Introduction

Historiographical work on science and religion—epitomized by John Hedley Brooke’s Science and Religion ([1991] 2014) and Peter Harrison’s Territories of Science and Religion (2015)—has raised important questions regarding the viability of generalizing about science and religion together. The reason is not that there is an inherent conflict—epistemic or methodological, for example—between them. Rather, the reason is that there is no such thing as science and there is no such thing as religion—because they are not analogous to natural kinds (Cantor and Kenny 2001, 771; Harrison 2015, 4–5, 176, 194)—nor is there such a thing as “the relationship between science and religion” (Brooke [1991] 2014, 438).

But what does “there is no such thing as science” or “there is no such thing as religion” mean? What does it mean to say there is no such thing as “the relationship” between them? The language of essentialism is useful here, and so is remembering that the scholarly context of these expressions is the historiography of science and religion. “There is no such thing as X” means that one cannot identify a transtemporal “essence” of X, always the same at any given time in history. For us to look properly at X, we need to do so in an anti-essentialist fashion; we need to recognize that there is no “essence,” no fixed and transtemporal meaning of X. Given the issue of essentialism, the question is therefore how we can heed the historiographical warning bells of anti-essentialism in science and religion discussions without rendering ourselves speechless due to the unstable meaning of our words through time.

A recent discussion between Josh Reeves (2023) and Peter Harrison (2023a) circles precisely around this question, and this article approaches it hermeneutically (see Sikahall 2022 for an example of a hermeneutical approach). The historiography of science and religion has successfully raised the issue of the lack of “essence” to science and religion. Alongside this anti-essentialist observation, such historiography leaves a number of issues unaddressed: the stubbornly anachronistic nature of our speech; the inherently linguistic nature of the historiographical endeavor to both perform the historical task and communicate with the present context; the importance of the present historical context that gives rise to the historical inquiry in the first place; and the explicit connection of historical work with present concerns. This article proposes a hermeneutical solution to these residual problems, focusing first on the philosophical import of anti-essentialist historiography. Second, it suggests that the hermeneutical tradition is suited to deal with the challenges raised by anti-essentialism, focusing on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work. Third, the article explores what it would mean to treat science and religion discourses as spaces of interpretation, or what I am calling hermeneutic things. Finally, the article analyzes how philosophical and historiographical work ends up reasserting the gap between philosophy and history, concluding with examples of work that self-consciously—with hermeneutical mindfulness—integrates historical insight, historical context and philosophical reflection.

Anti-Essentialist Philosophy? The Philosophical Import of Anti-Essentialist Historiography

To tackle the “after anti-essentialism” question, we cannot simply leave historiography enclosed in the discipline of history with only occasional and marginal support for science and religion discussions. Historiography has philosophical implications and in itself performs philosophical thinking. But what does it mean to take history seriously, especially when the historiographical work suggests something like anti-essentialism? If two of the key categories in the discussions (“science” and “religion”)—not to mention the pernicious “and” between them (Cantor and Kenny 2001, 770–72)—offer misleading narratives and ways of navigating human activities and concerns in the present and, especially, in the past, how to proceed? What should we do if even using these expressions with the intention of bringing them closer together reasserts the issue of essentialism, thereby distorting their historical trajectories and introducing a reified couple of “science” and “religion” (Harrison 2015, 194–95, 197–98)?

The first step suggested here is that in order for historiography to take a defining role in science and religion discussions, historiography needs to be seen as also involved in philosophical activity (for the purposes of this article, “philosophy” also includes ethical and theological thinking). Not only that historiography has philosophical implications (as Reeves 2018 shows) but that it does philosophy by interpreting and thereby shaping both the past and the present. Historiography, although seemingly to do with what happened in the past, is in fact to do with what happened in the past in such a way that it has a direct connection to current concerns and questions. As Hans-Georg Gadamer notes: “[A]n historical fact is not, in the first place, merely something that really happened, but rather, something that really happened in such a way that it has a special signification for an historical question, an historical context” (Gadamer and Risser 1979, 76). Historiography, therefore, not only arises from current concerns and questions but affects them, since it belongs to them. And since these concerns and questions are historical and approachable as questions about reality in the present—and the present is a part of history—it is necessary to recognize historiography as performing within its approach, in the very things it brings to the fore and leaves in the background, various forms of philosophical thinking (for blurring the boundaries between history, philosophy, and theology for the sake of truth, see Milbank 2023).

