My name is John Evans, I'm a professor of sociology of religion at the University of California at San Diego. And the question of whether or not religious public is in conflict with science is something we hear all the time. You know, the most famous of these supposed battles was Galileo versus the Catholic Church long ago. Another battle that's often mentioned is over Darwin. Scientists look at the fossil record and conclude that the Earth is a certain age and humans came from a certain place, and religious people supposedly looked to the Bible and come to a different conclusion. So, if you listen to people like Richard Dawkins, he would say that religion and science are incompatible ways of knowing about the world. And how would you determine the age of the Earth? The scientist would say it's, you know, 4.5 billion years old as we can tell through chemical analysis of rocks and so on. Or, in a conservative Protestant version, the Earth is six to seven thousand years old – that would be known through the Bible. These are supposed incompatible ways of knowing about the world. So, since this is, I believe, the only social science lecture in this course, I'm going to emphasize how a social science perspective is different from that you'll be hearing from theologians, scientists, historians, and philosophers. So here's what I'm gonna be talking about in the lecture here. First, I want to talk about the sociology of religion and science versus other academic perspectives we could be taking on this topic. I want to introduce debates over human evolution as an ongoing example that I'll be using throughout this course. And then, I want to talk about three possible ways that religious people and science could be in conflict, what I will call systemic knowledge conflict, secondly, propositional knowledge conflict, and finally, moral conflict. I want to talk about the official teachings in the major traditions about religion and science in the West, and then the evaluation of whether or not empirically it is correct that religious public is in conflict with science, and then evaluation at the end of whether or not it's possible that religious public is in what I would call moral conflict with science. So, the first obvious question is I just claimed that I'm a social scientist, what does that actually mean? Social science is the examination of essentially the relationships between people and why people do things. So the best example is to compare to psychology. Psychology looks at individuals and the individual's mindset and the like, things like attitudes and personality and the like. Social science ultimately is about their interactions between people. The other thing to know about social science, and this is in comparison to many other of the lectures you'll hear in this course, is that it's typically not normative in its analysis. It tries to be essentially scientific in objectively analyzing data, even though social scientists might use their own values to decide what topic to investigate. But once they start to investigate, they try to be as neutral as possible. Now, when I say social science, whereas in theory, any social scientist could be examining religion and science for degrees, for reasons of sort of the history of the social sciences, it's really sociologists and anthropologists who've examined this exact question. So let me briefly make a distinction between the social science approach to religion and science and the others. So let's look at theology. Theology is based upon logical derivations from faith claims. So, it might ask, you know, does the Bible really say that the Earth is 6,600 years old, for example. And I'm sure as you'll be hearing in other lectures in this course, you could ask, you know, are certain theological concepts consistent with scientific descriptions of the world? Philosophy, on the other hand, would ask, is there a justification for saying that the Earth is 6,600 years old? Is this logical? Sociology asks a different question, and social science more generally. What sort of person thinks the Earth is 6,600 years old? Where did they learn that, for example. Why do conservative Protestant believe this fact claim and not some other fact claim? Social sciences do not answer religion and science questions directly, but ask how others, such as the public, answer them and why. So history is actually interesting, it's the same approach as social science, but the obvious difference being that it looks at, historically, the same sorts of questions but, you know, what would people in the 19th century have thought and why. But now, there's a major difference that I will talk about here in this lecture which is theology, philosophy, and science are all engaged in what I would call elite behavior. Sociologists don't mean by elite something negative, there's this basic factual term. But if you look at theologians and philosophers who are in this debate, they all have a Ph.D. in something, which already defines them as some very rarified slice of the public. Historians often try to look at what regular people at the time would have thought, but historically, especially the further you go back in time, the only records that are available are from elites. So, the social scientists are really the only people who get to look at what ordinary citizens of the world think about these sorts of issues. Now, depending on what you're interested in, there's a drawback to this. So, I'm interested in influential ideas in a society and what ends up happening. So, who gets to influence, for example, laws, about what's taught in schools, and the like. And therefore, I don't talk about different religious systems that there are very few people who are members of in a society. So in the United States, which is my focus, I am not going to be talking about Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and the like because there are so few practitioners of these religions in the US. So, I want to give one final caveat which I'm sure you can tell from my accent, which is I'm an American, and I've largely focused my research on the American context so I'll be using mostly examples from that case. If I was going to focus on Europe. I think there would have to be a larger focus on Islam. Islam in the United States is a little bit under two percent of the population at present. What I want to use as my recurring example here is human origins, which has been an ongoing debate about religion and science. And my ongoing example, let's start with the Christian perspective on this, which comes from the Book of Genesis. And I will not read every last bit of this for you, but this comes from the Book of Genesis and basically God saying, "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds." So, God creates various sorts of animals. And then, "Let us make mankind in our image." In other words God created humans through a divine act all at once, and then says be fruitful and multiply and essentially be in charge of all of creation. So, God created animals on one day, God created humans from essentially the dirt on another day, God emphasized that humans are not animals because God put humans in charge of the animals and the plants, the first humans were called Adam and Eve, and this all happened six or seven thousand years ago. I think most people are familiar, whether or not you believe in this or not, most people are familiar with this narrative. Now the contrasting view is this scientific version of human evolution, most famously associated with Charles Darwin. So, you know, in contrast to that perspective, humans started with bacteria and evolution. You go through fish, up into various sorts of primates, and at the very end of the story there is a separation between, you know, Cro-Magnon man and other sorts of prehuman primates, you ended up with us, humans. So, you know, you go into great detail about the distinctions between the various forms of primates over time, but that's the basic story, the scientific version of human origins. So, this will be my recurring examples to you, which is, do you believe the traditional Christian version of human origins or the scientific version of human origins?
