Science and Religion

Historians have told two big stories about the intersection of science, religion, and politics in the modern United States. The better-known account tracks the mobilization of conservative evangelicals against Darwinian evolution, with the Scopes Trial and the creationist campaigns of the “Age of Reagan” as narrative bookends. A less popular but even more dramatic story looks to the other end of the theological spectrum. It finds in the twentieth century the culmination of the self-evisceration of a once robust American Christianity—the working out, in various cultural and institutional arenas, of a secularization process touched off when theological liberals and modernists ceded cognitive authority to science in the decades around the turn of the century.

Strikingly, both accounts largely ignore the period from 1945 to 1973, which brought profound changes in American political cultures, ideologies, and institutions. My current project uses a series of postwar episodes to tell an entirely different story about science, religion, and American politics. The narrative centers on the extension of science’s authority into the realm of the human, a result assiduously sought by many natural and human scientists and strenuously resisted by leading humanists and religiously committed thinkers. These critics sought to carve out a protected domain for their own approaches by insisting that science could not, by definition, speak to questions of value or meaning.

My contribution to the roundtable will illustrate these postwar dynamics by touching on a number of episodes. I will focus especially on how cyberneticists and systems theorists such as Norbert Wiener and Kenneth E. Boulding spoke to religious questions and how social scientists at Notre Dame, Fordham, and the Catholic University of America navigated what many others at the time saw as a contradiction between their religious beliefs and their professional identities.