Looking Back...
Zygon at 40: the times, they are a'changing--or not?
by Philip Hefner
Bob Dylan made music history in the 1960s with songs like, “the times they are a'changing.” His point was that people don't want to admit to the changing times. An eye-witness to the forty years of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science certainly knows that a lot has changed for the journal. Technologically, we're in a different world. We've moved from cold type printing plates that were shipped off to the printer to computer “typesetting” and PDF formatted pages that are transmitted electronically to the printer. Storing back issues on the shelf is superseded by forty years of digitized back issues that will be available on January 1, 2006 from home and library computers. The Zygon website, also as of January 1, will include everything one needs to know about the journal, as well as discussion boards for readers' comments. In dozens of countries around the world, the journal is available to students and faculty members at every major library--something unheard of forty years ago. In the last fifteen years, the number of pages published each year has nearly doubled--it's up to 1,000 pages.
Our social-cultural context is quite different today from that of the mid-1960s. “Religion-and-science” was a very small enterprise then, with few participants, and Zygon was one of a very small number of periodicals specialized for the subject; surely it was the only scholarly journal on the landscape. Forty years later, the landscape of religion-and-science is a crowded space, with flowers of every imaginable variety blooming in full. Several dozen magazines and journals flourish, including a few scholarly publications. Dozens, if not hundreds, of societies are equally vigorous, which means that there are many more authors providing papers for publication. All of this activity is international in scope, situated in every continent. Every world religion is now a seedbed for religion-and-science, and like all the other facets of culture, the field includes every shade of opinion, from conservative fundamentalist to left-wing liberal.
At the same time, the sciences began to expand with explosive force during the “Zygon years,” with new fields emerging at a rapid pace. Forty years ago, for example, the terms “sociobiology” and “evolutionary psychology” did not exist, even though their precursors did. The neurosciences were fledgling activities; the cognitive sciences were just beginning to take hold. The theory of the Big Bang had been proposed, but the work of Penzias and Wilson that would discover the background radiation that provided empirical evidence for that theory was just underway in the year that the journal began publication. Genetics and genetic engineering were just beginning to get significant attention--the structure of the DNA molecule had been discovered only twelve years before the journal started up. All of these sciences began to get attention in religion-and-science circles, and the journal added to its goals the task of providing a record, in its printed pages, of the range of scientific knowledge and challenges, as well as the scope of religious interpretation possible in the context of this expansive scientific development.
Changing times? Yes, but not everything changes. A counterpoise to Bob Dylan's call to acknowledge change is the French saying: “the more things change, the more they are just the same." Zygon started out with a point of view, an agenda that has not changed. Its agenda is “yoking”--“zygon” is a word derived from the Greek that means “joining two things together, yoking.” The journal seeks to yoke science and religion, knowledge and values for the benefit of the human community. Alienation between science and religion bodes ill for the future of humanity. Alfred North Whitehead wrote that religion and science are the two most powerful forces in history, and in their struggle to come to terms with each other rests the future of the human community. Zygon has always aimed to go beyond “dialogue,” and to translate the yoking of science and religion into policies and practices that contribute to human welfare and that of the planet. This aim continues today, intensified by the growth of science and the widening interest in the field of religion-and-science.
Yoking has never come easily. It went against the stream in the journal's beginning years, and it goes against the stream today. Zygon's founders spoke of “the widening chasm in twentieth century culture between values and knowledge, or good and truth, or religion and science, that is disruptive, if not lethal for human destiny.” If there is any doubt that the chasm between religion and science can be raw and hostile, we have only to look at two sectors of our culture that are mirror images of each another. The one includes large numbers of the intelligentsia who have simply lost confidence that religion, intellectually in its theology and philosophy or practically in its worship and ethical behavior, can take the measure of the sciences and speak significantly to a scientifically informed world. This group sincerely believes that religion at best is an anachronism and at worst a danger to society. In another sector of culture many religious conservatives, including fundamentalists of all sorts, think that the intellectuals who have given up on religion are the enemy. They represent an “atheistic,” “materialistic,” and “reductionist” scientific ideology against which religion must be defended.
Although most public discussion of religion and science begins here, on the tense frontier between these two groups, and their attacks and counterattacks on each other get most of the media attention, there is a consensus among historians that over the millennia the boundaries between religion and science have never been impenetrable. Science and religion have made a reciprocal impact on each other. These historians consider talk about “warfare” uninformed and unuseful. Nevertheless, as hostilities have raged, stoked equally by the scientifically informed intellectual despisers of religion and the fundamentalist defenders, alternative religious responses have been emerging. It is important to recognize that these responses are genuinely religious in character. Two such responses deserve mention.
Within certain segments of the various traditional religious communities, both theology and forms of worship have undergone significant transformations in response to scientific knowledge. Extraordinary developments of religious philosophy in the last two hundred years are, unfortunately, scarcely recognized outside the peer group of academically trained theologians. Resources are now available to interpret traditional beliefs constructively in the light of contemporary scientific knowledge. Worship forms are also in a state of reform, exemplified in the comprehensive revision of the United Church of Christ hymnal and the Lutheran handbook for interpreting Sunday Bible readings in the light of scientific perspectives. For many years, the Roman Catholic Conference of Bishops has carried on dialogue with prominent scientists; most Protestant churches incorporate the dialogue into their national programming, and they coordinate their efforts in the Ecumenical Roundtable for Religion, Science, and Technology.
A second alternative response, often identified as “religious naturalism,” is composed of a cross-section of people, many of whom are scientists, who are fashioning a religious worldview that is consistent with their personal outlook and/or free of those encumbrances of traditional religion which they consider conceptually anachronistic and morally dangerous. Religious naturalism is a variety of naturalism which involves a set of beliefs and attitudes that there are religious aspects of this world which can be appreciated within a naturalistic framework.
We see a double contradiction in our current situation: our culture is deeply divided by the warfare between despisers of religion and fundamentalists, but over against the warfare we find serious and diligent people who consider the idea of warfare itself to be unuseful and uninformed, based on too superficial an understanding of both religion and science. From this double contradiction at the heart of our culture we conclude that, even though it wears a new face and is more complex, the challenge of our situation today is fundamentally the same that the founders of Zygon discerned in the mid-twentieth century. Zygon stands with those who attempt the constructive yoking of religion and science. In numbers, these groups cannot measure up to either the hostile despisers among the intelligentsia or the fundamentalists among the religions, and they may never capture the headlines and the sound bites, but they encourage us to believe that a more wholesome future is possible.
We live on the exciting boundary between two views of life today: “the times are a'changing” and “the more things change, the more some things stay the same.” There is truth in these two views, and there is tension between them. The truth is in the tension--and that is where Zygon is situated.
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