Document(s) 8 of 10

This publication, on the International Development Research Centre's (IDRC's) Science, Religion, and Development project, features personal essays on the human-level interaction of science, religion, and development (SRD). The appearance of this publication at this juncture of human history is both timely and insightful. Calls for more "people-centred" development and for a higher quality of life beyond the culture of consumption are increasing. This implies what some are calling a qualitative step in human consciousness. Significant changes have occurred in the world agenda and in scholarly reflections on these changes since my earlier research on behalf of IDRC. The results of my work, carried out in 1994, were published under the title Culture, Spirituality, and Economic Development: Opening a Dialogue (Ryan 1995). This unconventional research was intended to respond to a concern voiced in a conversation with a Muslim leader that development research did not seriously take into account the influence of local cultural and religious values, systems, and institutions. A series of interviews conducted in a number of developing countries uncovered a strong consensus among nearly 200 theoreticians and practitioners in the international development field that local cultural and religious values must be better integrated into research on sustainable and equitable development.

That early study has generally been welcomed. The major objections to it have come from Western researchers who fear that if cultural and religious values form part of the development paradigm, it will jeopardize some human advances stemming from the Enlightenment. With justification, they resist the spectre of reintroducing paralyzing and self-defeating concepts and practices, such as fatalism and the subordination of women, which are still prevalent in some traditional cultures and religions. Of course, those who are still convinced that the global free market's invisible magic is adequate to the job of increasing human well-being see no need to introduce culture or religion into the development paradigm.

The field of research on religion and development is much more crowded in 2000 than it was in 1994. IDRC can no longer claim to be a pioneer in it, although its attempt to articulate the relationship among the fields of SRD still sets it apart. But now other organizations are taking up related questions. Space limitations require that I mention but a few of these endeavours. I offer as an indication of the sheer volume of these new inquiries a bibliography issued by the Centre for Development Research in Copenhagen, Denmark, in February 1998, Religion and Development: A Bibliography (CDRLS 1998). It lists 435 new entries between 1 January 1993 and 17 April 1997. This is a spectacular increase in work on this ambiguous topic for so short a period, especially considering that the Danish listing is still far from complete. Most of the works listed in this bibliography seem to have been written in response to recent world developments in the dynamic process of globalization. Many people, assuming that the current global free-market paradigm, with its Western accompaniments, is inevitably universal believe that globalization is threatening to homogenize local cultural and religious values and institutions.

The various faiths have themselves long been involved in development efforts, but recognition of the relationship between religion, development, and world affairs has also come from other, more unexpected quarters. James Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank, himself a practicing Jew, recently initiated a dialogue with the leaders of nine of the world's faiths to find a way to cooperate in their efforts to rid the world of poverty and misery. Likewise, the us State Department, confronted with the reality of Islamic fundamentalism, recently abandoned its long-accepted taboo against reporting religion in official diplomatic dispatches as an influence or causal factor in world affairs. Another recent and unexpected champion for the powerful, if ambiguous, influence of religion and culture in shaping civilizations is Samuel Huntington, a well-known political scientist from Harvard University. In his controversial book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Huntington 1996), he argued that cultures and religions are key factors in shaping world affairs. This perspective clearly flies in the face of The Economist's persevering declaration that "Asian values" have had no significant influence on Asia's recent rapid economic development.

Ecologists, too, are turning to religion for sympathetic support and motivation. For example, the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) at Harvard University has, over the last few years, involved more than 1 000 scholars — religionists, scientists, and ecologists — in its ongoing forum on the religions of the world and ecology. The forum aims to recover vision and meaning from religious teachings to enlighten and motivate people to act decisively on the current global ecological agenda.

Among economists, however, Herman Daly still seems to be uncommon: in his recent book, Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (Daly 1996), he specifically invoked religious insight from the Hebrew scriptures to ground the ethical principles he considers necessary for managing, through public policy, limits to both natural capital and personal income to achieve sustainable development.

