E XPANDING S CIENCE AND R ELIGION IN THE P LURALISTIC L ANDSCAPE OF T - - PDF document

1 DRAFT PRESENTATION – IRAS

CONFERENCE 2014, STAR ISLAND

EXPANDING SCIENCE AND RELIGION

IN THE PLURALISTIC LANDSCAPE OF TODAY’S W ORLD

Zainal Abidin Bagir

Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies, Graduate School, Universitas Gadjah M ada, Indonesia I understand that one of the motivations for speaking about the pluralistic landscape of our world today is to make the discourse of science and religion more inclusive. While the discourse originated in the western Christian context, a first approximation to the more inclusive discourse would probably be, to borrow Robert Russel’s characterization, more international, intercultural, interreligious and interdisciplinary. (Russell 2004, xiii) The fact that journals on science and religion frequently published works of self-critique and self- questioning of the field indicates that, for the better, the field’s boundaries are not stable yet. Taking cue from discussions about religious pluralism, we understand that awareness of the pluralistic landscape also means acceptance of diversity which would make it more challenging to find some common ground to sustain such a discourse. What distinguishes pluralism from relativism, as standpoints toward diversity, is that the former still, at some point, has to draw boundaries. And when boundaries are drawn, what would be the criteria? The danger has always been that the more powerful side of the diversity may, albeit inadvertently, hegemonize the other parties it wants to embrace. Boundaries are always contested. The question is how pluralistic, how inclusive are we prepared to be? Being a pluralist may mean more than simply inviting more parties to the table. It is surely necessary but not sufficient. At some point, we may need to be prepared not only to find some common ground, but question the ground itself. In this case, the categories of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ needs to be problematized, as a number of prominent scholars of religion and science have shown how the categories were invented in a western Christian

• context. While we may provide justifications for the wider use of both these terms as

understood today, the pluralist awareness may require further rethinking. This is not a mere theoretical attempt with no consequence, as it could imply the rethinking of the object of study and determining the agenda of research in science and religion discourse. Reflecting Peter Harrison’s suspicion that science and religion is a western problem (which I shall discuss later), I will look at the discourse in the Indonesian context to see to what extent the suspicion is justified. I will start by trying to understand today’s science and

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religion discourse and attempts to problematize it. In the end I will draw some more general and theoretical conclusions.

• 1. What is science and religion about? : Zygon@49

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What is science and religion about? A survey of very recent discussions by important figures in science and religion in Zygon@49, a series of recent editions of the oldest journal in the field, could give us some ideas. Taking science and religion as a disciplinary field, Niels H. Gregersen suggests that its object of research is the relations between science and religion in historical and contemporary contexts. (Gregersen 2014, 420) While this sounds like a common sense and not difficult to accept as a starting point, his next assertion circumvents the complexities of the relations and as such radically shrinks the possibilities of exploring

• them. ‘It seems to me that the programs within science and religion need to be committed

to some form of metaphysical realism, that is that the world exists regardless of the

• bserver, and consists of a variety of mind-independent entities or objective relations

(including also the observer’s interpretations.)’ (ibid., 423) The issue is not about the validity of that metaphysical realism, or other alternative philosophical positions, but the assumption that science and religion is about (conceptual) views of the world. This seems to be too quickly reducing both enterprises to their cognitive contents or beliefs: science to scientific theories and religion to theological views. While Gregersen may acknowledge other, non-cognitive dimensions of science, such as practices (of the practitioners or communities of practitioners in both fields), but that seems to lie in the very margin, and its study is simply one of the arms of the science-and-religion octopus (he is actually not sure what such studies would contribute to the discourse). (ibid., 427-428) I will later provide an illustration about the importance of looking at practices in the relation between (practitioners of) science and religion; in certain contexts, it may be even more important and consequential to focus on the practices. The other article in the earlier issue of Zygon, still part of Zygon@49, by the late Ian G. Barbour (his last piece?) also sees that ‘science and religion’ is about relation. Barbour acknowledges that science and religion are not only about religious beliefs, and that there is a social context in which the interplay takes place. However when it comes to relation between them, both are understood mostly in terms of beliefs. (Barbour 2014, 82-84) Toward the end of the article, Barbour says that the challenge for a journal like Zygon (or, he may as well be referring to the science and religion discourse in general) is ‘the inclusion of greater religious diversity’. He sees that other religious traditions (he mentions the examples

