Peter Harrison on Science, Religion, and the Virtues of the Mind

Over at ABC Religion and Ethics is a great piece by Australian academic Peter Harrison, formerly of Oxford (who I used to play tennis with), on Virtues of the Mind: Mapping the Territories of Science and Religion. Part of the problem according to Harrison is that the meaning of the words “religion” and “science” changed in the sixteenth and seventeenth  centuries, creating subsequent confusion for our own age.

My suggestion here will be that much of the contemporary conflict between science and religion arises not out of the activities themselves, but out of the unhelpful way in which we presently conceptualize them – that is, as knowledge-producing enterprises that compete for the same explanatory territory.