Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion, Nicholas Spencer, OneWorld Publications, 2023, pp. 480, $23 hardcover.
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Science™ has been making a strong bid to become our new religion, presuming to replace revelation with reason. There are sacraments (the “scientific method”), a priesthood (Ph.D. experts), a new trinity (… Newton, Darwin, and Einstein?). There are evangelists spreading the good news to the heathen, Richard Dawkins (“England’s most pious atheist,” as Simon Conway Morris has dubbed him) filling in as science’s St. Paul the epistolarian. “Follow the Science™” is the new altar call.
Along with any new totem comes heresy. The history of Christianity is littered with any number of doubters about, say, the Trinity, or the divinity of Jesus, who were branded as heretics and suffered the ultimate erasure. Under the totem of Science, erasures of heretics still happen, but are more humane. We no longer burn bodies — that would be too much like that bad religious zealotry—we now only torch careers and reputations. Any qualms are ameliorated as necessitated by the moral equivalent of war, an existential war of science against religion. Virtuous science must prevail by defeating evil religion. Dawkins has said so.1 Follow Dawkins!
Is the war of science and religion really so clear-cut? Nicholas Spencer explores this question in his book Magisteria. The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion, which casts shade on all the modern tropes of the supposed war — the phony war, really — of science versus religion.
Nick Spencer is a Senior Fellow and prolific essayist for Theos, a UK-based think tank that is broadly concerned with promoting debate about the place of religion in society. I confess, I did not know about Theos until a few months prior to the centennial celebrations last July of the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee. I was heading for Dayton myself to produce a documentary about the Scopes centennial. As part of my own preparations to cover the event, I came across Magisteria. It was the best find of my research.
Spencer’s thesis in Magisteria is a refutation of Stephen Jay Gould’s famous invocation of science and religion as occupying two “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA).2 According to Gould, science sits in its realm over here, and religion in its own realm over there. Peace reigns as long as one magisterium does not tread into the territory of the other: a grandiose expression of the “good fences make good neighbors” folk wisdom. Trouble inevitably ensues, according to Gould’s idea, when one magisterium dares to intrude on the other. Gould’s all wrong on this, Spencer says:
Whatever its merits as a description of how science and religion should interact, Gould’s model patently does not work when it comes to history. The “magisteria” of science and religion are indistinct, sprawling, untidy, and endlessly and fascinatingly entangled.
Spencer begins his critique with three skirmishes of the war of science and religion: the persecution and imprisonment of Galileo; the (in)famous Oxford debate between Thomas (“Darwin’s bulldog”) Huxley and Bishop (“Soapy”) Samuel Wilberforce; and the 1925 “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, which pitted Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan in an epic confrontation of reason and light versus ignorance and fundamentalist superstition.
Spencer’s three introductory examples have one thing in common: they offer wonderful opportunities for residents of the one magisterium (science) to preen and display their virtues over the other (religion), and so advance the phony war. The reality of these instances bears little resemblance to the myth, however. Among Galileo’s formidable talents was the ability (the compulsion?) to turn erstwhile friends and supporters into enemies, which in Galileo’s case was his largely sympathetic patron, Pope Urban VIII. There is very little evidence that the drama of the Huxley-Wilberforce debate actually happened. What sparse contemporary record there is pictured a rather more sedate affair, verging on boring. The debate’s epic narrative was not a recitation of history, but was crafted by the sons of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley, who were side players in a power struggle by upstart clerics to deploy Darwinism as a cudgel to dethrone the high-church Soapy Sams of the Anglican clergy. The Dayton trial, for its part, was largely a magic show, with Darrow throwing up sparklers to deflect attention from a case that rested on exceptionally weak grounds. The real victor in Dayton was not Darrow, but Bryan. Spencer succinctly concludes his opening statement thusly: that “the science and religion debate has been much like a swimming pool, with most of the noise up at the shallow end.”
Spencer intends to explore the deep end, which turns out to be vast, and like his three introductory examples, enveloped in narrative that often lapses into the glib.
Spencer starts in fifth-century Alexandria, with the murder of Hypatia, the brilliant philosopher and mathematician. The prevailing narrative paints her murder as a martyrdom at the hands of a religion-crazed Christian mob, who hated her love of science and her devotion to the Roman gods. Really? Spencer details the political turmoil and complicated religious rivalries that swirled through fifth-century Alexandria, pitting Christian sect against Christian sect and all against the still-viable Roman gods, all stirred up by the political turmoil that swirled around a Roman empire set on its path to decline and fall. Set in that context, it’s clear that Hypatia was not murdered by Christians because she was a pagan of superior intellect. She was murdered because she was there.
From Hypatia, Spencer takes us through the entire span of civilization, from the classical era, through medieval times, to the Enlightenment, and into the modern age, concluding with the challenges attending the rise of artificial intelligence. Throughout he does what every good historian should do, paint enough of a picture of the times so that we can imagine we are there, so that we can better understand the “indistinct, sprawling, untidy” entanglement of two distinct ways of making sense of the world and our place in it, all of it written with clarity and wit.
At the end, we are left with a clear, if perhaps startling, conclusion. That for most of our history, the two magisteria have got on quite well, and that both science and religion have been much the better for their comity.
J. Scott Turner is Emeritus Professor of Biology, SUNY College of Environmental Science & Forestry & Director of Science Programs, National Association of Scholars. He last appeared in AQ in the summer of 2025 with “Bubbles and Darwinian Daydreams,” his review of Richard Dawkins The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie.
1 1 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008).
2 S.J. Gould, “Nonoverlapping Magisteria,” Natural History 106, 16–22 (1997).
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