Can Faith and Reason Share the Stage?

I just got invited into a fun gathering of a few hundred people which was spurred into being by Lisa Miller's provocative article for Newsweek that suggested that Harvard was profoundly anti-intellectual in its refusal to entertain the thought of a religious studies major.  If there's anything to say, I'll tell you more about it next week.  But let me give you a selection from Miller's article.

In dozens of phone calls and several trips to the Harvard campus, I tried to understand the faculty's anxiety about religion. The facile explanation is that more than a third of elite university professors are nonreligious, a dramatically higher percentage than the population at large. But both believing and nonbelieving scholars clearly can teach about religion in a secular setting without crossing the line into proselytizing. And wouldn't students benefit from having their assumptions challenged in a rigorous way? (Fluency in religious history and texts, in fact, is the sharpest weapon against fundamentalism, as Sam Harris demonstrates in his polemic The End of Faith.) "My colleagues fear that taking religion seriously would undermine everything a great university stands for," the Rev. Peter Gomes, Harvard's chaplain and a professor of Christian history, told me. "I think that's ungrounded, but there it is."

Steven Pinker says his main objection to the 2006 proposal that students be required to take a course in a Reason and Faith category was that it seemed to make reason and faith equal paths to truth. "I very, very, very much do not want to go on the record as suggesting that people should not know about religion," he told me. "But reason and faith are not yin and yang. Faith is a phenomenon. Reason is what the university should be in the business of fostering."

Pinker is a public intellectual, a celebrity on the Harvard campus, the kind of teacher who can draw 400 students into a lecture hall and who elicits star-struck stares in the Yard. His specialty is the evolution of language, but all his work, from The Language Instinct to The Blank Slate (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), coheres under the broad notion that a scientific, rational world view is the highest achievement of the human mind. As his wife, the novelist Rebecca Goldstein, put it to him on a day I visited them on Cape Cod, Mass., "All forms of irrationality irk you, but [religion] is the form of irrationality that irks you most." In Pinker's view, human progress is an evolution away from superstition, witchcraft, and idol worship—that is, religion—and toward something like a Scandinavian austerity and secularism. (Pinker is one of those intellectuals who speak frequently about how sensible things are in Europe; one suppresses the urge to remind him of the Muslim riots in the Paris and London suburbs.) A university education is our greatest weapon in the battle against our natural stupidity, he said in a recent speech. "We don't kill virgins on an altar, because we know that it would not, in fact, propitiate an angry god and alleviate misfortune on earth."

That insistence on the backwardness of religion is why, on a warm October afternoon in 2006, at a small faculty luncheon at a Cambridge, Mass., bistro called Sandrine's, Pinker launched his bomb. The topic of the meeting was curriculum reform, but Pinker homed in on religion, declaring that requiring students to take a course in a Reason and Faith category would be like requiring them to take a course in Astronomy and Astrology. "Faith," he said, "is believing in something without good reasons to do so. It has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these." His remarks that day ran in The Crimson and were picked up by the national press.

"For myself," remembers Derek Bok, who was Harvard's acting president at the time, "that was one of the less thoughtful remarks that I heard. This was a rhetorical flourish he threw in there. It caught people's attention—it did. He's very good at that."

Clearly most of the commenters here would place themselves in the faith camp and are probably not yet ready to concede their fundamental irrationality.  But what are your thoughts on Pinker's comments and Harvard's dilemma?

Comments

[Ellen]

My dad, who is an historian and an Episcopal priest, is teaching a course at our local seminary on the "new atheists" (Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, etc.). He argues that these folks (and I think Pinker too) are actually operating under an old-fashioned, Enlightenment idea that reason (including science) and faith are opposed. Many modern scientists and modern theologians accept that such an opposition is false.

If nothing else, students should learn about religion because it has been a major shaping force in human history and has played (still plays) a significant role in politics, public life, private life, etc. College education is about exposing students to different ideas and teaching them vital skills such as intensive study, writing, critical thinking, etc. Let them study and come to their own conclusions. Religious faith is actually much less threatened by critical thinking than many people, both religious and non-religious, seem to believe.

[Titi]

Seems to me like, as usual, the whole framework of the conversation is skewed to be on Pinker's terms. He immediately takes the name "Reason and Faith" to imply that the two are parallel approaches to the same problem, and it is sadly a categorization that many on both sides of this sort of debate would agree to. And on those terms, I as a rational person would totally agree with him.

