. If we ignore religious dogmas as expressed in confessions of faith, theological expositions, and manuals of piety in our historical research we ignore a central driving force operating within religious persons and communities. Depending upon the religion or sect within a particular faith, understanding dogmas can often be far more important than understanding the social practices of these groups—sometimes because the social practices are more widely cultural or geographical and not first religious, and sometimes because the dogma is the foundation of the social practices themselves. Studying a ‘community’ does not mean we must suddenly switch to an examination of non-intellectual activity, least of all in religious communities. For example, in Christian religious communities, historically speaking, it has been the confessional documents which have provided the most significant defining feature of that community. These dogmas and ideas are the ‘social glue’, calling the historian to pay attention to them. This is not to say that historians of religion need to believe what was believed by those they study. However, a historian’s own lack of religion can make even the possibility of such beliefs quite incredible, inclining him to be reluctant to recognize them as a legitimate cause in historical events. This reluctance often leads to a search for practical causes outside of religious beliefs per se. This attitude among historians is certainly not universal, and is usually evident in varying degrees, but prevalent enough to deserve mention here. Quakers, Jews, and science would have been more complete if it had given a proportionate amount of attention to the primary theological documents or dogmas held by the communities discussed. Doing so, as explained above, would have helped Cantor achieve more fully his historiographical aim. In the case of Quaker faith, however, this does present an added challenge since the predominate feature of their theology—if it can be so characterized—is a decided distaste for creedal formulations. Yet even this dogma of anti-dogmatism is worth noting. Moreover, there are numerous sermons and manuals of piety that might have been consulted which reveal an implicit theology, even if not spelled out in terms of the traditional theological loci. At the very least, Quakers are Christians, and more discussion of the primary Christian document would have been appropriate, especially since Quakers were in their evangelical period for a large part of the period he investigates. Likewise, more attention to the relevant Jewish commentaries and interpretive tradition would have been warranted. In both cases, it is not merely direct references to holy writings which are important (of which there are some interesting cases described by Cantor), but how those texts shaped religionists as interpreters of nature. Chapters 6 and 8, on Quaker and Jewish ‘Attitudes and practices’ make a start in this direction, but could have helped his overall historiographical end if they had been developed further in the way suggested. Despite this weakness, Cantor’s attention to religious communities is a valuable step in the right direction. He has provided a great deal of careful research which leads the reader to desire an even more complete survey and analysis. More research, as suggested above, would help it to better achieve its goal of offering an important bridge principle in the historiography of science. It certainly seems plausible that this approach is capable of drawing together the micro and the macro—both at social and intellectual levels— because religion is so fundamentally human. Sadly, since many historians have tried so hard to write religion out of history, they have missed the opportunity to use it as a tool for unifying it. Cantor accepts its primacy in human affairs and has begun a line of research that one hopes others will develop.
