Entangled histories: Religion, science, modernity, and electricity

Abstract

In this article, we question the assumption that religion and science have historically operated in conflict with each other. We examine how the modern categories of science and religion were formed and how this modern categorization reinterpreted the earlier knowledge traditions. We argue that the conflict thesis depends on a selective reading of the medieval period and offers a simple story. This simplistic narrative often presents science as progress and religion as regress. The historical analysis of the relationship between the two, however, presents a more complicated story. Religion was never uniformly inhospitable to science and science was never developed entirely outside religion, culture, and politics. Understanding their relationship requires attention to the many histories through which both came to possess their modern meanings. We, in this article, examine some of these more complicated histories. We examine the theological thought of Isaac Newton and investigate religious interpretation of electricity. We examine the theology of natural resources and waste to show how religion participated in the development of industrial modernity. The purpose of this article is to challenge the conflict thesis by showing that the relationship between religion and science cannot be reduced either to permanent conflict or complete harmony. We use sources from the history of Christianity, colonial encounters with non-Western religions, and the movement of knowledge across diverse traditions, to show that scientific inquiry was never produced by one civilization or through the rejection of religion alone.