Abstract
Over 50 years ago, Zygon: The Journal of Science and Religion was launched to discuss ‘the mutual implications of contemporary scientific knowledge and the religious values of the world’ (Burhoe, 1966). Since then, the interdisciplinary field of science and religion has gained root in universities around the world. However, scholars are yet to overcome the focus on Western Christendom in their explorations. This shortcoming is addressed to a great extent by the book Science and Religion: East and West edited by Yiftach Fehige.
Yiftach Fehige follows the rise of ‘science and religion’ as an academic field, acknowledging the field’s evident Eurocentrism and the need to explore the non-West. This call has gained traction with scholarship shifting gears from the ‘conflict thesis’ towards the ‘complexity thesis’—that there is no simple pattern in the social history of science–religion relations. Taking this forward, Varadaraja V. Raman submits that ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ science are distinct not in chronology but ‘because of the different factors in their construction’ (p. 39). Attempts to revive the ancient into the framework of modern science or to claim modern science as ‘Western’ are both erroneous. Raman emphasises that science is the ‘common pursuit’ (p. 46) of all humanity and hence needs to be identified as ‘transnational’ (p. 43).
Anne Harrington presents the case of how Japanese Zen Buddhism was fashioned into a Western psychotherapeutic tool by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki in the America of the 1950s. This recalibration was aided by philanthropists, Western psychologists and Suzuki’s own knowledge of Western philosophy. The various actors in this case employed the categories of ‘East’ and ‘West’ to advance different agendas, but in a ‘strangely sincere and idealistic East–West encounter’ (p. 64).
David Gosling finds the response of educated Indians to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species unproblematic yet complex. Using the subaltern studies’ approach to review the vernacular writings of various Hindu reformers, Gosling submits that most of them (Vivekananda, in particular) assimilated selected features of Darwinism into Indian philosophical thought while firmly establishing the ‘self-sufficiency and national identity’ (p. 85) of the Hindu spiritual tradition. A. Raghuramaraju adds to the discussion, identifying three ways in which modern science and religion relate in Indian history. The first was the modernist approach of accepting science based on a critique of religion. The second was mutual exchange—which Vivekananda promoted while emphasising the ‘superior’ status of Hindu religion. The last is a rejection of modern science claiming incompatibility with Indian philosophical thought.
Continuing the dialogue further, C. Mackenzie Brown scrutinises the Indian spiritual elements in Jagadish Chandra Bose’s scientific study of the responses of living and non-living matter. While the Vedic inspiration behind Bose’s work was celebrated by his fellow Indians, Brown submits that it proved disastrous for his career. However, he adds that Bose’s findings did contribute to the emerging field of plant neurobiology.
Nalini Bhushan elaborates how two philosophers teaching in Indian universities during the 1930s and 1940s—S.S. Suryanarayana Sastri and A.C. Mukerji—amalgamated ideas from Indian classical philosophy and modern science to make Indian philosophy relevant to the modern world. Their articulation of the Advaita Vedanta School of philosophy using categories of Western science and philosophy helped explain that ‘physics and psychology (are) … part of a single project’ (p. 124).
Renny Thomas’ ethnographic account looks at the belief systems (or the lack of it) of scientists of an elite scientific institution in India. Thomas shows that atheist Indian scientists may not believe in God or religion ‘but they “belong” to the larger cultural framework of these religions’ (p. 155). Understanding this Indian form of atheism, Thomas suggests, requires moving away from Western parallels.
In the only chapter to discuss the cultural exchanges of Christianity in India, John B. Lourdusamy analyses the methods used by two European Jesuits to legitimate conversion in southern India during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Italian Robert de Nobili used Thomist epistemological categories to grasp Indian thinking about religion while the Frenchman Jean Venant Bouchet’s used his observational skills to seek ‘interconnectedness between ancient Hindu, Semitic and Greek cultures’ (p. 170). The use of a ‘scientific (rational) approach’ helped the Jesuits understand the local sensitivities without ‘other-ing’ the ‘Other’, ultimately serving the cause of the Jesuit mission in India.
In the first of two chapters to discuss ‘Islamic science’, Stefano Bigliardi maps the many ways in which Muslim scholars of the ‘Aligarh school’ adopted a ‘missionary approach’ for introducing Islam values in science. Bigliardi observes that the protagonists of the Aligarh school focused on promoting knowledge validated by Koranic principles but never advocated the superiority of Islamic religious philosophy over other traditions. In the second chapter, Paul Greenham engages critically with the historiography of Islamic science. He cautions against the use of modern categories to describe the pre-modern, an error committed by some historians of Islamic science. He uses the case of medieval Islamic alchemy advocated by the Persian Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi and calls for a modification of the category of ‘Islamic science’ to ‘medieval Islamic natural science’ (p. 188).
Efthymios Nicolaidis analyses the social history of how Greek scholars in the Eastern Orthodox Church came under the influence of Western natural philosophy from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Nicolaidis highlights two important individuals—Theophilos Korydalleus and Chrysanthos Notaras—who not only introduced science education within their constituencies in Eastern Europe but also remained surprisingly open to positivistic and heliocentric ideas of God and Nature.
The book presents an enlightening introduction, as Fehige writes, ‘to enable a revision of a number of misconceptions concerning the relationship between science and religion at the intersection of East and West’ (p. 1). While the majority of the book is focused on the Indian subcontinent, it contains a plurality of contexts employing a diversity of methodologies from ethnography to historiography. The book could have ventured to explore science–religion relations beyond Asia, and other religions which may have only oral traditions. But the volume is certainly a valuable addition not only to its own field but also to other related fields including the sociology of knowledge and science, technology and society studies.