Science and religion historiography is therefore neither philosophically neutral (Sikahall 2022, 170–83) nor unconcerned with contemporary discussions around science and religion. Reeves (2023, 80) even refers to Harrison’s “antiessentialist philosophy” (emphasis added). These discussions, despite tending to be embedded in the framework of a “dialogue” between science and religion (Reeves 2023), are a partial origin for anti-essentialist historiography and, by implication, also partially originate this philosophical anti-essentialism—even if the framework of dialogue is seen as one-sided from an anti-essentialist point of view (Harrison 2023a, 98–100).

Claims such as the lack of “essence” of words introduce not only a linguistic difficulty but also philosophical questions. One such question relevant to anti-essentialism is: What is the nature of the relationship between word and world—between concept and history—given that this relationship is a temporal one, meaning that the relationship itself exists in time as a historical reality?

In the actual historiographical work, an implicit hint of an answer is given by the rhetorical form of the work. It is implicit because the work answers the question of the relationship between word and world by the historiographical methods used and not by the actual content of the work. Take Harrison’s Territories as an example. Harrison’s genealogical approach uses the words science and religion to show the shifting territories of the moral, theological, and metaphysical assumptions underpinning the meaning of the words throughout history. Where does that leave us, present speakers, if one of its implications is that science and religion—in our contemporary understanding—are not analogous to natural kinds (Harrison 2015, 4–5) and therefore have no “essence” persisting through time? Can one trace the genealogy of science or religion for example, their ups and downs and metamorphosis throughout time, their mutations and expansions, and at the same time say there is no such thing as science or religion? What was the historian tracing then? The genealogy of what? Reeves (2023, 84–85) raises similar questions. I do think there are ways to make sense of there-is-no-such-thingness (anti-essentialism). But if one is not a historian, the rhetoric obfuscates rather than helps, even if I am interested in taking the history of science and religion seriously. Alister McGrath’s (2023) recent work, for example, delves into the history of natural philosophy, fully accounting for the anti-essentialist nature of science and religion, to recover the breadth and depth of natural philosophy, which the “science and religion” frame obtains today only in a limited way. Here, he implicitly accepts a connection between the past (natural philosophy) and the present (science and religion discourses), which is what the historiographical rhetoric leaves undisclosed.

Nonetheless, the focus on rhetoric is helpful: How is the historian using discourse—or language more broadly—to carry out their work? In Harrison’s work, what Gadamer (2008a, 64–65) calls the “self-forgetfulness of language” seems to be in operation. It is possible to forget about language, that language is being studied through itself: a particular word and associated words, as a part of language, are under study, and these words, as well as being the objects of study, are both the means of studying them and also the means of communicating this process to the contemporary reader. Language, which includes the very words themselves, is being used to trace the history of these words, to navigate the now and the then, to identify shifts and tensions between and across different historical moments, motivated by present concerns. The emphasis here is on the word “concerns” rather than on “present”—as if an objectivized “historical” present is available to us, removed from anything that truly speaks to us now. Talking about science or religion, or “science and religion,” as present concerns involves connecting with the experience they, explicitly or implicitly, evoke today. Furthermore, it involves accepting the priority of the regular speaker’s understanding of the expressions if only to communicate with such speaker. This allows us to trace the words’ individual histories and their inherent tensions, contradictions, and complexities due to the juxtaposition of a variety of concepts and practices under the (historical) hood, as it were, of the notions themselves, with the view of communicating such rich complexity to the contemporary reader.