• f Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism) have been involved in the enterprise and would

like to see this develops further, but still it seems what he sees in them are beliefs. Yet, for

• ne, beliefs may have different significance in those traditions or play different roles. (While

1 This is a draft presentation. I plan to elaborate and give more references to each of the subheadings.

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I will come back to this discussion later, I of course have to immediately add here that even within each of the religions there are different traditions, and as such I cannot also generalize here.) A further useful reminder is given by Willem Drees (2004). Even if we regard beliefs as the most important part or dimension of science and of religion, there is another problem lurking here. The ‘and’ in ‘science and religion’ deceptively gives the impression that the two are about ideas and, further, similar in their cognitive kind and status. The typology that presents the two as being in conflict, independence, dialogue or integration assumes a symmetrical understanding of science and theology, while the reality may be different. (Drees 2004, 372)

• 2. Three directions in expanding science and religion

As mentioned earlier, inclusion of greater diversity, as proposed by Barbour, may be a necessary first step, but further steps are required to really make the discourse more inclusive, reflecting our awareness of the pluralistic landscape of today’s world. There are at least three directions of expansion. First, the diversity to be included may have much wider scope than listed there, since each religion has within it different traditions with different emphases on beliefs and practices and interplay between them. Second, all the examples mentioned above by Barbour are well-known world religions. Of course these are examples, but just so that we do not miss out important stuffs here, we also need to explicitly acknowledge the variety that is usually called indigenous religions, which are still a living reality in many parts of the world. Though in many places they tend to be smaller or even on the edge of extinction, in most cases pressured and repressed by the ever larger and dominating world religions, they (or fractions of them) are still there,

• surviving. (Examples from Indonesia which I will discuss later will be especially pertinent in

this regard). Third, when we try to include more religions, we will then need to also open to the possibility that these religions may display quite different characteristics; the significance of theology in these religions may be different; the scope of their worldviews may be different, the interaction between faith and knowledge may be different, to the extent that the very distinction between faith and reason or science and religion do not even make sense. The starting point of this conversation is the discourse as developed in the context of (western) Christianity—and a particular modern version of it; the attempt to be more aware

• f the pluralistic landscape of our world will necessarily demand us to do some serious

rethinking of the very foundation of that discourse. The rest of this paper will focus on the last two directions.

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• 3. Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives

Again, at the ‘rethinking’ front, I cannot claim originality, as such attempt has been part of this enterprise, but in any case I have to take up the following issues as they are not yet widely accepted nor resolved. A very promising starting point—actually, not merely starting point, but it has moved rather far in this direction—is John Hedley Brooke’s historical approach to science and religion. History is always a good therapy for the essentializing tendency in abstract discourses whether in theology, philosophy of science or science and religion. I see his approach as in parallel with Thomas Kuhn’s when he re-moulds the field of philosophy of science to become more historical. Just to remind Kuhn’s famous first words in his The Structure of Scientific Revolution (1962): ‘History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.’ Replace ‘science’ with ‘science and religion’, and we are promised another transformation in our understanding. By history, of course it does not mean the history of dead people, but people nevertheless: To look at the people, including today’s people, who hold beliefs, not only the beliefs themselves in abstract, just as Kuhn suggested that we look at what scientists in their scientific communities do, instead of theorizing what they do in some general formula of scientific method which then is regarded as the norm.

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It seems not an exaggeration to say that what J

• hn Brooke did for science and religion is

similar to what Kuhn did for philosophy of science. As such, I would here simply briefly review this approach by looking at an excellent anthology published recently and dedicated to Brooke, Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives (Dixon, Cantor and Pumfrey,

• eds. 2010) I’d like to distill several important insights from a few chapters in the book to

help us rethink science and religion, especially in the attempt to expand it by considering

• ur pluralistic landscape.

