A LIBRARIAN’S ORIENTATION
What this book explores
Historian Peter Harrison argues that ‘science’ and ‘religion’ are not timeless, stable entities that have always related through either conflict or harmony. He traces how premodern ideas of natural philosophy, theology, virtue, and inner religion changed into modern categories, making today's familiar debate possible and often projecting it backward.
EDITORIAL NOTE
Why it’s in the Library
It helps travelers step outside a stale two-box argument and ask how the boxes themselves were built. That historical shift can clarify why episodes such as Galileo, evolution, or biblical criticism resist simple warfare stories. The book gives conceptual depth to the science shelf without pretending that dissolving bad historical categories settles contemporary questions.
Good starting place if…
You want an intellectual history of why modern science-and-religion debates may misdescribe the past and can engage a demanding conceptual argument.
Know before you begin…
This is scholarly intellectual history, not an introductory answer to evolution, miracles, cosmology, or divine action. Challenging the timelessness of categories does not show that present scientific and religious claims are compatible. Harrison's genealogy is itself an argument with interpretive choices, and readers may need background in Western philosophy and Christian history.