The aim of Peter Harrison’s ambitious book is to destroy once and for all ‘the idea of a perennial conflict between science and religion’ (p. 5). There can be no doubt that there was no such conflict, but this will come as little surprise to any even semi-serious historian of science, being the preserve only of figures such as the former biologist and current professional internet provocateur Richard Dawkins—and even the most devout zealots of the Church of Dawkins know that he is not to be taken seriously as an authority on matters historical. But Harrison’s secondary aims are both far more sophisticated and far more interesting, for he wants to show that not only were ‘science’ and ‘religion’ not opposed, but that they were consistently in a symbiotic relationship predicated on the fact that, until the seventeenth century, neither of them existed, at least in the modern sense of the concepts; when they did emerge, one result was the scientific revolution. According to Harrison, from the ancient world through to the sixteenth century, ‘religion’ never implied a set of doctrinal propositions, but was an ‘inner disposition’, corresponding consistently to the meaning of the Latin term religio. ‘Science’, meanwhile, was similarly never a set of propositions about nature, but likewise a moral or ‘spiritual exercise’ intended to cultivate a ‘habit of mind’ and ‘a particular kind of life’ (p. 18): this was the case for everyone, from the ancient Greeks (Thales sacrificed an ox when he discovered his famous theorem [p. 24]) to the medieval Christian natural philosophers, who, Harrison claims, cared little for the abstracted truth of natural philosophical ideas, because, for them, ‘the intelligibility of nature lay primarily in its moral and theological meanings’ (p. 60). Only in the seventeenth century, when, in the wake of the Reformation, ‘religion’ began to take on the meaning of a system of belief, did ‘science’ concomitantly emerge as a discipline designed to produce true propositions about the natural world (although it was still conceived of as a spiritual exercise, albeit now one tied to the entirely new enterprise of natural theology, which, we are told, was non-existent in the medieval world).
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Sep 1, 2023
Justin L Barrett 
Open Access