A central argument of the book is about the reification of both science and religion. Their histories can be traced back to the point when these categories emerged to name realities that previously were called differently. Science has not had a fixed meaning over the centuries—it was different from previous study of nature such as natural philosophy or natural history. M any recent works on the history of science show that science as a modern discipline emerged only in the 19th centuries. It was not a coincidence that the idea of an enduring conflict between science and religion gained prominence in this century too; one

2 While in philosophy of science such an approach has advanced for the past five decades, in religious studies

this approach has actually also developed for some time, but is still a central issue until today. This approach in religious studies means looking at what people say or do when they ‘do religion’, instead of what theology tells us about the religion. [Examples: John Bowen, Anthropology of Islam ; Nancy Ammerman, Everyday Religion.]

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way to define science is by distinguishing it from religion, or even showing that the two are in conflict. (Harrison 2014, 26-29) Religion too, as students of religious studies now usually learn in their first year, was reified around the same time. A classic study by Wilfred Cantwell-Smith shows how Christianity was not regarded as a ‘religion’; it was mostly faith or piety, not a systematic body of doctrines. Once Christianity becomes a religion, the next move was to identify ‘similar’ religious traditions and call them ‘religions’. The encounter of other religious traditions themselves took place, especially in the 19th century through imperialism. The realities had always been there, of course, but their reification has a definite history. So, first, Christian faith was reified, then other traditions reified as ‘religions’—using the standard of ‘religion’ from the paradigmatic Christianity. Reification, for Cantwell-Smith, is ‘mentally making religion into a thing, gradually coming to conceive it as an objective systematic entity’. M ore studies have appeared in the last few years which bring this historical insight to better understand how ‘world religions’, or ‘eastern religions’ were invented, and usually in the image of the paradigmatic religion, the origin of reification, which was western Christianity. Another important line in the rethinking of ‘religion’ is criticisms of the modern secular tendency to conceive religion mostly as beliefs. Cantwell-Smith has pointed out how this was not always the case in Christianity; later anthropologists such as Talal Asad went further in their idea of religion mostly as practices, not (propositional) beliefs. A chapter in Science and Religion – New Historical Perspectives by Jan Golinski (2013), interestingly takes up Bruno Latour’s notion of religion as performative, without beliefs. So what we see here are separate developments of the construction of categories of science and religion. The relation between the two itself, undoubtedly, was constructed after the 18th century. Previously the two enterprises were so connected that ‘relation’ between the two was not an issue. ‘’Science’ and ‘religion’ were not independent entities which might bear some positive or negative relation to each other, and to attempt to identify such connections is to project back in time a set of concerns that are typically those of our own age.’ (Harrison 2010, 16) Of course showing how the categories were constructed, and further details such as the construction of religion as mostly beliefs, is not a mere interest of historians. The least we can learn from the histories is that while terms are unavoidably constructed, the awareness

• f their constructed nature should help us to be more sensitive to the contestations behind

them and as such avoid over generalized conclusions which, for example, assume that ‘religion’ means the same thing for today’s Christians and M uslims, Hindus in Indonesia, etc. And behind the construction usually there is politics. One of Harrison’s conclusions may seem rather disastrous for an attempt to expand science and religion discourse beyond its original western Christian context. Considering the history

• f how categories of ‘religion’ and ‘science’ as well as their ‘relations’ were born in a

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particular history of the west, he thinks that ‘‘science and religion’ is primarily a western problem.’ (Harrison 2010,41) Recent literature has shown how Islam and Buddhism have dealt with these issues as well, though probably in different ways, but others, such as Eastern religions, especially when they do not consider themselves to be ‘religions’, are in general indifferent. Would our pluralist awareness, out of the good intention to include more diversity, export alien problems to them? As I will touch on again later, much of the issue of science and religion in the M uslim world is not the result of exporting a western problem. They are responses to the western science exported to the M uslim world through imperialism. While the modern science is exported from the west, the discourse on Islam and science which responded to it is different, since it developed in the context of countries that were colonized.