The difficulty, especially for historians but for anybody who is aware of the temporal instability of our speech, is having to refer at points in our communication to a “stable” meaning of the words under study in order to communicate what is being discovered. The danger of anachronism lurks in the background: reference to a specific meaning of the word needs to be historically consistent—it must match the use at the historical time under study. At the same time, however, our communicative efforts need to make sense to us contemporary readers, who have a different understanding of the word. Using the word science or religion, or scientific or religious—or natural and supernatural, as in Harrison’s (2024) most recent Some New World—becomes thus a way of traversing the distance between the then and now, but the toll to pay is a momentary but inevitable anachronism and essentialism, for the sake of communication, that privileges the contemporary meanings of the words.

Awareness of the dimension of language, therefore, subsumes essentialist concerns, since the issue is not only the fixity of meaning but the mediation—through language—of any meaning between any historical moments. Studying the history of science, for example, could mean that one is projecting the (fixed) contemporary meaning of science to the past, with the conviction that this meaning was indeed there and has remained stable up to the present. This is good old essentialism accompanied by anachronism. It could also mean to act as if there is “nothing”—no essence, one might say—connecting the meaning of a term today with associated terms and their meanings at different points in the past, while somehow still being able to trace these meanings through rigorous historical work. This form of anti-essentialism forgets that the connecting thread is language, and as the connection of these terms, it is also the very possibility to trace their blended histories. The forgetfulness of language as medium is a more encompassing danger than essentialism because it is one thing to raise a warning and leave the warning ambiguous; it is another to raise the warning, to leave it ambiguous, and then to unintentionally conceal a possible lifeline to enact an attend to the warning.

The problem for much of science and religion historiography is that insisting on avoiding essentialism, anti-essentialism, is precisely a warning without a clear lifeline. The lifeline is concealed in the fact that the anti-essentialist philosophy comes in a historical garment, a garment the historian might be unwilling to dispose of (Harrison 2021, for example, clearly distinguishes his contribution as a historian collaborating with—not doing—science-engaged theology). Transcending “history” might be to transcend the disciplinary boundary from which the strength of the arguments is perceived to come from, hence further elaboration is left to scientists, philosophers, or theologians (Harrison and Milbank 2022; Harrison and Tyson 2022; Reeves 2019).

Regardless of the reasons to abide by disciplinary boundaries, tactical or otherwise, my suggestion in the following section arises from the fact that in the case of the historiography of science and religion, this disciplinary boundary is an artificial historico-methodological construction to keep at bay philosophical, ethical, theological, and political issues (and one could go on) that if explicitly brought to the fore from the beginning, could either compromise or deem suspect the purely “historical” nature of the scholarly pursuit.

An example of this delicate boundary-setting is the fate of the so called “conflict” or “harmony” narratives of science and religion. Since John Hedley Brooke’s work, both narratives are deemed incredible in most science and religion circles. As Brooke ([1991] 2014, 68) puts it in his groundbreaking Science and Religion: “Much of the writing on science and religion has been structured by a preoccupation either with conflict or with harmony. It is necessary to transcend these constraints if the interaction, in all its richness and fascination, is to be appreciated.” The narratives of conflict are assessed as apologetically motivated (Brooke [1991] 2014, 42–56, 57–68)—for or against some religious agenda—or historically too simplistic, ignoring the diversity of interaction (Brooke [1991] 2014, 26–42). But who is judging here? An observer within a neutral, perhaps “non-religious,” space, neither for nor against “religion”? Or is it that one can judge these narratives on “purely historical” grounds regardless of one’s “religious” position? But what role is the word “religious” playing in the very questioning raised here? To make an analogy: just as theological presuppositions have a variety of effects on the study of nature (Brooke [1991] 2014, 26–42), so too can be said for the theological or religious presuppositions on the study of history. Historiography itself, just like the study of nature, is underpinned by assumptions that affect the historiographical work. These assumptions are disclosed—they “peek out”—in a variety of ways. From judging what is reasonable, wrong, desirable, or questionable to the kind of engagement one has with the historical actors (individuals, ideas, testimonies, social dynamics, etc.), one is informed, and perhaps formed, after these assumptions. For example, Noah Efron (2010, 255; see also Sikahall 2022, 57–58) notes that Brooke’s Science and Religion has clearly a moral message. Not only that, but Efron (2010, 255–58) notes that Brooke’s work clearly assumes an anthropology that allows him to treat the historical actors with ample decency, respect, and humility. Furthermore, it has a deeply spiritual import: “[H]istory done right must enlarge not just our knowledge but our spirit, so that we can enter the worlds of others, worlds we have never known ourselves” (Efron 2010, 256). Brooke’s historical work, therefore, needs to be opened up beyond its putative “historical” garment—beyond its historico-methodological boundaries—into the ground of ethics, philosophy, theology, anthropology, etc., where untrained historians are located, trying to figure it all out.

