Science vs. religion: But what are we actually disagreeing about?

Abstract

Popular opinion in the UK sees science and religion in conflict. Closer inspection reveals that the default position is “soft,” and levels of hostility weaken as the discourse shifts away from the familiar categories of “science” and “religion.” The reason for this is that the terms themselves are vague and capacious. Building on the work of Peter Harrison, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s late philosophy of language, and a UK research study of the understanding of science and religion conducted in 2019-2022, this article outlines a fresh approach to disaggregating the terms (“science,” “religion”) that are too often unduly essentialized in debate. It then disambiguates the key terms and concludes by setting out a number of different contact points between the de-essentialized terms “science” and “religion,” that clarify what precisely it is that people are disagreeing about when they disagree, and which could thereby serve as a future agenda for fertile discourse.