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The concrete implications of the historical approach should be clear by now, and I will add some more illustrations in the next sections. What I will try to do next, by taking a case study of Indonesia, is describing the scene of whatever can be said as science and religion discourse, and see how the preceding concerns about the boundaries of science and of religion, the politics involved in the reification figure in significantly here.

• 4. The case of Indonesia

In this section I will start by describing two main spheres of the existing science and religion discourse in Indonesia, which does not exhaust the whole area but sufficiently represents it, followed by specific discussion of indigenous religions which are quite relevant to science and religion discourse, but have not been studied as part of it. The first two areas may prompt us to ask Harrison’s question—is science and religion discourse a western problem? I would suggest that some parts of the Indonesian discourse, some of it represents the Islamic discourse more generally, are genuine, not exported problems. The next question then, does such a discourse in a non-western context display different characteristics? With regard to the third issue, indigenous religions, I will follow up the move of blurring of categories of science and religion and, further, ways to expand the discourse. Indonesia as part of the M uslim world Indonesia is the largest M uslim country in the world; 87% of the population, which means more than 200 millions, are M uslims. Yet it is also a diverse country which since 1945 acknowledges freedom of religion; the Constitution does not mention any particular religion, but in practice it has privileged six world religions (Islam, Protestantism,

3 This important historical background is not difficult to notice. See, for example, recent surveys on science and

religion in the M uslim world, such as Ibrahim Kalin (20--), Muzaffar Iqbal (---) and Bagir (2006). As I noted in my article, similar problem of ‘integrating’ the exported science to Islam was also experienced by the Tibetan Buddhists.

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Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism). These religions are administered and receives funding from the M inistry of Religious Affairs, which itself has divisions representing the religions—with the exception of Confucianism, which has a more complex history.

4 What people now call indigenous religions of Indonesia are not acknowledged as

religions; they are part of culture. I shall discuss this further later. What is called ‘science and religion discourse’ may consist of several things. In the past few years, an inter-religious discourse on science and religion has developed with mostly the participation of M uslims and Christians. However, most of the times the discourse developed separately within each religious communities. Here I shall look more into the M uslim discourse. M uch of the discourse related to science and Islam followed the agenda of such discourse in the M uslim world in general, especially its English-speaking part. It may be too strong to say that such discourse in Indonesia was ‘imported’ from other parts of the M uslim world, but we may discern that they have quite similar motivations. Discussions about Islam and science had existed for a long time, but it was not systematic, and mostly spoke about the history of science in Islam, especially the period of the so-called ‘Golden Age’, and much of it was apologetic. Another popular issue that frequently came up was on the backwardness of modern science in the M uslim world—usually contrasted with the strong and frequent normative injunctions on seeking knowledge of nature in the Qur’an. There is another issue which needs to be understood as the background of these discussions: whatever can be called as science and technology almost all was imported; there was the idea to develop small-scale, appropriate science and technology, which is “ more Indonesian” , but it never seriously took off. In 1980s and 1990s, a newer discourse that owed initially to the translation of English books

• n Islam flourished. Quite central here was the critique of western science and the need to

build a science based on some Islamic epistemology. We can see here topics that were popular among M uslim scholars in the US and Europe, such as Islamization of knowledge and the creation of ‘Islamic science’.

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This kind discourse shows, against Harrison, that the discourse was not exported from the (Christian) west. Rather, it should mostly be understood as M uslim response to the introduction of modern science, initially during the time of colonization of M uslim lands by western powers.

4 Reference to results from recent global surveys about the characters of Indonesian Muslims: Gallup

Poll, Pew Research, Riaz Hassan’s.

