The Territories of Science and Religion

The Territories of Science and Religion

Peter Harrison

Language: English

Pages: 320

ISBN: 022618448X

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The conflict between science and religion seems indelible, even eternal. Surely two such divergent views of the universe have always been in fierce opposition? Actually, that’s not the case, says Peter Harrison: our very concepts of science and religion are relatively recent, emerging only in the past three hundred years, and it is those very categories, rather than their underlying concepts, that constrain our understanding of how the formal study of nature relates to the religious life.

In The Territories of Science and Religion, Harrison dismantles what we think we know about the two categories, then puts it all back together again in a provocative, productive new way. By tracing the history of these concepts for the first time in parallel, he illuminates alternative boundaries and little-known relations between them—thereby making it possible for us to learn from their true history, and see other possible ways that scientific study and the religious life might relate to, influence, and mutually enrich each other.
A tour de force by a distinguished scholar working at the height of his powers, The Territories of Science and Religion promises to forever alter the way we think about these fundamental pillars of human life and experience.

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these concepts has also been accompanied by a kind of historical amnesia. In the chapters to come, I hope to expose some of the myths that inform our present categories, and to offer further details of an alternative, and largely forgotten history—Â�a history that, once called to mind, may help us reconfigure the relationship between the entities that we now call “science” and “religion.” [ 2 ] The Cosmos and the Religious Quest Natural philosophy substitutes for festering superstition that

contemplative life, inasmuch as man is guided thereby to the knowledge of God.”47 It is important, then, to reduce neither natural philosophy (“science”) nor sacra doctrina (“theology”) to familiarity with an organized body of doctrines.48 In proposing that sacra doctrina is a science, Thomas Aquinas is arguing that it is a practice that leads to a particular state of mind, as a consequence of which one can habitually reason from cause to effect. In the first question of the Summa theologiae he

an instructive example. “The true religion” is suggestive of a system of beliefs that is distinguished from other such systems that are false. But careful examination of the content of these expressions reveals that early discussions about true and false religion were typically concerned not with belief, but rather worship and whether or not worship is properly directed. Tertullian (ca. 160–Â�ca. 220) was the first Christian thinker to produce substantial writings in Latin and was also probably

philosophy,” it is worth recalling that they bear, in their very nomenclature, genealogical connections to the humanistic disciplines of philosophy and history. The gradual replacement of these two terms by a generic “science” and the host of subdisciplinary specializations that included “biology” represents a significant severing of ties with the humanities and the ominous bifurcation of Western intellectual life into what C. P. Snow, in the 1950s, would famously designate “the two cultures.”

spoke in similar terms of “a conflict between two epochs in the evolution of human thought—Â�the theological and the scientific.”84 For Draper and White, the lack of an inherent unifying principle among the sciences is compensated for by the promotion of a kind of negative definition, in which science is understood by what it is not, or by what it is in opposition to—Â�in this case, religion. This is akin to the old ploy of uniting a fractious nation by focusing attention on an external enemy.

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