Religion and science: two territories explored by Peter Harrison

Peter Harrison has been a professor of both science and religion, so this book demands careful reading.

From the cover of The Territories of Science and Religion by Peter Harrison.

The kernel of Peter Harrison’s intellectual concerns with this book is revealed almost at the end. “Christianity and science,” he writes, “have resisted the telling of their stories.” In saying that he ignores Diarmaid MacCulloch’s magisterial A History of Christianity (2009), but importantly his ex cathedra flourish reveals that by “religion” he really means Christianity, despite his approving quotation of St Augustine’s view that religion has existed since the beginning of human history. Accordingly, he has written a synoptic philosophical Christian history, though the flaw in his overview is that while religion and art have existed as long as mankind, science has not. Curiosity about the world did co-exist with them but it was not exercised in a way we would understand as “science”.

In fact, Harrison (who is at the University of Queensland but was formerly professor of science and religion at Oxford) avoids any attempt at definitions of “science” and “religion” until his closing pages, but then seems to shirk the task by writing: “There are no firm criteria for adjudicating what should or should not be included in the concepts.” Instead, in a book that demands very careful reading, he frets a great deal about his view of the changing significance of the Latin words religio and scientia, the progenitors of the modern words of his title. For him religio (and hence early religion) was something inner and attitudinal, rather that doctrinal and external. I cannot accept this. Christianity, after all, grew out of a doctrinal and liturgical faith and Christ’s injunction at the Last Supper, “Do this in remembrance of me”, seems a pretty clear declaration of the importance of an integral ritual.

Scientia meant knowledge, something fundamentally different from “science”. Harrison acknowledges this and, likewise, considers it an internal and personal virtue, yet he seems prone to conflating (or too easily interchanging) those meanings, though this does not compromise his argument that, for centuries, they were congenial fellow-travellers. I believe his dissection of semantic entrails is misguided: what philosophers might call a category error. Despite some incursions across boundaries — by solipsistic dogmatists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens or (in the opposite direction) by any number of fundamentalist parsons and their staunch vassals — science and religion, as we understand them, are different.

Science is our attempt to understand the physical and biological worlds of which we are a part by careful observation and measurement, followed by rigorous analysis of our findings. Religion and, indeed, the arts are, by contrast, our attempts to find fulfilling and congenial ways of living in our world.

Accordingly, religion and art are age-old. So, too, is the human search for understanding, but the methods we would understand as “scientific” are of much more recent lineage. In fact, I believe (and I think Harrison accepts this) that authentic science is a consequence of a parting of ways during the Reformation. For me this authentic science was a consequence of people’s inclination to think afresh about many questions. Importantly, for Harrison this newer scientific approach became (together with a comparable, even cognate, change in religion) an external activity. That mode of seeking understanding was utterly different from the approaches of the great Greeks and certainly from pre-Reformation scholars. As Harrison observes, “Reading scripture and nature together became an integral part of medieval contemplative practice”, but later “science” became a more co-operative as well as “external” venture, “a whole sequence of men being substituted for the growth of a single individual”, in his paraphrasing of Pascal.

As I understand him, however, Harrison sees this efflorescence of science as a consequence of a utilitarian turn from scientia. Too much can be made of this: science is far more than our seeking to ameliorate the travails of life. It can do that — though in his arguments Harrison seems not to distinguish between science and technology (from the Greek tekhn, a “craft” rather than “knowledge”) — but science is no more intrinsically utilitarian than a poem or a Bach partita.

Whichever of us is correct, the world and how we live in and exploit (or conserve) it are, together, the quiddity of our human experience. The questions with which Harrison wrestles are of enormous importance yet are all too rarely pondered by scientists. If they and others read this book there will be intellectual skirmishes along the way, but (cliche or not) there is still truth in Socrates’ aphorism that “the unexamined life is not worth living”.

John Carmody was for many years a member of the faculty of medicine at the University of NSW. He writes on concert music, opera and the history of medicine.

The Territories of Science and Religion

By Peter Harrison

University of Chicago Press, 300pp, $66 (HB)