J.M. Rampelt / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 286–289
References Cantor, G. (1991). Michael Faraday: Sandemanian and scientist. A study of science and religion in the nineteenth century. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Cantor, G. (2001). Quaker responses to Darwin. In J. H. Brooke, M. J. Osler, & J. M. van der Meer (Eds.), Science in theistic contexts: Cognitive dimensions (pp. 321– 342). Osiris, 2nd Ser., 16. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
289
Hart, D. G. (1999). The university gets religion: Religious studies in American higher education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins. Hooykaas, R. (1972). Religion and the rise of modern science. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Merton, R. K. (1938). Science, technology and society in seventeenth-century England. Osiris, 4(2). New York: Howard Fertig.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa
Essay Review
Religion and narrative building in the history of science Jason M. Rampelt The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge CB3 0BN, UK
When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
Quakers, Jews and science. Religious responses to modernity and the sciences in Britain, 1650–1900 Geoffrey Cantor; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, pp. xii+420, Price £59.00 hardback, ISBN 0-19-927668-4. ‘Science and Religion’, as an academic area of study, has thrived most within the study of the history of science. But the history of science brings its own historiographical problems which have yet to be resolved within its own disciplinary boundaries: grand narratives are accused of being Whiggish, and micro-studies have the obvious drawback of no application beyond their painfully limited scope. Science and religion, taken together, is able to help overcome this tension, since religious traditions have their own continuity and perpetuity built in. Geoffrey Cantor attempts to find the middle way between the grand narrative and the synchronic micro-study with his new book Quakers, Jews, and science. In this way, studies in science and religion may have something to offer back to their ‘host’ discipline, the history of science. Although there are divisions within these religions, there is no question that Jews and Quakers are communities worth consideration as groups. Consequently, Cantor devotes the first half of the book to revealing those social relations as they appear in the communities themselves (Chapter 2), education (Chapter 3), scientific institutions and societies (Chapter 4), and careers in science (Chapters 3 and 5). These chapters show that entering into a career in science, or even the study of it, was as difficult for a Jew or Quaker as entering society in general. This bar was high in the eighteenth century when the Royal Society suffered from cronyism, religious tests were still part of British law, and religious prejudices in general were strong. In the nineteenth century, when the Royal Society was reformed, religious tests were removed from the state and universities, and the rise of the industrial bourgeois class helped restructure society, Jews and Quakers found a more friendly home in British science. The book follows a two-part division: the first looks from a more sociological perspective, and the second part with a more intellectual one. The most interesting segment of the sociological part of this book is Chapter 5, ‘Trajectories in science’, which exE-mail address: [email protected] 0039-3681/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2008.03.012
plores the various career paths of Quakers and Jews in the sciences. By including travelers, traders, amateurs, industrialists, educators, and even social scientists, Cantor captures a large part of the scientific community who might otherwise go unnoticed, either because they are not a part of establishment science, or happened to serve only the interests of their religious community. The final section of this chapter is certainly the best, where Cantor describes the statistical work of John S. Rowntree (Quaker) and Joseph Jacobs (Jew). Rowntree, working from the wealth of statistics kept by the Quakers themselves, won a prize essay posted by the Quakers, where he used statistical arguments to explain the decline of the Quaker community, and how it should be remedied. Joseph Jacobs, trained in Francis Galton’s methods of racial statistics at the University of London, argued statistically against accusations that Jews were the bane of society. But Jacobs also argued against assertions of fellow Jews that their race was somehow superior, either innately, or by improved health under Mosaic corporeal regulation. Here, Cantor shows some significant connections between the particular religious identities of Quakers and Jews, and their scientific work. This excellent chapter is only marred by the publisher’s failure to typeset correctly the footnotes on pp. 204–224, putting many on the wrong page, and leaving four missing at the end of the chapter. At the end of the book, Cantor admits that the conclusions drawn from his sociological research were not particular to science (p. 354). This result is not so much an oversight of Cantor’s as it is a demonstration that religion has been widely misunderstood in academic discussions about it. Religion is not merely, or even primarily, a collection of social practices, but must include individual intellectual commitments. These beliefs may then have social ramifications, but they are first intellectual beliefs. Granted, this is contested territory, but it does clarify matters and raise new questions. So, for example, Cantor’s analysis is most acute when he describes how the split between evangelicals and moderates within nineteenth-century Quakerism affected attitudes towards Darwin’s theory of evolution. The insular ghettoization of the evangelicals, and thus failure to confront Darwin’s ideas, is not explained by their insularity, but is the manifest result of their strong biblicism. The
