An Interview with Nick Spencer
On the meaning of the word "God" and other arcana
I recently sat for an interview with Nick Spencer—the author of, among other books, the very impressive history of the relations between the modern sciences and religious thought Magisteria (2023)—for the podcast Reading Our Times, which is produced by the think-tank Theos. The discussion was principally about The Experience of God (2014). It seems to me that it went well, and covered a surprisingly broad range of topics very economically (of course, part of that is due to some very expert editing).
I can't help but be a litle annoyed by the reviews featured under the book. Not because what they're saying is wrong, but because it's so disheartening to see that we've apparently made no progress in challenging the "science vs. religion" narrative even among people who fancy themselves educated enough to review books for major newspapers.
I mean, think about it: Every serious historian who's written on Galileo in the past few decades points out that his theories went beyond the evidence and had problems of their own (theoretical annd empirical). Recent biographies of Newton have finally come to terms with the fact that he was a theologian, not just (or even primarily) a scientist. And even many popular accounts of the Scopes Trial have started to notice that it was a contrived media circus in which Social Darwinism, not just evolution, was on trial. And that's not even to mention the poor medievalists, who have been loudly challenging the myth of the Dark Ages in word and in print since the mid-1900s.
And yet every time a new book comes along restating the same things that Ronald Numbers and Peter Harrison and other historians of science and religion have been saying for decades, we get the Economist and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal expressing bemused surprise at its conclusions... then promptly forgetting them until the next book in the same vein comes out.
I am glad this interview happened. It seems that now TASBS and the book on Tradition are, in many senses, all the rage, but The Experience of God is fantastic. Easily my favorite (except for perhaps some of the fiction) so I am glad to see it has not been forgotten.
It also seems that a sort of Heideggerian inspired hermeneutic of religion that seeks to distance the God of faith from the God of the philosophers presupposes that the average religious person is not actually concerned with (even if just implicitly) the truth of what they believe. Which is absurd. It also sets religion at odds with reason and so shows itself actually to be distinctly modern.