The Territories of Science and Religion

315 Pages·2015·1.721 MB·English

by  Peter Harrison

The Territories of Science and Religion

The Territories of
S C I E N C E A N D R E L I G I O N
Peter Harrison
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
Peter Harrison is professor of the history of science and director of the Centre
for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland. He is
the author of numerous books, including Wrestling with Nature: From Omens
to Science, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2015 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2015.
Printed in the United States of America
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15  1 2 3 4 5
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 18448- 7   (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 18451- 7   (e-b ook)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226184517.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harrison, Peter, 1955– author.
The territories of science and religion / Peter Harrison.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-226-18448-7 (cloth : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-0-226-18451-7 (e-book)
1. Religion and science. 2. Science—History. I. Title.
Bl240.3.h365 2015
201′.65—dc23
2014016857
∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
For Tom

[ CONTENTS ]
Preface ix
A Note on the Graphs xiii
1. The Territories of Science and Religion 1
2. The Cosmos and the Religious Quest 21
3. Signs and Causes 55
4. Science and the Origins of “Religion” 83
5. Utility and Progress 117
6. Professing Science 145
Epilogue 183
Acknowledgments 199
Abbreviations 201
Notes 203
Bibliography 255
Index 287
vii

[ PREFACE ]
This book is a revised version of the Gifford Lectures, delivered at the Uni-
versity of Edinburgh in February 2011. The lectures sought to address the
history of two overlapping sets of concerns— those to do with the nature of
the physical universe and its operations, and those that concern the goals
of human existence and the source of our moral values. We now tend to
think of these questions as belonging to the distinct domains of science
and religion. When we look to the past, however, we see that the bound-
aries of these two domains have been understood very differently and that
questions concerning ultimate human meaning and value were rarely di-
vorced from understandings of the nature of the universe. In one sense,
then, this book is about the history of science and religion in the West. But
it would be more accurate to say that it seeks to describe how it is that we
have come to understand the world in terms of these distinct categories
“science” and “religion”—h ow, in other words, we have come to separate
the domain of material facts from the realm of moral and religious values.
This subject matter brings with it two particular challenges. The first
should be more or less immediately apparent. This book cannot be a
straightforward history of the relations between science and religion,
since my argument is that these two ideas, as they are presently under-
stood, are relatively recent conceptions that emerged in the West over the
course of the past three hundred years. What I have sought to do, then,
ix