It is also evident, I believe, that the conversation between science and religion has intensified at the opening of the new millennium. In the last 2 years, articles have appeared in publications such as Science ("Science and God: A Warming Trend?" [Easterbrook 1997]), The New York Times on the Web ("Science and Religion: Bridging the Great Divide" [Johnson 1998]), and Newsweek (as a front-cover feature) ("Science Finds God" [Begley 1998]). But popular articles discussing questions like these represent only the front edge of a long-standing research problematic. J.M. Templeton and the John Templeton Foundation have long been investing significant resources in numerous efforts to bring rapprochement and increased understanding between science and religion. John Paul II's remarks on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (mathematical principles of natural science) are also highly relevant: "'The unprecedented opportunity we have today is for a common interactive relationship' in which science and religion retain their own integrity and yet are 'open to the discoveries and insights of the other'" (John Paul II 1988, p. 375). And at the September 1998 CSWR conference on ecology and religion, scientists brought the following question to the table: Can religions of the world adjust their own world visions, stories, and myths of creation to enhance and put soul, meaning, and motivation into scientists' current theory of how the universe is unfolding since the initial "big bang"?

Increased desire for citizen participation and accompanying cynicism about public institutions, especially government, have led to a worldwide explosion of nonprofit nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and coalitions of such NGOs. This offers us another good example of the new awareness and incorporation of religion into discourses until recently considered secular; increasingly, groupings of NGOs in every sector of society include faith-community membership. Recent NGO successes include lobbying for the International Land Mine Agreement, stalemating the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment, and blocking the construction of the Narmada Dam in India. These are just a few of the more significant and current international issues in which NGOs have played a large role. Some people have become optimistic — probably too quickly — that these new balances of power, much aided by the Internet's ability to connect millions of like-minded people worldwide, signify the ultimate death knell for monopoly power in all its multiple forms.

For my present purpose of reflecting on our authors' essays, perhaps the most significant development is the widespread deprivatization of religion and churches to give them a more active role in the public forum. This process was well-documented in the work of sociologist José Casanova of the New School for Social Research. The central thesis of his book, Public Religions in the Modern World (Casanova 1994), is that we are witnessing everywhere the deprivatization of religion. Casanova supported his thesis through sociohistorical case studies in Brazil, Poland, Spain, and the United States and corroborating references to similar happenings on other continents, such as the Islamic revolution in Iran. He documented the fact that "religious traditions throughout the world are refusing to accept the marginal and privileged role which theories of modernity as well as theories of secularization had reserved for them" (Casanova 1994, p. 234). In other words, for Casanova, the narrow secular point of view that holds that religion is dying or withering away is itself now dead. And more and more sociologists are recognizing this trend. But this is not the place to develop Casanova's unexpected thesis; it is enough to take seriously the cocky challenge he threw at reductionist social scientists in the final paragraph of his book:

Western modernity is at a crossroads. If it does not enter into a creative dialogue with the other, with those traditions which are challenging its identity, modernity will most likely triumph. But it may end up being devoured by the inflexible, inhuman logic of its own creations. It would be profoundly ironic if, after all the beatings it has received from modernity, religion could somehow unintentionally help modernity to save itself.

Casanova (1994, p. 234)

The issue, then, is no longer whether there should be a dialogue between the fields of SRD. It is already happening, piecemeal, in various sectors. Rather, the key question is how to find a productive methodology for this type of conversation. How can these very different kinds of knowledge, diverse kinds of rationality, be brought together so that they can benefit from the insights of the others without encroaching on the integrity of the other realms of knowledge? We are not without historical precedents for such interactions. Religious belief has long accepted the unity and interconnectedness of all creation, which science is just now coming to understand and endorse. And modern science painfully brought Christians to the realization that the sun did not, in fact, circle the Earth, as they had always assumed. But these historical shifts offer little in terms of models for the mediation of constructive interaction.

For some, the answer lies in a new and more compelling global rational ethic. Experience shows us, however, that for the great majority of people, reasonableness alone simply does not lead to decisive action as effectively as belief. Belief, whether religious or secular, engages the human will and emotions, as well as the human intellect; indeed, it engages the whole human being. So what is to be our way of proceeding? Obviously, it has to be interdisciplinary in the sense that each side has to recognize humbly both the strengths and the weaknesses of the other's approach. A jousting of infallibilities will prove futile. The goal cannot be religious conversion, although a degree of intellectual conversion is probably necessary for the participants to become open and empathetic to each other's beliefs and convictions. Even the politely tolerant approach of certain scientists, such as distinguished biologist E.O. Wilson, would likely prove counterproductive. As he reiterated at the CSWR meeting, he accepts the usefulness of, even the need for, dialogue between science and religion but steadfastly holds that a time will come when biology will no longer need any help from religion, because it will itself have decoded the whole human story.

This IDRC team of researchers chose the essay approach to present evidence of how individual scientists–believers can harmonize their personal understandings of the various epistemologies, rationalities, and assumptions involved in the discourses of SRD. If we, as individual believers–scientists, can experience a unity of consciousness and understanding in our daily work, why should it not be possible for other groups of scientists and believers to achieve, or at least appreciate, the benefits of an analogous experience of shared consciousness and understanding?