But reason and faith are not mutually exclusive. We needn't accept his definition of faith as "believing in something without good reasons to do so." Rather, faith is more about maintaining belief in something (or someone!) in the face of some good (but not necessarily conclusive) reasons not to. The distinction being that reasons abound to believe all manner of things, and faith adds extra weight to believing some things over others when incompatibilities arise. So faith is not an alternative to reason so much as a complement.

And the foundations of faith are often rational in and of themselves. Take Francis Schaeffer's classic example: You're traveling high up in the Alps and fall and find yourself hanging off of a cliff. You can see no way of escape except somehow managing to climb back up. But you hear a voice from across a valley say "I can see you, and if you drop over to your right you will find a ledge to land on safely." You have no reason from your own senses to think that ledge is there, and in fact it really looks to you that there is no such thing. Faith would be trusting in this person's word and dropping down, to certain doom if this person is lying or incorrect, giving up even the remote possibility of pulling yourself back up. Your reason for believing them may be that you have analyzed the likelihood of someone maliciously lying to be near enough to zero that it's worth the shot. Very rational, yet still requiring faith to make the call as to which set of competing propositions to believe. (Incidentally, there is also faith at work in deciding to trust your senses over the other person's word.)

Let's add another wrinkle to the story. Let's say there are two kinds of people who frequent this area, one who are kind and always looking to help, and one who are malicious and would love nothing more than to see you fall. The faith stakes are suddenly raised. If you happened to be well-acquainted with the kind folks, and could recognize them by voice, you would be in much better shape deciding on a course of action. You might still be stuck with figuring out whether the voice really corresponds to a trustworthy person, and there would be some level of faith in that decision, but once that decision is made, the decision to jump is completely rational.

And this is where anti-faith people can get stuck. Because quite often, even the best practicioners of faith base their actions on decisions less on the presenting issue than on believing something else, so it seems like a logical short circuit going on. In semi-formal logical terms, this is what looks like is going on from the outside:

A implies that B is not true
A appears to be true
Therefore, B is very likely not true
Believing in B flies in the face of reason!

but from the faith perspective:

A implies that B is not true
A appears to be true
C implies that B is true
C seems to have a greater likelihood of being true than A
Therefore B is most likely true

And it can get even more complicated, because believing in the truth of C may rely upon another faith-based determination, so the series of rational decisions that lead to a given apparent leap of faith are invisible, and may not even be apparent to the person who went through this whole chain.

If Harvard were to end up presenting a course on Reason and Faith, I would dearly hope that they would not fall into the trap of setting up a false dichotomy. I'm guessing though that the only way they could manage to make it happen in the face of such skillful rhetoric in opposition would be to change the terms of the conversation. It sadly would likely need a name change, though, as we're probably still a long ways off from molding the common understanding of faith to the point where putting "faith" next to "reason" would not touch off such controversies.

[Paul]

Seems to me an unfortunate retelling of of history: thought leaders who are keepers of 'Truth' strongly oppose (read: inquisition) 'heretical lies' offered as a new Truth. Meanwhile, could it be 'glory to glory'? Meaning growth of the church over millennium following Jesus' life is 'good.' Enlightenment and growth in rational thought, scientific method and modernism over a half millennium is good...even at the expense of what existed before.

So now will the current thought leaders at Harvard take the well worn road of intransigence against a rebellious new Truth (even if its a redeemed packaging of truth...God willing)? I wonder if this cycle isn't part of the journey God would have us walk...again and again (perhaps a societal 4 stage process recycling).

[bsergott]

This may seem a little strange, but I actually agree with Pinker's resistance to this change in curriculum. Harvard, like many other universities, has fallen into a rigid modernism. Religion taught in an institution like that would be valuable from an historical/anthropological standpoint, but nothing else. I really believe that many of these universities are stuck in their own dogmatic worldviews. They refuse to release their Enlightenment foundations, and they long for "the good old days" when everyone just accepted Reason as the ultimate good. The same holds true for the new atheists. They come across as religious fanatics who are surrounding themselves with their own dogmatic beliefs to hold on to a "Golden Age" that was never all that golden. As a thoroughly postmodern person (setting all religious stuff aside), I live in a world where there is no longer a blind acceptance of Reason as the ultimate good or even as the means to "the good life". It is faulty at its core, along with other such time-honored "ultimate goods": democracy, capitalism, assured progress, rugged individualism, etc.

