Not thinking about science and religion

[FIRST PARAGRAPH]

Willem B. Drees, Religion, Science and Naturalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). xvi + 314 pp., ISBN: 0-521-64562-X.

It is often an illuminating, if sobering, experience to see one’s work through the eyes of another discipline. Theologian Willem Drees gives historians researching the interactions of science and religion just such an experience. The thrust of Drees’s project is to argue for the application of a form of ontological naturalism to religion (or, more specifically, to Christianity) and to consider what remains of religion when this has been done. In developing this project, however, he devotes interesting chapters to modern discussions of science and religion, and to ‘histories of relationships between science and religion’. His assessment raises questions that historians would do well to consider.