What is Religion? What is Science? How might they be related?

Peter Harrison has beautifully demonstrated that answers to these questions have changed significantly over the past few hundred years in the Western world, with reference to Christianity and the natural sciences. Harrison’s book, The Territories of Science and Religion, based on his Gifford lectures, has generated considerable interest. 

 

Similar issues of ambiguity and Western bias become even greater in South Asian contexts. This is nicely summarised below by Darren Duerksen and William Dyrness in a recent book, 

Seeking Church: Emerging Witnesses to the Kingdom, which builds on field research by Duerksen, and engages concepts of emergence from the social sciences, that I will also discuss below. The quote is long but I include it because it highlights such a fundamental issue.

 

Defining religion is similar to the proverbial problem of defining time—it seems self-evident until one actually tries to put words to it. But for all the various definitions of religion—and there are many—there are at least two things upon which contemporary scholars agree. The first, as scholars such as Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Clifford Geertz, and J. Z. Smith have suggested, is the idea that religion was, and to some degree continues to be, a concept that comes from outside of religions themselves and does not adequately describe various religious traditions. As Richard King has noted, early Greco-Roman uses of the concept referred to ritual practices and paying homage to the gods. With the rise of Christianity, however, it was redefined as “a matter of adherence to particular doctrines or beliefs rather than allegiance to ancient ritual practices.” This model tends to emphasize a theistic belief and a “fundamental dualism between the human world and the transcendent world.” Such conceptions reflected particular ways of understanding the Christian religion in the West but did not and do not always adequately describe the religions of other contexts.

The second area of agreement is that the idea of “world religions” is also largely a Western concept born out of the Enlightenment and responds to the need to make sense of a changing world. As Tomoko Masuzawa demonstrates in her influential book The Invention of World Religions, until the mid-nineteenth century Europeans and North Americans typically described the world as made up of Christians, Jews, Muhammadans (Muslims), and the rest. Western affinities for taxonomy began to be more specific about “the rest” in subsequent decades, …

What this required, however, was to somehow define and order in Western and Christian terms that which often defied categorization. An important example is the “religion” of Hinduism. As H. L. Richard and others have shown, historically the non-Muslims of the Indian continent did not understand themselves as sharing a common set of beliefs and practices known as Hinduism, much less call themselves Hindus. In the eighteenth century onward, however, and particularly through interaction with British Christian colonialists and missionaries, Britons and then Indians started to categorize the widely ranging traditions of the subcontinent as an identifiable religion.

This signals an important point that we intend to explore in this book— that from a social science perspective the category of religion itself is an elastic concept and is not as self-evident as is often assumed.