J.M. Rampelt / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 286–289
revised theology of the Quaker evangelical gave less attention to the Inner Light, but stayed inward by redirecting that attention to the biblical text. This did not result in opposition to Darwin, but shows how the uniquely Quaker biblicism prevented many from really having an opinion at all. Here, the Quaker theology and mindset provide the foundation for understanding their organization as a social group and also their attitude towards science. The reader may draw such a conclusion from the book, but the overriding sociological focus would not encourage him to do so. The result of taking belief at the fore in studies of ‘Science and Religion’ is that intellectual history will inevitably require some primacy. According to the author, the historiographical goal of Quakers, Jews, and science is: to develop an approach in between the big picture narratives of Merton and Hooykaas and the micro studies provided by biography. Between these two extremes lies an intermediate perspective constituted by religious communities, such as churches, sects, and denominations. (P. 3) That Cantor has successfully described the various ways in which science touched upon the lives of Quakers and Jews in his period, there is no doubt. But it is not clear that he has provided a unified view of those groups. Certainly, his exposition of the Quakers comes out better, particularly in the way that he linked their self-conscious insularity (social perspective), their doctrine of the Inner Light (intellectual perspective), and their propensity for individual investigative and empirical scientific research. Cantor’s analysis here is reminiscent of the best parts of his biography of the sectarian physicist Michael Faraday.1 However, his presentation of the Jewish community is less illuminating if we judge him according to the aims set forth in his Introduction. Part of the reason may be that the Jewish community was already divided along their own cultural lines before ever arriving in Britain, and thus established independent communities when they arrived. Yet, even within these separate groups, Cantor has not been able to articulate a convincing synthesis of Jewish social context, religious ideology, and resulting scientific practice. Perhaps Cantor’s comparison of Quakers and Jews could have come out differently if he had given more attention to another segment of the Jewish population in Britain. At various points throughout the book, he makes brief references to the wave of Jewish immigrants from Europe settling in Britain who had practices far different than the existing Jewish population: They established their own small synagogues and Yiddish newspapers, their voices rarely heard in the Jewish Chronicle or Jewish World. The traditional, even primitive, forms of Judaism practised by these immigrants shocked many within the establishment. (P. 336) Cantor does not say more, but leaves the reader wondering about their perspective on science. The more bookish life of these chasidim, where social insularity and ostracism is a virtue rather than an obstacle to be overcome, is a sharp contrast to the established Jewish aristocracy discussed by Cantor. His conclusion that in a large part Jewish interest and attitudes in science came through a desire for professional success and social mobility is a direct result of limiting his view of Judaism to this London majority. On the face of it, the chasidim seem more intellectualist in the practice of their religion and might prove a useful test case for comparing Jewish and Christian attitudes towards science. This would, however, require a scholar who reads Yiddish.
1 2
287
One is thus left at the end of the book with a familiar conclusion about the fate of minorities. In general, science will go unchallenged among religions where the religion is toned down. Cantor does suggest some conclusions about the unique contact between Quakers and Jews with science: Quakers felt at home with empirical work and Jews with the theoretical, but he does not develop this idea. For the most part, science and religion did not meet very fruitfully in either context because there was little to be gained on the part of science—its institutions, schools, and practitioners— from religion. And religion, in the particularly low-intensity forms of Quakerism and Judaism discussed, had little to lose in accepting science, and socially had more to gain. To be fair, the book does not set out to describe the interrelations between science and religion in the traditional sense. That is, Cantor’s primary goal is not to show how science played a role in religious thought or practice, or religion played a role in scientific thought or practice. So, even though he does entertain some of these issues, they are not the main point. Rather, he is interested in the historiographical question of how to bring together the thematically broad and diachronic with the local and synchronic in the history of science in Britain from 1650 to 1900. If we consider some larger narrative themes in the history of science such as state and religious control of institutions (such as universities), social stratification and mobility, and industry and technology, we can safely say that Cantor has successfully provided a bridge principle to the lives of some scientists in describing the role of two longstanding British religious communities. Cantor has informatively linked individual scientists to their religious communities, and those communities to the larger scientific community. This gives the simultaneously wide and narrow perspective possible when religion is used within the architecture of the study. Religion, perhaps uniquely, cuts across a wider range of cultural profiles, much as a biography of a scientist does, yet also has the capacity to speak for a larger number of individuals at the same time, in a way that