Book Review: Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Part One)

In 1991 John Hedley Brooke released his Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives,[1] which arguably became the most important book written on the history of science and religion in the last half-century or more. The uniqueness of Brooke’s work is that it encapsulated and summarized—through a mesmerizing command of the sources—the growing rumors of historiographical discontent regarding the “Warfare thesis” of the history of science and religion.  While in part going the route of Ian Barbour’s likewise pioneering conceptualization of complex relationships of conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration between religion and science in his Gifford Lectures[2] (akin to Reinhold Niebuhr’s similar typology regarding the various relationships of Christ and Culture), Brooke pressed this “complexity thesis” even further.  Rather than merely pointing out the variety of ways “religion” on the one hand, was related to “science” on the other, Brooke’s lengthy monograph argues in a stronger manner that “precisely because the boundaries [of science and religion] have shifted with time, it would be artificial to ask about the relationship between ‘science’ and ‘religion’ as if modern definitions of their provenance had some timeless validity” (Brooke, 8).  Brooke thus spends the majority of his work looking at how the porous boundaries of science and religion were negotiated (and sometimes even fused together)[3], advocating for what has been called the “complexity thesis” of the relationship between the two.

The historian of science Noah Efron recollected that his first encounter as a Ph.D. student with Brooke’s newly minted work was so profound, that when he picked it off the fresh-arrivals shelf in the library, he sat down next to the shelf on the carpet (the book not having yet been catalogued for borrowing) and did not move until that evening when his wife came to pick him up.  “The person she found crumpled on the carpet was different from the one she had kissed goodbye ten hours earlier,” he recalls.[4]  It is thus high praise when another historian of science—this time the distinguished Ronald Numbers—writes on the back of Peter Harrison’s latest work based on his 2011 Gifford Lectures, The Territories of Science and Religion that it is “simply put … the most significant contribution to the history of science and religion since the appearance of John Hedley Brooke’s [work] nearly a quarter-century ago.”

Both Harrison and Brooke have been, at one time, the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford, and both display encyclopedic comprehension of the traditions they expound upon. Though similar in theme to Brooke’s work, Harrison’s latest outing is no mere pedantic fussing with a few unexplored corners of Brooke’s arguments, but a powerful addition, questioning the historically constructed nature of the contours of science and religion themselves.  Though a variety of different theses are put forward in the book, we can summarize the overall picture by encapsulating it into several main ideas, which this review essay intends to look at:

1.)                   The conceptual territories mapped by “science” and “religion” have a history.  Describing their relationship in transhistorical and transcultural terms is problematic because it does not attend to the historical realities behind their emergence as we understand them.  This historical emergence is precisely what Harrison intends to look at.

2.)                   Part of this emergence of both science and religion involves an inversion, or what Harrison terms “the turning inside out,” of earlier terms and concepts like religio, scientia, fides/pistis (belief), even other auxiliary concepts like usefulness, caritas (charity), and progress.  What he means will become more apparent, but he wants to index how they all went from terms describing individual and group virtues to objective sets of data and belief systems or “worldviews.”

3.)                   Both modern science and modern religion emerge roughly parallel and in relation to one another in the historical record: they both shape each other, and are shaped by similar environments, to produce what we recognize today.  This has a few consequences.

a.)   Theology and “religion” play a large hand in defining the territory, presuppositions method, prestige, and goals of science, though these are often forgotten in what Harrison terms “acute historical amnesia.”

b.)  To understand the relation of science and religion, one must as such tell broader stories.  The story that Harrison tells is also one that looks at various narratives recounting the emergence and “essence” (if there is such a thing) of Modernity, and secularism as concepts.

  Indeed from one angle this book is the culmination of the scholarship contained in Harrison’s three previous monographs.  A year before Brooke’s Science and Religion, Harrison had published his “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment[5] in which he traces how the category “religion” and “the religions” as we know it developed in the English enlightenment period.  In 1998 he published The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, and in 2007 his The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science arrived on the scene.[6]  These latter two works attempt to display how Christian theology, rather than hindering science, actually intersected with and helped produce, what we would now call “scientific” reasoning in key ways.  Building on all three, The Territories of Science and Religion nonetheless sets out on its own path, and is a fascinating look at intellectual history.

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[1] John Hedley Brook, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

[2] Ian Barbour, Religion and Science (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991, 1997), 77-105.

[3] This is also the thesis of two major works, Michael J. Buckley, At The Origins of Modern Atheism (Yale: Yale University Press, 1990); Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From The Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

[4] Noah Efron, “Sciences and Religions: What It Means to Take Historical Perspectives Seriously,” in Thomas Dixon, Geoffrey Cantor, and Stephen Pumfrey, eds., Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 245.

[5] Peter Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

[6] Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).