An equally telling example of this historico-methodological boundary setting is Harrison’s attempt to distinguish between descriptions, namely history (including “theological genealogies”) and normativity (explicit theological or moral commitments). It is telling that in order to do so, Harrison (2023b) relies on a distinction—which he himself notes as problematic—between facts (assessed by the “canons of historical explanation”) on the one hand and values and norms on the other (Harrison 2023b, 683–89 on non-normative critique, 689–91 on normativity, facts, and values).

Regardless of the historiographical boundaries made by historians themselves (implicitly or explicitly), the warning for us all is there. Be careful. Do not assume there is an “essence” of meaning that trans-historically remains the same. The philosophical contribution of the anti-essentialist warning is thus in the realm of the temporal relationship between form and content of concepts and narratives, and it can be explored in the manner of a question: How does one incorporate (anti-essentialist) historical insight into science and religion reflection without operating within the artificial boundaries of the historiographical work? The following section introduces philosophical hermeneutics as a way of heeding the warnings of essentialism, and the final section suggests that science and religion discourses can be considered hermeneutic things: interpretive spaces where one is interpreting an unknown entity (“science and religion”), and it is the salient aspects of these interpretive processes that open up new avenues for reflection.

The Relevance of Philosophical Hermeneutics

Philosophical hermeneutics, as exemplified by the work and ideas of Hans-Georg Gadamer, usually arising from his magnum opus Truth and Method (1960), introduces vocabulary and modes of thought that are aware of the problem of the temporal instability of concepts. I mentioned in the previous section the issue of the self-forgetfulness of language when one needs to acknowledge language explicitly, as in the case of science and religion historiography. A more well-known Gadamerian notion is wirkungsgeschichtlichen Bewußtsein, or historically effected consciousness. The idea here is that being—the sein (being) in Bewußtsein is invisible in its translation as “consciousness” (Gadamer 2008b, 38)—is always already affected by history. Being itself is historical, which is to say it is temporal. Both of these hermeneutical insights, one about language and the other about history, recover the connection between history and philosophy.

Hermeneutics is aware of the temporal nature of being itself, where “being” is linguistically mediated. Key here is the word mediation. This is exactly what the historian—or anybody talking about history or historical entities—is doing. Historians are mediating, they navigate between “the now” and “back then,” in the present and for the present. As Gadamer ([1960] 2006, 310) says, “historical hermeneutics too has a task of application to perform, because it too serves applicable meaning, in that it explicitly and consciously bridges the temporal distance that separates the interpreter from the text and overcomes the alienation of meaning that the text has undergone.” Moreover, historians perform this mediation in language. Historians trace words, and words are worlds of experience.

Through tracing the word science, for example as Harrison (2015) shows, one notices that the Latin scientia is connected to the contemporary (English) meaning of science in complex ways, even though the meaning has shifted over time and jumped between languages. Does this process render my task of tracing the meaning of the word unachievable? It does not, although it does complicate things. Such complications might tempt me to say that science therefore has no intrinsic enduring meaning, since its meaning is clearly temporally unstable. In fact, it is not just the meaning but also the language conveying the shifting meaning that is unstable (as evidenced through the variety of languages like Latin and Greek through which the notion has come to be). But the temptation to suggest that there is no enduring meaning—that there is no “essence”—no transhistorical “core” of meaning for a given word is only that, a temptation. I am using the analogy of temptations since one can indulge in them, or not. One has, in other words, other paths. Here, I propose one such path: instead of focusing on the fixity, or lack thereof, of meaning throughout time, one could focus on the processes of mediation. One could focus on the in-between, on the coming to be and passing away of things.

