ABSTRACT
Ian Barbour diagramed four modes of possible relationship between science and religion—conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration. His model was developed primarily to schematize the interaction between Christian churches and universities in Western civilization. However, the model is also adaptable to understanding how the Jewish people have related their pursuit of wisdom through the use of human intellect in conjunction with both human experience and professed revealed scriptures. We can for our purposes call the intellectual striving for wisdom from experience “science” and the same endeavor out of holy scriptures “religion,” even though these terms were not used until the twentieth century. With respect to the Jewish people, “religion” refers to all study of professed revealed texts (scriptures) and their associated commentaries, or what in terms of premodern Judaism is called the way of law (Dat) or the tradition (Halakha) or simply “Torah” in a very broad sense. Similarly, the term “science” refers to all study of texts of natural philosophy, both Jewish and non-Jewish, by Jewish thinkers with the intent either to interpret the meaning of the revealed texts or to interpret human experience of the world.
