254 Roberts
THE PREHISTORY OF “SCIENCE AND RELIGION”
It was not always so. Indeed, prior to about the middle of the nineteenth
century, the trope “science and religion” was virtually nonexistent. To be
sure, there was a good deal of discussion of the appropriate relationship
between nature and the Bible, the two “books” that God had given hu-
mans for their edifi cation. But because virtually all of the participants in
that discussion agreed that the Author of those two books would ensure
that no real contradiction in their testimony could occur, they tended to
limit their focus to the relative value and perspicuity of God’s two modes
of revelation. They did not grapple with the more global issue of the in-
teraction of “science and religion.”^1
The pairing of science and religion did not become prominent until
the defi nition of both terms attained recognizably modern form. “Reli-
gion” was the fi rst to do so. Within the Christian tradition, with which
this paper deals, elite members of the church hierarchy had long devoted
attention to theology, but prior to the seventeenth century, most adher-
ents of the faith had treated religion primarily as a life of piety and com-
munal devotion and a set of ritual practices. But with the proliferation of
beliefs that occurred in the wake of the Reformation and the discovery of
a plethora of “heathen” beliefs during the course of Europeans’ voyages
into hitherto uncharted parts of the world, doctrinal claims assumed new
importance, and by the end of the Enlightenment “beliefs” had become
central to the way that people envisioned the nature of religion.^2
The nature and meaning of “science” also changed in important ways.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, students of the natural
world called natural philosophers and natural historians sought to associ-
ate their efforts with theological inquiries and made God- talk central to
their endeavors. Isaac Newton, for example, maintained that whatever
truths might be gleaned from the Scriptures, “the proof of a Deity and
what are his Properties belong to experimental philosophy.” John Win-
throp IV, an American who made something of a name for himself in the
British colonies as a practitioner of natural philosophy, echoed Newton’s
claim, declaring in 1753 that “the consideration of a DEITY is not peculiar
to Divinity, but belongs also to natural Philosophy.” Natural historians, by
calling attention to the multitude of ways in which living things attested
to the existence of a rational and benevolent Deity, also gave their studies
a distinctly theological cast. In the face of such commitments, titles juxta-
posing “natural philosophy and religion” or “natural history and religion”
were conspicuous by their absence.^3
The boundary between the natural sciences and religion in Great Brit-