By suggesting an alternative path, I am not negating or ignoring the insight on the dynamic and fluid nature of words in time. I am not an anti-anti-essentialist, although I do think the idea of “essence” can be extended to the trajectories or histories of things. My (hi)story—me being me through time—is my “essence.” It is not despite change in time but in and through temporal change that I am myself. Being is time, as Gadamer recalls his teacher Heidegger’s Being and Time (Gadamer [1960] 2006, 248; Heidegger 2001, 456). What I am rather saying is that “the process of temporal mediation between words can help us figure out what we are talking about, with and beyond the usual words we use to talk about it.” This process can also point to gaps in our understanding and to potential new ventures in science and religion discussions. Not focusing on anti-essentialism does not mean to deny it. I am rather focusing on what anti-essentialism tries inadequately to address: the challenge of the temporal and linguistic mediatory process of understanding and how this affects our integration of historiography in (philosophical) discussions on science and religion.

Science and Religion Discourses as Hermeneutic Things

Borrowing Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s (1997) idea of “epistemic things” in the realm of historical epistemology (Feest and Sturm, 2011)—which is to say in the context of approaches to the history and philosophy of science—the proposal here is to look at science and religion discourses as hermeneutic things.

Uljana Feest and Thomas Strum (2011, 288) distinguish at least three versions of historical epistemology: histories of epistemic concepts; histories of epistemic things; and dynamics of long-term scientific developments. An example of the first would be Harrison’s Territories. By focusing on epistemic concepts—such as science and religion—Territories attests to the fact that “fundamental epistemic concepts and standards are subject to historical change” (Feest and Strum, 2011, 290), which is the core of histories of epistemic concepts (Feest and Strum 2011, 288–91). However, in the case of science and religion discourses, the issues are more complicated. Science and religion discourses involve many concepts, but “science and religion” is not a concept. It is, rather, a shorthand for a realm of discourse—a translation space—where the layers associated with science and religion—philosophical, theological, historical, scientific, literary, etc.—clash together, such as waves do on a beach, resulting in a coming and going that mirrors the cultural issues the conversation space contributes to.

The version of historical epistemology that can serve us to draw an analogy from is histories of epistemic things, due to the notion of epistemic things. An epistemic thing is a “[s]cientific object, that is, an entity whose unknown characteristics are the target of an experimental inquiry” (Rheinberger 1997, 238). Since the context of this notion is the history of science, Rheinberger is interested in how scientists might pursue a given object, subject to experimentation, that might not yet be clearly defined. A scientist therefore approaches this “entity” with unknown characteristics through experimentation to define the object itself. Now, science and religion discourses are not an object of experimentation. The whole context of the imagination of “epistemic things” is a laboratory where “experiments” are performed. These experiments are the repeated testing of things deemed sufficiently undifferentiated from one another so that the testing of one or the other is deemed to be repeating “the same thing.” In our case, science and religion discourses are clearly no such “things,” but from the earlier reflections, while they are not objects of experimentation, they are objects of interpretation, or hermeneutical objects. Their initial delimitation as hermeneutical objects is the very phenomena the words science and religion conjure together, whatever that is. These hermeneutical objects are spaces where mediation happens, and they share with the notion of epistemic things that there are unknown or unclear characteristics involved. The very terms of our discussion are undefinable, which does not mean lacking in meaning. But there is an excess, an always “more,” that can properly be called an unknown. Therefore, the suggestion is that science and religion discourses be seen, in analogy with epistemic things, as hermeneutic things: contours of translation, always moving and changing, and nonetheless serving as the meeting and mediation places for a variety of approaches. Hermeneutic things do not deal with concepts primarily but with shores of convergence that mediate difference, and the emphasis is therefore on the nature of such shores. One can understand science and religion discourses as hermeneutical shores, localities of mediation and translation, of convergence and divergence, so that one focuses on the interpretive processes happening in these unclear contours. These contours are unclear—there are no definitions of science and religion as the historians keep reminding us—but full of comings and goings from a wide variety of disciplinary directions.

