Book Review
Natural Questions
God's Planet by Owen Gingerich
Harvard University Press, 2014
(170 pages, $19.95, hardcover)
Rare are the books that combine brevity with clarity, and delight with instruction. This is one. It is also nicely produced and agreeable to hold and read: a pleasure, therefore, to review. The author, Owen Gingerich, is emeritus professor of astronomy and history of science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The book's arrangement could hardly be simpler: three great scientists in three short chapters. Each chapter preps us with an expert introduction to the scientist's thought and then asks us to consider the question of whether he was right.
We begin and end with astronomers—Nicolaus Copernicus from the sixteenth century and Fred Hoyle from the twentieth. In between we consider the nineteenth-century naturalist and evolutionist Charles Darwin.
The Big Question
So who are we, you may wonder, to be deciding whether Copernicus, Darwin, and Hoyle are right? But that's not exactly our assignment. Instead, Gingerich prepares us to discover on our own a more fundamental question, and to answer it for ourselves. He gets us to see that there is something like faith involved in declaring any one of these scientists to have been right. What I will call Gingerich's "big question," underlying the leading one about rightness, is whether the natural sciences contain within themselves the answers to questions about the history, nature, and significance of our world and of human life. The reply Gingerich expects us to arrive at is no, though even in that negative we have to be careful.
Some Christians, for example, would reply in the negative, but for the wrong reason. These would be Christians who like to keep their religion and their science in separate compartments, so they can be secular during the week and Christian on Sunday. They would say science isn't the full answer, because it doesn't work on Sunday. But this is not what Gingerich is after.
For similar reasons, he disagrees with atheistic scientists who are prepared to agree with the Sunday Christians, if only to get the Creationists off their back. In that connection, Gingerich likes to cite his late Harvard colleague, Stephen J. Gould. Gould was prepared to concede that both religion and science can be regarded as authorities in their own domains, provided these two "magisteria" do not overlap. Let religion have its own authority, Gould thought, as long as it doesn't try to lecture to scientists.
That is a scientist's negative answer to Gingerich's big question, but still not the one he is looking for. Science cannot be self-sufficient, but not because religion is a separate magisterium. Quite the contrary. The two magisteria overlap, and religion, or at least the metaphysical part once called "natural religion," is indispensable to science. Good science, Gingerich argues, must be consistent not only with the convictions of its leading theoreticians but also with those of what he calls a "broader cultural milieu." That milieu holds views that are metaphysical and religious.
Magisterial Approaches
Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).
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