Here is my point: If institutions, like Harvard, can't keep up with the tectonic shift that is taking place in the world and are instead choosing to bury their heads in the sand of their own dogmatic superstitions, then they have no business teaching something as postmodern as the tensions of faith and reason. Pinker is right. They should be allowed to remain ignorant and anti-intellectual, and, in turn, they should also be allowed to fade away into irrelevance and obscurity.

[Jeff]

I had a fascinating conversation with Matt Croasum about this. He's getting a New Testament Ph.D at Yale, I had asked him how seriously N.T. Wright was taken in his academic world. Interestingly, he said that it is precisely Wright's public faith commitments that make his otherwise serious scholarship questionable.

I find myself ambivalent about hostility towards religious faith from any corners. I don't have any desire to fight back. Maybe I should, I just don't.

Sociologically speaking, I've noticed that a lot of people, like me, who were kids and teenagers in evangelical churches at the heights of the Colson/Dobson/Reed culture wars in the 80s and 90s find ourselves suspicious of any attempt to impose faith-based values on secular people. Mainly because we saw the culture wars from the inside and we know how ugly they were for the church itself.

So, at some point, when I finally get healed of my ex-fundamentalist stage 3-ness, maybe I'll have a thoughtful comment.

[Hiromu]

I agree with Ellen and bsergott that a dogmatic insistence on Enlightenment/modernist values like scientific rationality and empiricism seems oh so 19th century. And, in fact, I would guess that most of my colleagues in my field (modern social/cultural history), would agree. So my sense is that the Pinkers of the academic world are a shrinking minority. In that sense, I'm pretty optimistic about the place of 'religion' in universities.

That said, I share bsergott's concern about how that actually might work out and whether it's even desirable to happen in the way that Miller suggests (although, I would, maybe because I'm a historian, take issue with bsergott's suggestion that "historical/anthropological standpoint" is stuck in the same dogma and is ill-suited for a more 'postmodern' mode of discussion). I also think that it's a bit of a red herring to focus on the lack of core-level curricular requirement in religion or a department of religion at Harvard as indicators of an institution's discomfort with religion. I think come religious and spirituality actually come up in many classes (even in ones not specifically dedicated to religion per se).

[bsergott]

Excellent comment. In rereading what I said, I completely agree with you. I think "as is", unless there is a thought revolution, discussion on religion is useful only in the area of how it has shaped the historical and anthropological landscape. But my comment, without qualification, seemed to say that I take history and anthropology out of serious postmodern thought. That is not the case, and I appreciate you pushing back on that. I don't feel that those areas are stuck in the same dogmatic clinging to the Enlightenment as other areas. I really hope you are right, Hiromu, that people like Pinker are fading into the minority. I also hope your optimistic view is correct, because I would love to see universities moving to the forefront of progressive thought again. I just think there is still a great deal of work to do to get there.

[amy]

Okay, I've been reading this blog avidly for a year now without ever having commented, meaning to comment about a billion times but not really feeling I had much to add because I am very much an outsider to your conversation and it's been, I think, good practice for me to keep my mouth shut and just listen, for once.

And now I'm commenting even though I have neither carefully read the article in question nor done more than very quickly read the other comments, because I'm in a huge hurry right now. So I apologize in advance. But I have a data point in that I graduated from Harvard with a degree in religion. There were certainly many religious people in our 'concentration', though I was not one of them. You can still get a degree in religion from Harvard, I see: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~csrel/

Anyway, so it's incorrect to say that Harvard doesn't teach about religion. I took some fascinating classes about postmodernism and theology, and yeah, a lot of classes in religion from an anthropological or sociological or historical perspective, but still, there was and is a sense that studying it could not simply be reduced to any of these other approaches.

It's true I was not required to take any classes on religion, but frankly I was not required to take any classes on a number of things that I ought to have taken classes on. I did not take an economics class. I did not have a world history class. (I believe I took a class focused entirely on the Chinese Cultural Revolution that counted as one of my 'historical studies core' classes and I don't even remember what the other was, but I've certainly had to fill in quite a bit on my own since then.) At the time I was at Harvard there simply were NO broad survey courses that were required for students. I believe that is one reason for the curriculum reform, certainly. The 'Core' was not that successful.

Nevertheless, I have tons of friends who took, say, Ec 10 even though they did not have to, and plenty who took James Kugel's course "The Bible", (oh, I think that WAS a core course), which always played to a packed crowd in Sanders Theater. Not a course on Faith and Reason, certainly, but Kugel himself is a faithful Orthodox Jew and struggling with how his research on the Bible affects his faith and vice versa (I missed his class, but I read his book "How to Read the Bible" which was awesome.)

