The Territories of Science and Religion

Administrators in the university in the USA in which I worked in the early 1970's would often 'correct' what seemed to them an obvious typo in documents I sent them which said that I had a BA degree in Chemistry from Oxford University. They were mystified by my explanation that when chemistry began to be taught in Oxford in the nineteenth century it was part of natural philosophy and so of course it merited an arts degree. A few years later I obtained another BA from Oxford – in theology. This Oxonian anachronism is pertinent to the main thrust of this book by the Professor of the History of Science and Director of the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland. He argues that if we rigidly apply our modern categories of 'religion' and 'science' to the past we inevitably arrive at a distorted picture of their historical relationship. His book is a fresh undermining of the still-popular 'conflict myth' view of the relationship between science and religion which traces the rise of the modern use of these categories. It is a fascinating and somewhat complex story which is lucidly told. A review can touch on only a few points.

In the Middle Ages, as evidenced by Aquinas, religio was a human virtue or habit, concerned with inner acts of devotion and prayer, not a set of beliefs and practices. Scientia referred to a habit of mind or intellectual virtue which could be developed by practice, not a body of systematic knowledge about the world. What historians of science usually see as the closest medieval analogue to modern science, 'natural philosophy', included topics such as God and the soul and excluded mathematics and natural history. As an integral part of philosophy it was also concerned with pursing a 'good' life. It therefore always had moral and religious ends in mind. Christian critique of pagan philosophy is often seen as evidence of a bias against 'science'. In fact, much of it was directed at astrology, divination, the worship of deified heroes, and belief in the divinity of the celestial bodies – at what is now seen as 'superstition'. As medieval Christianity emptied the universe of divine beings it replaced them by divine meanings. Every creature was seen as designed to manifest some divine truth. Nature, like the Bible, was 'God's book'. Through the use of allegorical interpretation, a method already applied to Scripture, they gave intimations of the Trinity, bore witness to Christ's work of redemption and were the source of specific moral lessons.

Reservations about the abuses of the allegorical method were voiced before the Reformation. Both Luther and Calvin rejected its application to Scripture, prioritising instead the 'historical' or 'literal' meaning of the text. This affected its wider use. Francis Bacon proposed a new non-allegorical way of reading the 'book of nature'. In his view it manifested the 'power and skill' of its Creator but not his 'image'. He replaced allegorical 'deduction' with the 'inductive' approach of observation and experiment. Following Bacon, natural philosophy still had religious significance but by the eighteenth century it simply provided a limited amount of evidence from which some basic truths about God could be inferred, as by Newton in his Principia. Natural Philosophy also continued to be concerned with pursuit of a 'good' life, but the 'good' concerned came to be seen as not so much the 'good of the soul', as the material betterment of humankind.

Another significant result of the Reformation was the Peace of Augsburg (1555), a settlement between the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and an alliance of Lutheran princes. It specified two 'religions' based on the idea that religious differences could be given objective expression, as in the twenty-eight articles of the Augsburg Confession. By the second half of the seventeenth century a number of influential English Protestant thinkers, for example Stillingfleet and Locke, presented faith and belief in terms of giving assent to propositions.

In the first half of the nineteenth century there was still a fundamental conviction that there was a unity of theological and physical truth. In this 'natural theology' played an integrating role, as seen in the Bridgewater Treatises (1833-36). However, seen as an 'inductive science' the idea of 'natural theology' reinforced the understanding and definition of 'religion' in terms of belief in propositions. It was the second half of the nineteenth century that saw the reconstruction of 'science' around the principle of a common method for studying the physical world to gain knowledge about it and a common identity of its practitioners, the emerging professional 'scientists'. This drawing of boundaries around 'science' and 'religion' with a focus on each as bodies of knowledge expressed in propositions raised the question of the relationship between them in a new way. This was the period which produced the 'conflict myth' as some scientists set out to validate their particular view of reality and reinforce the boundaries of science to establish its independence and authority. This myth was linked with another one, the myth of 'historical progress' which took various forms in the late nineteenth century – such as J. G. Frazer's scheme in which humanity progresses from magic, through religion, to science. Reading history through the lenses of these myths distorts it.

Harrison provides a wealth of interesting material to support his understanding of the development of the understanding of 'religion' and 'science' and their relationship from antiquity to today. No doubt other historians will assess it and challenge him at some points. However, his overall thesis seems sound: that our current understandings of these categories are relatively recent constructs and it is unhelpful to project them into the past as is commonly done. This is not a matter of purely historical interest. As he indicates in his closing sentences, there are implications for today. He suggests that advocates of a constructive dialogue between science and religion may unwittingly perpetuate conflict because, 'Often they concede the cultural authority of the sciences, the propositional nature of religion, and the idea of a neutral, rational space in which dialogue can take place. As we have seen, each of these developments is relatively recent. But the history of their emergence, along with the past from which they came, offers some intriguing intimations of how things might have been, and might yet be, rather different' (198). There is a lot to think about there!