Certain subjects command an insatiable following. Abraham Lincoln, for instance; World War II in the Pacific; the perfidy of men (as evident in their treatment of women); and so on. There are no doubt readers who consume just one book on such a topic, but there are many who want to revisit their favorite subjects repeatedly. That’s part of the draw! And of course over time, as the generations pass, some subjects begin to lose their appeal while others rise to the top.

Midway down this list — far below Lincoln, but by no means at the bottom — is science-and-religion. If this is a subject of no special import to you, you might be surprised to learn how many books about it have been and continue to be published, ranging from massively learned tomes to breezy introductions. (If you visit our home someday, I can show you stacks of them.) Nicholas Spencer’s Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion is neither a heavily footnoted scholarly book written primarily for other scholars (such as Jonathan Topham’s brilliant Reading the Book of Nature: How Eight Best Sellers Reconnected Christianity and the Sciences on the Eve of the Victorian Age, published last year by the University of Chicago Press) nor a pop treatment that avoids the tangled complexities of the subject. Rather, Spencer writes for the dedicated General Reader, and he succeeds magnificently.

Spencer’s title, as some readers will have guessed, alludes to the late Stephen Jay Gould’s contention that science and religion constitute what Gould termed “non-overlapping magisteria,” that is, “distinct fields of human activity that need not — should not — encroach on each other’s territory.” Gould’s claim, Spencer notes,

was an intervention born of good intentions, hoping to bring a ceasefire to an exhausted local conflict between fundamentalists who disbelieved Darwin and fundamentalists who disbelieved anything that wasn’t Darwin. Whatever its merits as a description of how science and religion should interact, Gould’s model patently does not work when it comes to history. The “magisteria” of science and religion are indistinct, sprawling, untidy and endlessly, fascinatingly entangled.

So true, and so well said. (I am, by the way, a great admirer of Stephen Jay Gould as a writer.) I hope it will prompt some of you to seek out and read Spencer’s book at the first opportunity. Magisteria is valuable precisely because it rejects widely circulated but misleading generalizations (including but not limited to Gould’s famous NOMA) and positively wallows in the messy particulars of history. See for example Spencer’s superb chapter twelve, “Globalization,” in which he observes that “the incursion of European science” into Islamic lands, India, China, and more during the 19th century “often precipitated both a measure of soul-searching and a reappropriation of [religious] thought from earlier centuries” deemed to have anticipated “Western scientific ideas.” This undercuts several stock narratives simultaneously while also inviting the reader to share in the author’s pleasure at the endless ironies of history!

Alas, on one subject Spencer falls short of the high standard he sets. In his treatment of the controversies regarding evolution, which flourish distinctively in the United States, he is less witty, less likely to delight in historical ironies, more likely to be working from the standard playbook. Still, Spencer is better than most. “There were even nuances in the homeland of the anti-evolution movement — evangelical America,” he concedes. Of course there were ironies he could have savored in this sphere, as he does when treating different subjects. Consider, for instance, the fact that many leading Young Earth advocates are in certain respects much more knowledgeable about science than a substantial majority of their fellow Christians, who are content simply to trust that God created the universe, one way or another.

A salient recurring theme of Magisteria is the temptation to seize on the authority of science to bolster some deeply held conviction, often with unintended consequences. Spencer’s most striking case in point appears near the end of chapter 15, punningly titled “Entangled and Uncertain,” much of it centered on Einstein and all of it dealing in some way with the relationship between scientific theories and religious belief.

Near the end of the chapter, Spencer introduces Georges Lemaître, a young Belgian physicist, also a devout Catholic, who beginning in the late 1920s made the case for an expanding universe (what became known as the Big Bang theory, generally accepted by the early 1960s), beginning with what Lemaître termed the “primaeval atom.” In an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1951, Spencer relates, Pope Pius XII

drew on these ideas to claim that “present-day science . . . has succeeded in bearing witness to the august instant of the primordial Fiat Lux [let there be light].” The conclusion was unavoidable. “Hence, creation took place. We say: therefore, there is a Creator. Therefore, God exists!”

And yet, as Spencer tells us, Lemaître “contacted the pope’s scientific adviser and encouraged him to dissuade the pope from further pronouncements on such matters,” and his request was granted. I have to give you the conclusion of this chapter in full:

The fact that it was a Catholic priest who first established that the universe had a beginning — not by faith, not by dogma, but by flawless mathematics — is an attractive detail within the complex histories of science and religion. But that he then went on to warn the pope himself away from drawing any theological conclusions from his work is a still more appealing twist in this particular tale. In the strange world of the new physics, nothing was as it seemed.

My take on this differs from Spencer’s. I think the conviction that prompted Lemaître’s request had nothing to do with the distinctiveness of “the new physics.” It does, however, fit with a theme that runs through this entire book: the trickiness of seizing on the authority of “science” to promote this or that endeavor.

Spencer’s concluding chapter, “Artificial Anxieties,” deals (as you might infer) with AI. In my judgment it is the weakest chapter in the book, but perhaps that is because I came to it already terminally weary of endless speculation and hype, dire forecasts and bad jokes, and much more on this subject, which between the time Spencer completed the book and the time of its publication had moved to center stage in the mediaverse. Other readers may differ, of course. And the questions at the core of this concluding chapter are certainly central to the entire book.

In his introduction (wittily subtitled “The Natures of the Beast”), Spencer writes, “What (or who) is the human, and who (or what) gets to say? These two questions run through the histories of science and religion like rivers through a landscape.” Indeed they do, and we can be grateful to Nicholas Spencer for following their sometimes elusive course from the ancient world to our wildly contested present moment.