I don't claim Harvard was or is an easy place to have faith, or a particularly encouraging place to get faith. I neither had nor got faith while I was there. And there were and I'm sure still are things wrong with the curriculum, and always will be. But even disregarding the religion major, they still teach the humanities there, and the humanities gave up on the Enlightenment Project many years ago, for better and for worse. So it amuses me to hear that Harvard "has fallen into a rigid modernism" -- I certainly would not describe my education there as modernist in the least.

I hope this comment contributes to the conversation in some way. I have learned a lot from my lurking here, and will now probably go back to lurking again.

[Dave Schmelzer]

Oh we can't let you get away with that "lurking" thing now that you've outed yourself. Keep coming to the table, Amy! Lurk no more!

And I'm very helped by your perspective here. I have a modest role to play in a conversation on this stuff tonight, and you'll help keep me from putting my foot in my mouth (not that I won't put my foot in my mouth, to be sure, but maybe I can now ratchet it down 10%).

I think some of the ire here can come from Pinker himself, who does seem eager to do a little taunting (not to say he doesn't believe his taunts...but, as he points out, people are capable of believing all sorts of irrational things [OK, I'm taunting back; I'll stop]): comparing faith to astrology, categorizing it as definitional irrationality, even framing it as believing in something when you have no reason to do so.

So maybe it's not Harvard we're talking about, just Pinker's voice in Harvard's discourse. What's your feeling on that?

[amy]

oh man, I'm in for it now! Now that I've broken my lurk I'll try to add comments when I think they are useful, but keep in mind that I am struggling hard against my knee-jerk tendency to believe that whatever I have to say must be important and useful.

In answer to your question: I think Steven Pinker is a brilliant cognitive psychologist. I am sure he is an asset to Harvard, not least because celebrity professors are a huge draw. And celebrity professors become celebrity professors not just because they're brilliant but because they have celebrity, which they don't acquire by being modest and careful and never ever shooting their mouths off about things beyond their expertise. Which they absolutely should do, because I think the idea that professors and people should not shoot their mouths off about things that are not in their fields is worse for the pursuit of truth (or Truth, if you wish) than the fact that Steven Pinker thinks religion is a load of hooey and said so.

Meanwhile, these very public debates about curriculum are, in fact, part of the curriculum. Universities are not monoliths, and even all non-religious professors are not all rabid Christopher Hitchens atheists, just like, as I've learned reading this blog, not all evangelical christians are rabid like [ choose your poison ].

I am sure Peter Gomes and other people who have been around Harvard for years and years can speak more to this than I can. But I just don't think universities like Harvard are your enemies here, just like I don't think Steven Pinker is your enemy. I don't think there was a way to get through Harvard without thinking about the meaning of life. It's after Harvard, when half the class goes on to become management consultants and investment bankers, etc., and working 80 hours a week that people can become so caught up in what I think y'all would call 'the things of this world' that they have neither the time nor the inclination to think about the meaning of life. If you want to attack Harvard for something, attack it for its Recruiting Season, not for its professors.

I just can't believe that public intellectuals, even those personally hostile to faith, are ultimately bad for faith. As Ellen said above, I think faith is probably more robust than that.

And now I am done shooting my mouth off about things that are in no way within my area of expertise. At least for the moment. ;-)

[Ian]

I would like to think that Faith and Reason are two alternative routes of seeking the 'Truth'. Reason is powerfully-equipped to ask and investigate certain types of questions, e.g. through the use of logic and the scientific method. However, Reason is very poorly equipped to answer other questions, which nevertheless remain important questions for us to consider in our human existance; questions along the lines of "what is consciousness?" or "what is the meaning of life?". If we deny ourselves the means to express, to ask, or to try and answer these questions, then I believe we become impoverished in our human existance. Therefore I believe that Faith deserves a platform alongside Reason at a place such as Harvard in seeking Truth and in allowing us to pose, to ask, and to investigate the questions which define our existance.

[bsergott]

Please don't quit commenting on things outside of your expertise, and please don't go back into hiding! Your perspective is amazing!

I really don't think any of us have God or faith within our area of expertise. That is why forums like this blog are so helpful for just putting thoughts out there and dealing with them, breaking them down, and even changing our minds (if we can, hopefully, remain pliable and teachable). I am so glad you commented here, because you gave me a great deal to process and think about. It is all of us risking and putting ourselves out there that allows all of us to grow. Thanks again, Amy.

[Dave T.]

Boy oh boy, what fun. And this catches me on the day I moved into a new [old] house. Like I have time for this on this particular weekend! Fun reading provocative comments. Dave S., please ask around about what you probably already know or shouldn't be surprised at: the faculty who sponsored the proposal are not much more "religious" than Amy. They ain't religious folk but they care in at least some of the same ways we do about examining faith and have the same angsts that we here have about dead-thinking in the name of religion AND so-called anti-religion.

Can we all remember that there's SO much more than faith & reason going on in any discussion of faith & reason? In their heads, some people are arguing with their dead parents or their living siblings over going to church or temple, and not really thinking about what you think they're thinking about over what you just said. Ultimately, disrespecting people reveals glaring individual personal tribulations (yes, thank you, I should know, I've taken home Oscars for my disrespectful performances), so while Pinker respects good people routinely, he's really giving away his neediness. But to say more than that is to defame, so I desist.

[Dave T.]

I meant to say, "While Pinker DISrespects good people routinely..."

[Brian Odom]

I find myself agreeing with most of what Pinker says. His quote--"But reason and faith are not yin and yang...Reason is what the university should be in the business of fostering."--sounds mostly right to me. I think in the spirit of Titi's comments, reason and faith not two alternate roads to truth. Nor are they appropriate paths to different and distinct sorts of truths. People of faith employ reason (whether it's good reasoning or bad reasoning is a different issue) when drawing conclusions about spiritual issues. People going about rational disciplines, like science, employ something very much like faith when using with confidence the tools of their trade.

So, I agree with the part of Pinker that I quoted. Now, if Harvard wants to best educate it's students in rational and useful thought, should it have a Religious Studies concentration? I guess people could argue that one either way, but it's not a question of whether or not reason and faith are opposed to one another. They're not yin and yang, but (to disagree with Pinker), neither are they astronomy and astrology.

[PB]

Wow... I'd never really been able to put into words your thought about the kids/teens of the 80s & 90s, of which I was one. So true for me. I know you don't say things for the "thanks", but, you know, thanks for saying it. Helpful for me to piece together my life story!

[amy]

thanks for your nice words. You are very welcoming to this mystery commenter who has somehow ended up deeply fascinated by what are often very insider conversations here. I suppose there might be more readers like me, not sure what they are doing here at all...

[Brent]

What is the purpose of mankind?
Why are we here?
Why is ther esomething instead of nothing?

Universities have their very formation in trying to answer questions like these. A university education used to be (at least up until a hundred or so years ago) about a search for meaning. Not anymore. Now it is about a search for a system, an equation, a better way to build a bridge.

What Pinker misses is that faith is absolutely central to the entire enterprise of forming that rational, scientific worldview he so highly values. Newton sought to understand the world only because he had faith that the world was in fact understandable (an assumption he made because he believed the world was created by a rational God).

Without faith - without belief in a higher purpose - that scientific worldview that is the pinnacle of human achievement is just another expression of evolutionary self-preservation. Explaining how we have the ability to choose doesn't explain why we make the choices we do - it doesn't explain the purpose that humans bring to things.

Pinker is afraid of teaching irrationality, but this just shows he doesn't understand faith, which can be completely rational and unmotivated by things like fear or lack of knowledge.

I have to also say that reading Pinker's 'The Language Instinct' in 10th grade is one of the reasons I became a linguist. Several years ago I got the chance to meet him and also ask him a question after one of his talks. He had talked a bit about how belief in God could be a genetic predisposition that some people have that perhaps others don't. I followed up by stating that nearly every religion has in common the idea that humans are in some sense broken and in need of repair - that we aren't everything we can be and need help getting there - that we need some kind of purpose that we inherently lack. I asked him if that could be a genetic predisposition as well. He didn't have much of an answer. Purpose as a genetic adaptation isn't an easy sell.

[Ryan NYC]

I concur with PB. Great post Jeff.

[Ryan NYC]

To basically echo Brian O. and Brent (but in a much less eloquent or educated way), I've never quite understood how reason/science has ever gotten completely detached from faith.

Seems to me that everyone reasons their way into what they believe, they just place their faith in different areas. Whether one believes that God created the universe or not, they are basing their belief on some sort of evidence that has persuaded them; some sort of evidence that they have faith in. I'd say that believing that there is no God takes just as much faith as believing that there is.

