It needs to be more widely known that the “history of the conflict between religion and science” essentially originates in one book of that title of 18751, with encouragement from a History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom in 18972. War between science and religion is “the idea that wouldn’t die”, according to a recent collection of essays3, but Peter Harrison’s 2015 book The Territories of Science and Religion (which I reviewed a while ago) goes further to show how such a conflict is simply inconceivable before the nineteenth century since ‘religion’ and ‘science’ had such different meanings in earlier discourses as to render the very notion meaningless.
If Harrison’s Territories gave us a bird’s-eye view of how ‘science’ and ‘religion’ have shifted over centuries, The Landscapes of Science and Religion: What are we disagreeing about? (2025, OUP) comes down to earth to examine the lie of the land today. And, as hinted by the Constable painting on the book’s cover, it lands in Britain. Nick Spencer and Hannah Waite report a series of in-depth interviews with 101 UK-based scholars in fields related to the sciences and theology, together with a public survey. Drawing on this body of data, Spencer and Waite masterfully paint a picture of prevalent discourse. The book would be worth buying just for the wealth of thought-provoking quotations provided as endnotes!
Landscapes is dedicated to Tom McLeish, who, ironically, didn’t like the phrase ‘science and religion’. And, appropriately enough, Spencer and Waite’s first objective is to ‘disambiguate’ each of those terms. They then move on to investigate where disagreements occur, and how far they might be obviated by better mutual understanding. From here on, I find the book’s agenda intriguing.
On the face of it, disambiguation is a task commended to us by Harrison. Territories ends by confirming that ‘science’ and ‘religion’ are not natural kinds of things but historically-contingent amalgams, and invoking Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation that confusion arises when language maps poorly onto reality. And Landscapes takes its own cue from Wittgenstein: his example of how a word like ‘game’ may have no satisfactory definition but evoke diverse things (football, patience, wargames…) that merely share a family resemblance. Spencer and Waite set out to disambiguate the terms ‘science’ and ‘religion’. And at the end of Part 1, a table (pp.134-6) summarises six ‘family features’ discovered for ‘science’ and five for ‘religion’.
At this point, I think the ‘landscapes’ project has diverged from what Harrison might recommend. Let me press the geographical analogy. A ‘territories’ project could show that, despite sharing the same language, monarch and majority ethnic group, the so-called CANZUK bloc (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK) is not a natural region; and neither is France with its overseas territories of Réunion, Martinique, Mayotte, French Guiana and Guadeloupe. If we wanted to understand these two entities, we could try documenting their family resemblances, but we’d surely gain more insight by recognising their essential heterogeneity at the outset and dropping the terms ‘CANZUK’ and ‘France’. Similarly, a ‘landscapes’ investigation of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ could move beyond the contingent language of our time to more historically and philosophically informed concepts. At the very least, ‘religion’ should primarily be disambiguated into Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam and so on.
This approach might also have made more sense of the data. Interviewees commonly seemed to supply notions (or caricatures) of Christianity for the content of ‘religion’, while some argued that religions are not reducible to ‘religion’ (p.90). One said that their Islamic faith wasn’t a religion (p.109), and another that being Christian did not make them religious (p.110). This need not surprise us. But what never emerges from the largely secular discourse that this book probes is the more radical Reformational proposals that (1) all of life is religion, and (2) any belief about something being unconditionally real is a religious belief. These admittedly marginal views contest the secular credo that progressive people can simply abandon religion.
Similar concerns apply to ‘science’. Harrison’s point that ‘science’ is sometimes defined in opposition to ‘religion’ may account for professional scientists’ tendency to emphasize observation, speculation and scepticism. Hence a striking oversight in the table on p.134 is that science is said to study observable phenomena. Yet on a critical realist account, science studies the unobservable laws and structures behind phenomena. Marginalised here is a Reformational understanding of science as our search for the order of creation. Deeper insight might have opened up a more realistic set of landscapes to “tour” in Part 2 of the book.
I’m struck by how much work lies ahead to introduce authentic Christian perspectives into popular consciousness. While Spencer and Waite helpfully critique some of the more egregious misconceptions expressed by ‘elite’ interviewees, others pass unnoticed. For example, a dichotomy between scientists and religious believers surfaces (pp.169, 240, 249) without critique – as if these were alternative identities. And the writing as a whole settles with disturbing ease into a portrayal of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ as contrasting forms of “activity” at opposite ends of a single spectrum. The scare quotes I have used so liberally here aren’t found in the book.
Ultimately, I think Landscapes overlooks the way that parts of the discourses under investigation are inherently polemical. No matter how carefully surveyors of the Holy Land (returning to our analogy) might seek to document which parts of its landscapes were more Israeli and which more Palestinian, such surveys would not advance the cause of peace because people see things in fundamentally divergent ways. Indeed, a biblical understanding of the fundamental importance of religious commitments should disabuse us of any hope that the scope of ‘religion’ might be conveniently settled in the manner of Wittgenstein’s treatment of ‘game’. The importance of Spencer and Waite’s book lies not so much in its attempt to chart two contested landscapes, as in its insightful depiction of the strikingly divergent things that British people had to say about them in the early 2020s.
- Draper, John (1875) “History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science” ↩︎
- White, Andrew Dickson (1897) “History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom” ↩︎
- Hardin J, Numbers R, Binzley RA (2018) “The Warfare Between Science and Religion: The Idea that Wouldn’t Die” ↩︎
[Views expressed here are his own.]
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