a biography cannot. There is one respect, however, in which Quakers, Jews, and science does not meet its historiographical aim. When Cantor gives examples of the ‘big picture narratives’, he named Robert Merton (1938)2 and Reijer Hooykaas (1972). Indeed, their claims were much wider: Merton argued that modern science owed its origin to Puritanism and Hooykaas more broadly to Christianity in the West. Merton and Hooykaas were interested not only in the social structures which came with religion, but also, if not more importantly, in the religious mindset which purportedly brought about modern science. Their grand narratives were decidedly intellectual ones, much in keeping with the Scientific Revolution historiography, if not in a large part continuous with it. In the second part of Quakers, Jews, and science, Cantor does connect certain pieces of religious ideology with the ideas, motivations, or methods of some scientists in those traditions, but the upward connection does not carry on from that level to a wider intellectual history of science. That is to say that there seems to be a piece missing from the analogous analysis he provides at the sociological level. From a sociological perspective, Cantor successfully builds a bridge from the specifics of individual scientists, through their religious community, and on to wider social themes in a larger national and cultural narrative. But from the perspective of intellectual history, he builds a bridge between the ideas of individual scientists to their religious community—yet there the bridge stops. It does not continue onwards into any larger intellectual narrative. So, as a historiographical middle stage between the macro and micro, the intellectual side of this study has connections between the
Cantor (1991). See in particular Ch. 8, ‘Faraday on scientific method’. It is likely that Cantor has in mind the Mertonian legacy—the ‘Merton thesis’—when speaking of Merton here.
288
J.M. Rampelt / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 286–289
middle and the micro, but not the middle and the macro. The bridge is present for individuals such as Rowntree and Jacobs mentioned above, but not for their respective religious groups as whole social bodies. There are several possible reasons why Cantor does not extend this bridge in the way we might have expected. More space devoted to ideological synergies in science and religion might have given the necessary material to finish that bridge. As discussed above, this may mean greater consideration for the chasidim among the Jews, and perhaps also those who left Quakerism, but not Christianity. These even smaller minorities may not figure greatly in a social sense, but may have been more significant to their traditions in an intellectual way. A second possible reason why Cantor does not finish the proposed intellectual micro/ macro-history bridge may be the primarily sociological definition of religion. This naturally makes it harder to provide a link between a religious community and a larger narrative about philosophy, theology, or more generally, the history of ideas. A third reason could be the more extreme position which rejects even the possibility of any larger intellectual narrative altogether, making such a connection impossible or unwarranted. Although Cantor takes pains to show that the study of religion must not ignore sociological factors, he does not believe religion is comprehended by them (Cantor, 2001). So this last, more extreme position can be eliminated in Cantor’s case. The reason for the missing link on the intellectual side of the book is most likely the second reason, which ultimately leads you to the first as well. Cantor certainly did not ignore completely the ideological aspect of the groups he discussed, but spent much less time exploring this; around thirty percent less, judging by page numbers. And if he had allowed intellectual principles more into the definitions of these groups in the first place, he might have been better equipped to complete the picture in the second half of the book. The titles of Chapters 6 and 8 are revealing. Although they are devoted to the relevant points of religious ideology among Quakers and Jews, they are named, ‘Attitudes and practices’, not ‘Theology’, or more vaguely, ‘Religious ideology’. This points out a weakness which is increasingly evident not only in studies of ‘Science and Religion’, but also in the academic study of religion more broadly. The very preference for the name ‘religion’ as opposed to ‘theology’ illustrates the point. As universities in the West over the last few centuries became concerned with ever widening areas of knowledge, their primary function as divinity schools became diluted. This was not necessarily a move against religion. That did not manifest itself fully in the universities until around the turn of the century, when theology departments were turned into religious studies departments.3 In this shift, religion became more and more a study of peculiar social phenomena, like other social phenomena, and not a science of God. Further, it was necessary to realize the equal place of other religions, and so Christianity became one among many. For the historian, this means a shift in how we tend to think about religious people and their communities. By rejecting any personal commitment to the reality of a supernatural realm and reducing religion to sociology and psychology, theology becomes less important as a category of historical interest. Theology is an important category only if we assume that holy texts really do contain eternal truths given by God, and that these tell people what to think and how to behave. With that assumption gone from the historian’s own set of beliefs, religious dogmas move into the background, often forgotten in the overall presentation of a religious character or group. The loss is significant since religious dogmas are the chief intellectual component of religions. It
3
See, for example, Hart (1999).