Some believers, such as the renowned Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, have long been advocating the development of a new (or rediscovered) cosmology as an overarching framework to provide, as in earlier times, a common point of reference to facilitate dialogue between religion and science. I believe that Dr Baharuddin is sympathetic to this approach in her own efforts to establish that her Islamic faith is not in contradiction with her science of biology. A key insight in this approach is, I believe, that many statements in science and religion are not contradictories as they at first appear. Rather, they are contraries — different ways of understanding the same reality that can often be harmonized at a different level of knowledge or integrated within ancillary fields (such as development) that have human well-being as their primary goal. For example, Dr Baum is at peace with his understanding that scientific and religious approaches produce different kinds of knowledge that can be mutually beneficial to each other, provided that scientists and believers are at least empathetic to each other's beliefs and convictions, whether secular or sacred. Like an increasing number of social scientists, he has little difficulty acknowledging the personal influence of religion on his scholarship or adding religion as an endogenous variable in his sociological analysis.

Today, most believers want evidence that their faith is not conceptually in contradiction to the findings of science. They also want to know that their faith is an evident force for good in shaping human history. For example, Dr Kapur seeks to understand and articulate how the Hindu faith has, over the centuries, been a fertile environment for human material development grounded in spiritual principles, even if the Hindu tradition has not always been actively supportive of such development. Dr Arbab's personal experience of seeing flawed development models foisted on marginalized people in Colombia led him to discover a more holistic and participatory model of human development in the vision and tenets of the Bahá'í Faith. His commitment to the tasks of development is realized through concrete methods and programs, based in religious and spiritual principles, that promote the personal human capacity of poor people.

Following the preparation of this volume, a still larger group of 10–15 people, with diverse experiences of SRD, was invited to bring further personal experiences, insights, and approaches to this discussion. They were believers from different faiths or scientists empathetic to the role of belief systems in the process of development. They came from countries in the South and countries in the North. This group met with the original essayists at an international conference in November 1999. The purpose of this meeting was to agree on a way of proceeding with the SRD discourse and to legitimize the discourse for wider dissemination. The participants at this meeting were clearly invigorated and excited by the possibilities of seeing worldviews that integrated both faith traditions and science to help guide development research. Participants created bonds spanning disciplines, religions, and nationalities, demonstrated in their desire to maintain contact and collaborate with the other researchers, scientists, and NGO participants at the meeting, and talked of ways to bring this discourse into their respective fields. Finally, they agreed on a third and final publication, in which the proceedings of the meeting would be disseminated and for which they would transform the documents they had prepared for the meeting into messages for youth — messages of hope and invitation for the young to explore new ways of looking at the world.

Through the three volumes generated by this project, the fruits of the SRD research process may prove helpful to both theoreticians and practitioners in the field of development, concerned religious leaders, and a future generation of researchers, scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. Our ultimate hope is that this dialogue will engender a creative, new consciousness — both personal and public — of how science and religion can work together effectively to their mutual benefit and create a more humane and just world. Should this happen, IDRC will be abundantly rewarded for undertaking what seemed at first a daunting experiment in unconventional research.

REFERENCES

Begley, S. 1998. Science finds God. Newsweek, 20 Jul, 46–52.

Casanova, J. 1994. Public religions in the modern world. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, USA. 320 pp.

CDRLS (Centre for Development Research Library Staff). 1998. Religion and development: a bibliography. Centre for Development Research, Copenhagen, Denmark. CDR Library Paper 98.1. 54 pp.

Daly, H. 1996. Beyond growth: the economics of sustainable development. Beacon Press, Boston, MA, USA. 253 pp.

Easterbrook, G. 1997. Science and God: a warming trend? Science, Aug, 890–893.

Huntington, S. 1996. The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. Simon and Schuster, New York, NY, USA. 367 pp.

John Paul II. 1998. A dynamic relationship of theology and science. Letter from John Paul II to Jesuit Father George Coyne, Director of the Vatican Observatory. Origins, Nov, 375.

Johnson, G. 1998. Science and religion: bridging the great divide. The New York Times on the Web. Internet: http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/063098sci-essay.html

Ryan, W.F., S.J. 1995. Culture, spirituality, and economic development: opening a dialogue. International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, ON, Canada. 67 pp.

Document(s) 8 of 10