5 To get a fuller view of the kind of discourse that developed until around 2000s, see Part I of Nidhal

Guessoum’s book, The Quantum Question. Part I of the book is mostly critiques of trends on Islam and science in the M uslim world since 1980s; all of the trends Guessoum observed were present in Indonesia, though not all became as popular as in the Arab world. Especially with regard to evolution, see Bagir(2010)

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It is interesting to note that while the popular discussion was on epistemology, philosophy

• f science and how Islamic values may play roles in science, issues such as evolution and

creation was not popular at all. The issue of evolution became popular only recently, in the past decade or so, owed almost exclusively to the translation of books by the Turkish ‘creationist’, Harun Yahya. And this discourse, as many authors have shown, is to an important extent exported from the American creationists.

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Islamic universities and the need for an Islamic identity for sciences Another direction in the development of science and religion discourse occurs because of the recent transformation of a number of Islamic universities. In the past decade a few out

• f tens of state Islamic universities were transformed into full-fledged universities.

Previously they concentrated on studies of Islamic religious sciences, such as Quranic hermeneutics, Islamic theology and Islamic law. Now they offer ‘secular’ (or more popularly called in Indonesia as ‘general’) sciences. M uch of the reason for the transformation may have to do with practical reasons. The universities had traditionally been the choice of graduates of religious high schools, which were called madrasa. However, different from the madrasa in many other parts of the M uslim world, such as the ones in Pakistan, the Indonesian madrasa had undergone the process of mainstreaming to the national curriculum, and as such they were almost not different from other public high schools, except that in addition to the courses mandated by the national curriculum, they provide additional hours for Islamic subjects.

7 Being mainstreamed to the national curriculum, now

the graduates had more options to continue their education. While they previously did not have many options except to go to the Islamic universities, now they could also go to the general universities if they want to pursue non-religious subjects, and many chose these

• universities. This puts some pressure on the Islamic universities as the rate of intake of

students decreased. Adjusting with this changing situation—and with the employment market—they had to change. However, when they changed, somehow they felt the need to assert some Islamic identity to the universities to distinguish it from other non-religious public universities. Would the physics or medicine taught in these universities be different from those taught in the non- religious universities? If not, other than the above pragmatic reasons, why should they offer these secular sciences? The need to answer these questions forces them to try to define a certain Islamic identity for the universities. Here the literature on Islam and science that were already developed became handy.

6 See Hameed (2010) 7 A parallel trend occurs in non-religious schools, in which religion subject is mandatory for all students from

the primary to high schools. Recently, in the amended Constitution (2002) and the law on national education, development of science and technology is said to also consider religious values. There does not seem, so far, concrete implications of the laws on the development of science and technology, but the implications are more felt in the way national curriculum is designed.

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Some versions of Islamization of knowledge were considered; development of Islamic epistemology was also discussed. A range of alternatives, from the most radical to the most pragmatic were on the table; there was no one single idea underlying the transformation of the different universities, instead each university was trying to reformulate its identity. The most pragmatic would simply add Islamic ethics and broad knowledge of Islamic sciences as part of mandatory subjects all students have to take, and leave the education of general sciences intact. The most idealists thought of islamizing sciences such as developing certain kinds of ‘Islamic sociology’, or encouraging the professors to ‘integrate’ the natural sciences they teach with Islamic teachings. Especially for the latter case, while the existing literature

• n science and Islam is relevant, the great difficulty was that they were also forced to create

curricula and syllabi which translate the ideas into more operational format. While clearly all the universities, in terms of the objectives they want to achieve especially with regard to non-religious sciences, aim for excellence in the sciences (and in the employment market their graduates will have to compete with graduates of non-religious universities), the question is how could Islam be ‘integrated’ systematically into the day-to-day conduct of higher education? The indigenous worldviews: ‘science and religion’ discourse without ‘science’ and ‘religion’ A more fundamental and really different discourse that was not developed in the context of science and religion discourse but anthropology of religion and religious studies concerns indigenous religions. As noted above, the expansion of the discourse of science and religion could be justified by the blurring of boundaries of religion. In Indonesia, the boundaries of what is called religion (agama) were influenced by the existence of world religions and, with it, modernity (with rationalization as one of its main features) which was deployed through the means of developmentalism. The indigenous religions are not called as ‘(modern) religion’ (agama) partly because they are not sufficiently modern. (Hidayah 2012) Agama is from Sanskrit but actually it is intended as a translation of ‘religion’ in its modern western meaning. In his classic study of the modern notion of ‘religion’, Wilfred Cantwell- Smith observes that ’… in modern Indonesia agama, from classical Sanskrit for ‘text’, has come to be used for the western notion of a religion.’ (Cantwell-Smith 1962, 58-59) The quotation below summarizes in more details the situation of agama in Indonesia: ‘In Indonesia, the category ‘religion’ has been appropriated in terms of “ agama” . In truth, agama is the peculiar combination in Sanskrit guise of a Christian view of what counts as a world religion with an Islamic understanding of what defines a proper religion: divine revelation recorded by a prophet in a holy book, a system of law for the community of believers, congregational worship, and a belief in the One and Only God. ... M oreover, far from being autonomous, agama is an integral part of a semantic field which it composes along with the categories adat (‘tradition’), budaya (‘culture’), hukum (‘law’), and various signifiers involving political authority. (Picard 2011, 3) This understanding of religion has

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dubious legal-constitutional basis, but it is effective in practice until today, with serious consequences for, especially, indigenous religions and syncretic religions. While since 1945, before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Indonesian Constitution has had an article guaranteeing freedom to religion, such an understanding of religion means that the non-world religions are not protected as religion. In practice Indonesia divides religions into a hierarchy of privileged religions. The top position is

• ccupied by six world religions (Islam, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Hinduism,

Buddhism and Confucianism). These religions are protected and they are privileged in the sense of being accommodated into the structure of the M inistry of Religious Affairs and receive regular annual state funding. The next layer is other world religions (such as Judaism and Taoism). These are religions with a small number of adherents in Indonesia; they are not accommodated in the structure of the M inistry, and as such they also do not receive state funding, and the state is to simply ‘leave them as they are’. A further consequence is the putative obligation for every citizen to have a religion—for example, to be recorded as a proper citizen in state administration one has to fill in the column for religion in the identity card. The old, living stigmatization of people who do not ‘have a religion yet’, associated with the atheist Communists, means that this people’s civil rights are not fully fulfilled. To be a full citizen, one has to have or to associate with a world religion (and, further, actually, their ‘mainstream’ versions). The right to freedom of religion and belief was significantly strengthened in 2000 after the Constitutional amendment following the 1998 democratization, but the old definition of religion, hovering in the background, remains effective in practice.

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In the scheme, where is the place of indigenous religions, which are present in many parts

• f Indonesia. The indigenous religions are not regarded as religion but (local) cultures. As

such members of such communities have to choose a religion to be considered a full citizen. While association with the world religions connects the Indonesian people with the outside world, thus provides them with familiar identification, local cultures connect them with the Indonesian past, which was ‘not modern’ and as such was not interesting for a developmentalist regime of the 1960s to 1990s. The 1998 political liberalization opens the way for re-assertion of local identities which previously was subsumed under one arch- national identity as a modern nation.

8 A 2006 law on civil administration provides a way out for those whose religions are not acknowledged as

agama, by allowing them to fill in the religion column in identity card with ‘Others’ or simply leave it blank, but the stigmatization of people who do not ‘have a religion yet’ renders it not an effective way to guarantee equal

• citizenship. A very recent (July 2014) interesting development is the M inistry of Religious Affairs’ consideration

to confer the status of “ agama” to Baha’i. Baha’i communities, which are very small in number and scattered in a few areas, were in the past attacked by a group of M uslim vigilante because they were considered as a deviation of Islam. Recognizing Baha’i as a religion does not mean that it will join the six world religions in the first layer of the hierarchy, but the second. It means the religion is considered a distinct religion and as such cannot be accused of deviating from Islam; with regard to state administration, the followers of the religion may leave the religion column in the identity card blank, or fill it in with “ Other” .

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To return to the topic of science and religion, the question is whether such a discourse could include indigenous religions? Excluding indigenous religions from the discourse, because they are not ‘proper religions’, is a sign of submission to the state definition of religion, which was a political decision. Academically speaking, the indigenous worldviews are very much relevant to be discussed in science and religion discourse. While we cannot abstract certain general characteristics out of the existing diverse local indigenous religions,

• bservation of a few of them would quickly show how a certain view of nature is a central

part of their worldviews. If modern science is related to religion by way of their understanding of nature, the indigenous worldviews have much to say here. The difficulty lies in the fact that the indigenous worldviews do not recognize the modern differentiation between science and religion. If in the modern discourse ‘science and religion’, as discussed earlier, tries to find a certain relation—be it harmony, independence

• r conflict—this project immediately disintegrates when the two are not differentiated.

A good example is a community of less than 5000 people living in South Sulawesi today, the Ammatoa.

9 For the Ammatoans, the social actors in the cosmos consist of human and non-

human subjects/ actors, who live together. This perception is, until today, effective in governing their everyday behaviors, including forest conservation. The ‘religion’ of the Ammatoa is at the same time their ‘science’, which gives them an understanding of nature and tells them how to behave and ‘exploit’ nature effectively. It is at the same time the source of social-political governance that includes sets of regulation and punishment. Interestingly, as shown by M aarif, they came to interact with world religions, in this case mainly Islam, such that Islam has been an integral part of their being today, though it is a version of Islam which supports their religious ecology. This kind of dual identity defies state definition of religion and does not always treated well even in academic discussions.

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This Indonesian history is by no means unique. The violence with which the modern definition of ‘religion’, as a political decision during the era of European colonialism, has encroached on indigenous communities in the faraway lands it colonized, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, has done even greater damage. In Indonesia such communities have suffered violent hegemony by the modern state for a few decades and some of them still survived, when the authoritarian government was forced to step away, while the indigenous communities in the US and Canada, for example, have suffered much longer. As the example of the Ammatoans and a few other surviving communities show, discussions

• f religion and ecology, as part of science and religion discourse, need to take indigenous

communities into account, especially when the concern is not only to theoretically understand the relation between science and religion but also how a better understanding

9 I summarize this description of the Ammatoa from Samsul M aarif (forthcoming) 10 Cf. Prasojo (2011)

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• f the discourse should help us in crafting possible futures. Especially in the case of

reservations of forest, which is at the heart of their worldviews and determine their survival

• r extinction, the indigenous communities of today are facing daunting challenges coming

from the global corporations with their hostile technology. (Tsing 2004)

• 5. What is science and religion for?

At this point, an important question we need to address is, to quote a formulation posed by Drees (2004), ‘What do we seek to do when we do religion and science’? ‘Although reflections on religion in a scientific age often seem to be driven by other questions, I suggest that a moral and motivational interest may be more prominent that is often recognized or acknowledged.’ (Drees, 2004, 367). He listed the moral questions that drive many of the science and religion engagements, including, from Zygon: “ how the joint reflection of scientists, philosophers and theologians can contribute to the welfare of human community” . Understanding such motivation, and observing the fate of indigenous communities around the world, it seems natural to put them rather centrally in the science and religion

• discourse. But to take them seriously means accepting the blurring of the boundaries of

science and religion. In this regard, there are promising ideas already developed to some extent in the literature, though mostly outside science and religion discourse, such as Bruno Latour’s politics of nature.

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The other two problems in the Indonesian science and religion discourse as discussed above are easier to accommodate, but even here we need to understand the different context, which is inseparable from colonialism and the introduction of modern science through colonialism as part of the inexorable modernization. The reflection on indigenous religions may be seen as one among other agenda in religion and science, but, due to its radical blurring of modern categorizations of science and religion, it may as well be a main guiding framework to help us expand the discourse in the pluralistic landscape of today’s world. * * * * * * * * *

11 In the full paper, I may elaborate on Latour’s ideas such as his challenge of the distinction of scientific and

indigenous types of knowledge; the new politics of nature, or political community of the earth, in which non- human actors are somehow, through certain procedures, represented in the decision making.

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