is a rather obvious statement to make, but lately it seems to need saying. If we ignore religious dogmas as expressed in confessions of faith, theological expositions, and manuals of piety in our historical research we ignore a central driving force operating within religious persons and communities. Depending upon the religion or sect within a particular faith, understanding dogmas can often be far more important than understanding the social practices of these groups—sometimes because the social practices are more widely cultural or geographical and not first religious, and sometimes because the dogma is the foundation of the social practices themselves. Studying a ‘community’ does not mean we must suddenly switch to an examination of non-intellectual activity, least of all in religious communities. For example, in Christian religious communities, historically speaking, it has been the confessional documents which have provided the most significant defining feature of that community. These dogmas and ideas are the ‘social glue’, calling the historian to pay attention to them. This is not to say that historians of religion need to believe what was believed by those they study. However, a historian’s own lack of religion can make even the possibility of such beliefs quite incredible, inclining him to be reluctant to recognize them as a legitimate cause in historical events. This reluctance often leads to a search for practical causes outside of religious beliefs per se. This attitude among historians is certainly not universal, and is usually evident in varying degrees, but prevalent enough to deserve mention here. Quakers, Jews, and science would have been more complete if it had given a proportionate amount of attention to the primary theological documents or dogmas held by the communities discussed. Doing so, as explained above, would have helped Cantor achieve more fully his historiographical aim. In the case of Quaker faith, however, this does present an added challenge since the predominate feature of their theology—if it can be so characterized—is a decided distaste for creedal formulations. Yet even this dogma of anti-dogmatism is worth noting. Moreover, there are numerous sermons and manuals of piety that might have been consulted which reveal an implicit theology, even if not spelled out in terms of the traditional theological loci. At the very least, Quakers are Christians, and more discussion of the primary Christian document would have been appropriate, especially since Quakers were in their evangelical period for a large part of the period he investigates. Likewise, more attention to the relevant Jewish commentaries and interpretive tradition would have been warranted. In both cases, it is not merely direct references to holy writings which are important (of which there are some interesting cases described by Cantor), but how those texts shaped religionists as interpreters of nature. Chapters 6 and 8, on Quaker and Jewish ‘Attitudes and practices’ make a start in this direction, but could have helped his overall historiographical end if they had been developed further in the way suggested. Despite this weakness, Cantor’s attention to religious communities is a valuable step in the right direction. He has provided a great deal of careful research which leads the reader to desire an even more complete survey and analysis. More research, as suggested above, would help it to better achieve its goal of offering an important bridge principle in the historiography of science. It certainly seems plausible that this approach is capable of drawing together the micro and the macro—both at social and intellectual levels— because religion is so fundamentally human. Sadly, since many historians have tried so hard to write religion out of history, they have missed the opportunity to use it as a tool for unifying it. Cantor accepts its primacy in human affairs and has begun a line of research that one hopes others will develop.
J.M. Rampelt / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 286–289
References Cantor, G. (1991). Michael Faraday: Sandemanian and scientist. A study of science and religion in the nineteenth century. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Cantor, G. (2001). Quaker responses to Darwin. In J. H. Brooke, M. J. Osler, & J. M. van der Meer (Eds.), Science in theistic contexts: Cognitive dimensions (pp. 321– 342). Osiris, 2nd Ser., 16. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Hart, D. G. (1999). The university gets religion: Religious studies in American higher education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins. Hooykaas, R. (1972). Religion and the rise of modern science. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Merton, R. K. (1938). Science, technology and society in seventeenth-century England. Osiris, 4(2). New York: Howard Fertig.