Tag: Science

I was rather pleasantly surprised by most of the emails that I received from the piece that I wrote for this column last week, this being my reflections on Dr. Adah Igonoh’s story about her survival in the battle against the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD). Many people wrote to tell me that they had also found Dr. Igonoh’s story very moving, very inspiring. I was pleased to read this, but quite frankly this was not what I found pleasantly surprising in the bulk of the emails that I received on last week’s column. What surprised and pleased me in the emails was this: virtually everyone who wrote informed me that, like me and academics of my type, they also think that there is no necessary and inevitable opposition or incompatibility between religion and science. Although it did occur to me that most of those who wrote the emails to me were probably people who generally share my views on many aspects of our country’s current crises and challenges, nonetheless it was pleasing to find that many readers of last week’s column also think that religion and science, faith and reason should not go their separate ways in any modern-day nation in our world. So far, so good, as the saying goes.

But then I noticed a pattern in these emails that rather disturbed me. This was because in nearly every case, those who wrote those emails to me felt that the need for religion and science to, as it were, “walk together” in any modern state was so obvious that anyone should be able to see and affirm that need. Why I found this disturbing is the subject of this week’s essay, thus making it something of an epilogue to last week’s column. My central argument in this piece is that though the need for religion and science to work together harmoniously in the modern world seems fairly obvious, that obviousness is not to be taken for granted, not to be assumed to be without any tension, any stress. The struggle of science against religion, more specifically against the fanatical dogma of organized, institutionalized religion, is one of the central themes of modern intellectual history. At the height of that struggle, brilliant and gifted scientists were burnt at the stakes. Those who were not burnt were made to recant on their scientific theories and were banned for life from the pursuit of their scientific vocation. We cannot go into the full details of this history, but in the end science prevailed and religion had to make its peace with the decisive, transformative role of science in modern life, in the specifically modern organization of society and its productive relations and activities.

Since our country and our continent are constituent parts of the modern world, we are heirs to that monumental struggle between religion and science. Nonetheless, that struggle never took place, never shook society to its foundations in our own part of the world. This is both good and bad. In this essay, I wish to reflect upon the good and bad parts of this historic fact that in our society, our own part of modernity, science and scientists never had to struggle against the powerful institutional, doctrinal and ideological authority of organized religion. Let’s deal first with the good part of this crucial fact that science and scientists in Africa never really had to wage fierce battles against the forces of organized religion and its historic opposition to rationality as a cardinal basis of life.

As reported by Chinua Achebe in his famous collection of essays, The Trouble with Nigeria, in the 1950s, the Minister of Education in the old Western Region, Dr. S.A. Awokoya, wrote a book titled Why Our Children Die. According to Achebe, Awokoya wrote that book as a medical scientist who took up arms against traditional African cultural beliefs and practices that wittingly or unwittingly caused or promoted high levels of infant mortality in our society. As I have not been able to lay my hands on that book by Dr. Awokoya, I am going by what Achebe says about it in his book. And what Achebe says is that Dr. Awokoya in his book took up arms in defence or promotion of science and rationality against beliefs and practices in our traditional cultures that militated against rational explanations and remedies for diseases, together with the practice of private and public hygiene, especially with regard to the great vulnerability of children to diseases and lack of hygiene.

The allusion to Achebe and Awokoya in this discussion helps us to see, I hope, that the “enemy” of science in Africa was not organized religion. More crucially, Achebe and Awokoya were careful to emphasize the fact that it was not the entirety of the African cultural heritage that was against science and rationality; rather, it was some specific and identifiable beliefs and practices that constituted the composite enemy. As a matter of fact, both Achebe and Awokoya were products of the schools of a rationalized, “modernized” form of Christianity that promoted science and the scientific spirit in our part of the world, even as theological and doctrinal branches of these same forms of Christianity waged holy wars against the entire heritage of culture on our continent. Achebe and Awokoya, as archetypal figures in the story of science, rationality and religion in our continent, showed us that this was and is a complex story in which organized religion, traditional cultures and the scientific spirit could not be divided into a simple pattern of opposites and negatives, illumination and mystification. Some parts of traditional cultures were not in opposition to the scientific enterprise, just as some doctrinal aspects of Christianity opposed all aspects of traditional cultures, not because they were against science but because they were thought to be the antithesis of the one true God of the Christians or Moslems. In other words, faith and rationality in modern Africa never got caught and fixated in the radical and uncompromising opposition that medieval, pre-modern Christianity in Europe mounted between religion and science. This is the good part of the overall narrative. We now move to the bad part.

For this, it helps to put matters in concrete and perhaps even dramatic terms. No scientists were ever burnt at the stakes on our continent. But this also means that no scientist ever achieved a heroic stature as the defender of the scientific spirit and enterprise against the forces of religious medievalism. For it was precisely because of these factors that science in Europe was able to win commerce, industry and the popular imagination to its side in the struggle against organized religion. There is another way to put this observation in terms that are perhaps even more graphic and it is this: we do not have a single man or woman of science to match the iconic stature of an Achebe or a Soyinka, none at all. Achebe, Soyinka, Clark, Okigbo and the other icons of modern Nigeria literature achieved their stature because they challenged and overcame the racist, colonialist canard that we did not have what it takes to produce works of literature that are equal to the best literary works from other regions of the world. In our celebration of the achievements of these icons of modern Nigerian writing, we often place too much emphasis on their talent, their genius and in the process underestimate the struggles that they had to wage. Thus, though talent and genius are very important, the central factor in this piece is struggle and effort, unceasing and unflagging struggle and effort.

It is perhaps useful at this point to bring these observations and reflections back to Dr. Adah Igonoh’s story. In doing this, I wish to place as much emphasis as I possibly can on the fact that in last week’s column, I made every effort to highlight and praise the determination and will with which Dr. Igonoh went in search of knowledge and information that could help her prevail over the EVD peril. Repeatedly, I stated that while she spent much time and invested great emotional and spiritual energy in prayers and divine favour, she was also relentless in her search for remedies available from medical science. Please remember that this all took place at a moment in her life when she faced great debilitation from a relentlessly destructive disease. At the risk of offending the sensibilities of many readers who are devout religionists, I wish to point out that at that moment in Dr. Igonoh’s battle with EVD, religion and faith were the easy, assured part of the struggle; far more onerous and demanding was the pursuit and absorption of scientific knowledge and information.

Knowledge and truth seeking, in all areas of life and experience, is not for the faint-hearted; this is even more so with regard to science. To be a successful and dedicated  woman or man of science takes a lot of hard, grindingly demanding work. With the phenomenal rise and accession to dominance of Pentecostalism in our country and our continent in the last two or three decades, this crucial perspective on what science demands from scientists has been submerged by the belief that you must leave everything, everything, to God. The reason for this is not difficult to find: in many respects, Pentecostalism is medieval in its worldview. It does not exactly have the institutional power and authority that organized religion in medieval Europe had and so it cannot wage a direct assault on science and rationalism as Christianity did in the Middle Ages in Europe. Its assault is more indirect, more subtle in that it comprises the combination of intellectual laziness and fanatical religiosity in which the religiosity provides a cover, a refuge for the intellectual laziness. In next week’s concluding essay in this series, we shall explore how and why it has managed to capture many segments of our national intelligentsia that include men and women of science.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu