Historian, Christopher Harding, reviews Playing God for Engelsberg Ideas. 15/05/2024

For all its enormous popularity, something feels a little dated about Netflix’s hit science fiction series 3 Body Problem. Whenever the conversation among its cast of super–smart young physicists turns to life’s big questions, the dominant theme is: ‘We don’t believe in God – we’re scientists!’ The closest one of them comes to finding solace in the face of death is the multiverse theory: many more of him will be living on, elsewhere.

It is a testament to the work of writers such Nick Spencer, and those upon whom he builds, that the idea is steadily filtering through into popular consciousness that science and religion are not the implacable enemies they were once claimed to be, in 19th–century polemics and then in the New Atheism of the early 21st century. Spencer’s previous book, Magisteria: the Entangled Histories of Science and Religion (2023), does a fine job of demolishing the old notion of ‘science vs religion’, replacing it with an account of rich, fascinating entanglement.

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