As far as Pinker's quote that "Faith is believing in something without good reasons to do so." - I've always wondered what applying the scientific method from my Jr. High days to exploring God (Jesus, more specifically) would bring about.

That's what I like about the whole Leap of Faith thing that Dave's church promotes (yes, shameless plug) - it's a faith "experiment" where a bunch of "data points" are gathered and a participant is able to make conclusions based upon the "evidence".

I wonder if Pinker tried that out (he already has, for all I know), if he'd find any good "reasons" to change his hypothesis on faith. Maybe, maybe not.

[Brian Odom]

Interesting comments, Brent, about a recent shift of education shifting from a search for meaning to a search for a system. I'll have to think about that.

I'm trying to understand the implications of your argument. I'm pretty sure you're not advocating what we sometimes hear from religious people--that universities like Harvard, Stanford, etc. should return to their Christian roots and teach the Bible as part of the curriculum. Would your argument be more along the lines that having official religious studies programs, where various faiths can be explored, should be part of higher education--towards the end of encouraging students to pursue meaning?

[Brian Odom]

Ryan, thanks for the helpful comments in paragraph 2 about the role of reason in faith.

Now, when it comes to applying the scientific method to beliefs about God, I'm of the opinion that this would be a flawed (and unhelpful) approach. Much like application of the scientific method to a relationship with one's spouse would go wrong--(does she really love me...let's do a controlled experiment to find out)--I think this approach to finding truth about God would be a misapplication of one set of rational tools. Speaking from personal experience, at least, that approach didn't work out very well for me over a few years that I was trying it!

[Brent]

No, I am simply saying that there should be a place in Universities where these sorts of questions are welcomingly considered. Often we seem to want to block them out altogether.

But it may be even more serious than that. A friend of mine (and an emeritous history prof here at UF) wrote a book on this where he argued that by kicking out religion and considerations of faith (by becoming fully 'secular'), university have marginalized themselves in society (which is decidedly not fully secular). They have thus largely become mere 'credential mills' where students are trained in a particular discipline for a particular purpose and where there is little room for considerations of the greater meanings of things. When even an institution like Harvard is pursing this path, I think maybe he is right and universities are in trouble.

The book is called 'The Decline of the Secular University'.

http://www.amazon.com/Decline-Secular-University-John-Sommerville/dp/0195306953/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272386652&sr=8-1

[Dave Schmelzer]

Not apropos of much: I read Sommerville's HOW THE NEWS MAKES US DUMB a few years back and enjoyed his contrarian point (and maybe contrarian temperament, for all I could tell). It was fun and provocative.

[Brent]

yes, 'helpfully contrarian' might be a good way to describe John. I have been very grateful to interact with him over the past couple of years through reading groups, seminars, and now as fellow 'board of director' members at our local Christian Study Center.

RE: his view on the news, John subscribes to all sorts of papers and magazines, but doesn't read them until they are about two months old. By then, he says, he knows what is important to read and what he can skip :)

[Ben]

Thanks Titi. I like the "logical short circuit" thing. I think of John 3:8 and those born of the Spirit like the wind.. their decision making and action taking not understood by those outside.. what look likes "mere faith" and unreasonable to an observer is actually reasoned activity.

[Brent]

To provide a brief and somewhat feeble answer to your question about how faith and science got detached...in my opinion, the Reformation was to blame, and specifically the ideas of William of Ockham (picked up by Luther and especially Calvin) that God exists as wholly Other, completely and totally apart from us and the rest of nature. That idea leads to a de-sacramentalization of nature that has a good side and a bad side. On the good side, nature can now be studied on its own terms and can be described with completely natural principles that needn't reference God. This is the very definition of modern science. On the other hand....this puts God pretty far out of the picture - at most he becomes a deistic God in the sky who created everything a long time ago and now just sits back and watches. In fact, many enlightment thinkers and scientists had exactly this view and it is still strongly with us today (most of the arguments repeated again and again by atheistic biologists as well as literalist creationists assume this kind of God).

In my humble opinion, the only way to get science and faith back together again in a meaningful way is to get rid of this calvinistic idea of God as 'wholly Other' and return to a more sacramental view of nature like one finds in Thomas Aquinas. I think modern scholars on science and religion (Polkinghorne, Haught, Murphy, etc.) move in this direction.

The best book I have read about this is Terence Nichol's 'The Sacred Cosmos.'