The Territories of Science and Religion

"Book number three is by one of the most distinguished historians of science and religion alive, to use a classification that this book rejects, at least for most of history. And I share the rejection. Peter Harrison starts with (another) striking thought experiment, if you like. He says if a historian were to contend that he or she had discovered evidence of a hitherto unknown war that had broken out in the year 1600 between Israel and Egypt, what would your response be? Exactly. In the 1600s, those territories didn’t exist with those designations. Of course the bits of land, the hills, the mountains existed, the topography existed, but not with those labels. What he is showing, in an immensely scholarly way, is that these labels of science and religion—although nowadays we think we know what they mean—are rather recent and no more applicable to most of intellectual and cultural history than the labels of Israel and Egypt would have been to those territories in 1600. And therefore a lot of misunderstandings arise because people are applying incorrect categories. “The idea of religion as a distinct body of knowledge is a surprisingly recent one” They’re arguing about distinctions—in some cases they’re alleging warfare—between things they’re wrongly categorising. In fact, if you want to push it a bit further you could say that both those bits of land were part of a single Empire and much of the discussion about things that we would now think of as religious and things we would now think of as scientific, were part of a single territory. In so far as words like religion and science—or their Latin equivalent—were in use in the Middle Ages, they were describing virtues. Sometimes now, in the popular mind, science is thought of as a body of knowledge. Probably among practising scientists it’s thought of as a way of arriving at a description of reality. Similarly, concepts like religion are sometimes used to describe a body of knowledge, and sometimes they’re used to describe a way of relating to God, and worshipping him. The idea of religion as a distinct body of knowledge is a surprisingly recent one, insofar as you can talk about when the change happened. I suppose it happened in the 17th century, to some extent here in Oxford. Similarly for science. But really these are rather weak ways of describing what was a process and, in many cases, a very integrated process. “Isaac Newton wrote more about religion than he ever wrote about science” So what Peter Harrison is saying is that first of all, if you’re trying to understand these alleged conflicts between science and religion, most of what you need to do is not so much look at the details but to realize you’re just applying inappropriate categories. Once you’ve cleared that misunderstanding away, then you can begin to look at the details . Absolutely. He saw his scientific pursuit as very strongly religiously motivated. Like most of us, Isaac Newton was a complex person, only more so. But he wrote more about religion than he ever wrote about science. It’s for his science that we now remember him because it was brilliant. But it’s true of him and it’s true of some of the greats that we know about, like Robert Boyle. Every school child learns Boyle’s law of gases. It’s true of Robert Grosseteste who is not so well known. He was probably the first to serve as chancellor at Oxford University, before becoming Bishop of Lincoln. He saw all his life’s work as motivated by his faith in God and made some very important advances, some of them specific—such as in optics, why a rainbow is coloured—and some of them about methodology. He was the first to formulate the idea of a control experiment, which is now standard in many branches of science. It was William Whewell, master of Trinity College, Cambridge, who coined the term. If you read the book God’s Philosophers , which is not one of my five, the subtitle is ‘How the Medieval World Lay the Foundations of Modern Science’; it’s a very good read. If I were allowed six books I might have included that one. ‘ Scientia ’ did exist as a word before then. It meant the character virtue of being an inquiring person, of seeking knowledge, of being curious. Scientia was not only a personal quality but one with a significant moral component. In the 17th century, Rene Descartes defines scientia as the skill to solve every problem. Religio , in the Middle Ages, was a virtue. It referred to internal acts of devotion and prayer. This interior dimension is more important than any outward expression—that’s according to Aquinas, in the 13th century. There is no sense in which religio refers to systems of proposition of beliefs, and no sense of different religions. They’re inner virtues."