Rheinberger’s work is heavily and explicitly influenced by Jacques Derrida’s work. Derrida (1998, 17; 1994, 111–12) has a notion of “messianicity without messianism,” or more generally, “x without x” (Watkin 2017, 47–53), which is similar to how Rheinberger defines epistemic things: an entity—or “x”—whose unknown characteristics—“without x”—are the target of an experimental inquiry. Although it is not clear if Rheinberger is using this aspect of Derrida’s thought directly, “x without x” is also much more like anti-essentialism: “science without science,” for example, could mean that we still speak of something called “science,” but since it is evacuated of any fixed content that would make it what it is, we have “science without science”—a form without any content. The difference between “x without x” and a “hermeneutic thing” is that the hermeneutical emphasis is not in form over (evacuated) content but on processes and relationships between forms and contents. Hence, I have stressed mediation and translation as the aspects relevant to the obscurity around “science and religion” rather than something in “science and religion” deeper than, although without any, “science and religion.”

The hermeneutic preference for the in-between—for mediation and relations—is not innocent; it privileges the language of translation, the transdisciplinary connection, over the specificities in this or that area. My contention is that the priority of the in-between—and of mediating and translating—is particularly suitable to the kinds of things science and religion discourses tend to be, and could be, through what they are now. These discourses, even if tending towards essentialism, do mediate between science and religion or science and theology, and there are hermeneutical approaches to this mediation (as in Reynhout 2013, using Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutics); more importantly, however, if one is to consider the temporal mediation processes in and through language—which not so much transcend but dissolve the issue of essentialism—science and religion discourses constitute federations, sets of connections between various disciplines and modes of thinking. The in-between is not primarily between “science” and “religion” but between anything—historical episodes, concepts, events, practices, experiences, etc.—within the historical trajectories of the meaning of these terms. I think this federative way represents well how science and religion discourses tend to happen naturally, and it opens up ways of integrating the history and philosophy of science and religion.

This hermeneutical approach echoes Michel Serres’s thinking about philosophy (and mathematics) in two ways. First, Christopher Watkin (2020, 114) contrasts Serres’s thought with Derrida’s “x without x” by noting that Serres focuses on transformations and relations, moving between models and disciplines, rather than on an ineffable and final form without content. Second, Serres contrasts between “umbilical thinking” (Watkin 2020, 38)—thinking that privileges one single access to truth over others—with connection and relations between a variety of aspects or accesses to truth. Watkin (2020, 73–74) calls this series of relations “federation” based on Serres’s reliance on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (hence my use of the word “federation”).

Hermeneutic Things between the Philosophy and History of Science and Religion

So far, I have suggested that science and religion discourses can be seen as hermeneutic things, allowing science and religion discourses to be mindful of the historiography of science and religion, especially the temporal dynamicity of our concepts, without losing sight of our current historical situations and how these move, motivate, and receive the historiographical work. What is at risk is that unless we are able to properly incorporate both present concerns and historical studies into science and religion work—or, as Gadamer ([1960] 2006, 283–84) suggests, until the distinction between history and the knowledge of history is seen as only an abstraction—we will have essentialist and anti-essentialist work, largely using each other as interesting curiosities but not really affecting the substance of each other’s work.

Let me give two examples to show how the anti-essentialist philosophy arising from historiographical work can undermine the philosophical relevance of said work for reflection on contemporary issues. Willem Drees (2010, 56), in the fifth of his ten commandments for science and religion discussions (“Honour your father and your mother, but treat them as history”) says: “Though a thorough historical tour is fascinating, studies of particular historical cases cannot be transposed to our time since each episode is embedded in its own wider context . . . Hence we have to move on from historical studies to reflections on contemporary science. A ‘flight to history’ is inadequate.” Drees is aware of Brooke’s and Harrison’s (and other historians’ work); even if Territories had not yet come out in 2010, the main tenets of what I have called, following Reeves, anti-essentialist philosophy predate Territories, as one can see in Brooke’s Science and Religion. Drees sees limited use for historical work: it is useful for careful reflection on history but less useful for contemporary reflection on science and religion. The anti-essentialist historiographical standpoint would still characterize Drees’s work as at least essentialist adjacent, since it is trying to populate what “science” and “religion” stand for today, implying that one can say this is “science” or this is “religion,” and this is not “science” or this is not “religion,” without direct reference to their histories. The whole point of Brooke and Harrison is that the history of science and religion illuminates the very way of thinking and speaking about science and religion in the present, hence one cannot detach contemporary reflection from this history. Therefore, the gap between the philosophical interest in the present (Drees) on the one hand and the historical interest on the past with a tenuous or mostly undisclosed relation to the present (Harrison and Brooke) on the other is largely unbridged.

