ABSTRACT
It is commonly assumed in the West that science and religion are (and always have been) in conflict with one another. Over the last fifty years historians, philosophers and theologians exploring the interactions of science and religion (their efforts shaping a sub-discipline which has become known as ‘science-and-religion’) have disputed these assumptions. They have demonstrated that the ‘conflict myth’ is based on monolithic Enlightenment constructions of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ that are historically and geographically limited. Science-and-religion scholarship has noted that there are many sciences which shape their methodology to suit the subject(s) they are investigating and which may be underpinned by a variety of philosophical understandings; and, it hardly needs stating, there are many religions, each of which may itself encompass many different positions regarding the sciences. The surfacing of this global complexity has been a major development within science-and-religion scholarship of the 2010s.
This chapter surveys recent literature looking at science-and-religion from different global perspectives. Examples of interactions between science and religion are considered from Western Christian, Eastern Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Indian, East Asian and African contexts. In all these cases there is a caveat, in that the pluriformity of each religious tradition means that we are looking at examples of responses in particular contexts which may or may not be indicative of wider trends within the religion in question. However, that very pluriformity allows the conclusion to be drawn that the Western, modernist construction which sees ‘science’ and ‘religion’ as inevitably and irretrievably locked in conflict cannot be sustained when considering these phenomena in a global, 21st-century context.
