J. L. Schellenberg: Religion after Science: The Cultural Consequences of Religious Immaturity
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J. L. Schellenberg: Religion after Science: The Cultural Consequences of Religious Immaturity Cambridge University Press, 2019, 143 pp, $67.71 (hb.), $23.59 (pb.) Sabrina Little1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
In Religion after Science, J. L. Schellenberg argues that human religion is not a failed enterprise. It is just an immature one. He addresses the Nones and those who, either due to advancements in the natural sciences or out of dissatisfaction with the present offerings of conventional religions, have resigned themselves to atheism (p. 125). Schellenberg claims that there is much to be gained from religion. It can satisfy our human desire for wonder, foster community, and potentially offer a source of normative grounding for values (pp. 111–113). Rather than forfeit religious inquiry entirely, we should consider it in light of the advancements in natural science. We should consider religion after science, per the title, and approach it with the same seriousness and rigor that characterizes our approach to the natural sciences (p. 38). Schellenberg’s book is a good one, and it is certainly worth reading. It raises interesting questions about how advancements in one sphere of human inquiry might inform another, and it motivates religious inquiry as worthwhile, both in general and within the academy. And while his suggested audience is those who have dismissed religion entirely, it will also be fruitful for a theist to reconsider the nature and value of religious knowledge. For both audiences, Schellenberg’s project inspires epistemic humility regarding our limitations as human knowers, and this is rare and valuable in public discourse about religion. Moreover, whether or not this was his intention, Schellenberg places religion and natural science in conversation with one another in a way that incites wonder about our place in the world. These are the book’s virtues. It is also true that Schellenberg’s project rests on potentially controversial assumptions about religious progress, and it is underdeveloped in certain areas that I hope Schellenberg will explore in the future. In what follows, I outline the main ideas and raise questions his book provoked. In Schellenberg’s recent writing, he has examined the consequences of advancements in the natural sciences for religious inquiry. These texts include Evolutionary * Sabrina Little [email protected] 1
Morehead State University, Morehead, KY 40351, USA
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International Journal for Philosophy of Religion
Religion (Oxford 2013) and Progressive Atheism: How Moral Evolution Changes the God Debate (Bloomsbury 2019). Religion after Science is a continuation of this work. Schellenberg has two goals—to describe the developmental immaturity of religion and to introduce and defend a new humanism that takes religious immaturity into account. He begins with two significant empirical discoveries—evolution and deep time—and writes that, while we accept these discoveries as true, we fail “to make our everyday, lived understanding of human id
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