Author: Benjamin E Zeller
Publisher: New York University Press, 2010
Price: £16.99 (paperback)
Isbn: 9780814797211

The supposed incompatibility of science and religion is often trotted out as if it is the end to an argument, not the beginning. The pronouncements of Richard Dawkins and of the Australian archæologist reviewed recently make one wonder at how little understanding such people have of religion – and perhaps of science too.

Prophets and Protons is a schol­arly study of how three new religious movements interact with science, both how they view science in the light of their religious beliefs, and how they integrate science into their beliefs. Benjamin Zeller establishes early on that religion and science are not in conflict; they are in creative tension, which is a very different matter.

Through close examination of the literature of the religions, he proposes three ideal types of how religions “could respond to the tremendous growth of power and prestige of science in late-twentieth century America”: religions which seek to guide science, those which seek to replace it, and those which seek to absorb it into their teachings. The relig­ions he examines as examples of each type are respectively the Unification Church, ISKCON (the Hare Krishna movement) and the ill-fated Heaven’s Gate.

Why choose these three? Zeller doesn’t say. One suspects that they are simply three religions he happens already to have studied in depth (though the extensive bibliography only lists one paper by him on just one of the movements), but perhaps he should be applauded for not going for more obvious candidates such as Scient­ology and the Raelian Movement.

Although he doesn’t draw the comparison, Zeller’s three ideal types bear some resemblance to Roy Wallis’s well-known categorisation of religions into world-affirming, world-rejecting and world-accommodating; a little more integration of this study into existing sociology of religion would have been helpful.

The greatest fault in this otherwise worthwhile contribution to the debate on science and religion is that Zeller has only done half the job. If you are going to base a theoretical model on just three cases, you then need to show how well, or not, other religions fit your three ideal types. Zeller presumably leaves it to other scholars to establish how useful his model might be.