Another example is Reeves’s (2023) defense of science and religion against an “extreme” anti-essentialism perceived from Harrison. Again, like Drees, Reeves is knowledgeable about the history of science and religion and, furthermore, sympathetic to an anti-essentialist approach. And yet, from an anti-essentialist position (á la Harrison’s historiography), similar to Drees’s case, Reeves would be characterized as at least essentialist adjacent. Defending “dialogue,” the anti-essentialist would say, implies that there are these two sides, “science” and “religion,” that might come into a conversation, thereby reifying each other by means of dialogue (Harrison 2022, 15). In so doing, this supposed dialogue opens the possibility of an imbalance prioritizing the “scientific” side of the dialogue (Harrison 2023a, 100), becoming instead a monologue from science to religion (Harrison and Tyson 2022, 2). Also, similar to Drees, Reeves argues for the limited relevance of historiographical work, since this work about history does not have any normative reach in the present. In both examples we see that the philosopher, on the one hand, is moved to find limited use of the historical work; the rhetoric in the historiographical work—which proposes the anti-essentialist philosophy—emphasizes the foundational relevance of history in a way that preempts some important kinds of philosophical engagement, as both Drees and Reeves perform. The historian, on the other hand, by remaining in the purely “historical” domain, is moved to see as “essentialist” even attempts at dialogue between science and religion (Reeves); dialogue implies two parties, and since these two parties are not essences, they are merely reifications by means of the mere suggestion of a dialogue in the first place. The result is that the gap between philosophy and history is, again, reasserted; it is the historiographical work that partially encourages the gap to remain.

The philosophical work this article does is to side with both philosophy and history by giving a mode of integrating the historical work in philosophical reflection through a hermeneutical approach. Historiography cannot attempt to affect the present without leaving its disciplinary boundary, and if it does, it is also doing philosophy. That this is the case—that historiography is always doing philosophy—is part of what drove the suggestion of considering science and religion discourses as hermeneutic things: history here is one of many nodes of connectivity that allows the flow of understanding reality in the present. To know what something meant is to know what it means now, in the present, otherwise one does not know either what it meant or what it means (Sikahall 2022, 186).

As indicated in the previous sections, even the historian needs to refer to the contemporary meaning of things to communicate and note if this or that was not in the past, although we have it now, thereby doing some form of anachronistic essentialist momentary move in order to speak coherently to contemporary readers. The historian’s translation between the evidences of the past and the historian’s—and their readers’—contemporary understanding shows that, as Gadamer suggests, the distinction between history and the knowledge of it is merely an abstraction.

Conclusion

The suggestion of science and religion discourses being hermeneutic things can help by encouraging a focus on the in-betweenness of things: mediatory things, translational modes of thought, plurivocal concepts, models, objects, practices, or any kind of possible connector between areas of discourse relevant to science and religion discussions. These mediatory things will have their complex histories and possible parallels in other areas of knowing that cannot be determined in advance. For science and religion discourses, this means transgressing the artificial “historical” disciplinary boundary to clearly address contemporary questions, mindful of the historical trajectories of things. It also means that historical work on science and religion could be more mindful about the philosophical claims it implicitly makes due to the rhetorical framing of what is good or bad practice in historical research, acknowledging furthermore that just as the trajectory of modern science is fraught with metaphysical–theological and moral assumptions that have determined and changed the meaning of what science refers to, so is the case for our modern understanding of history.

Four examples, to conclude, illustrate the possibilities of conceiving science and religion discourses as hermeneutic things, focusing on philosophical and historiographical integration. The first is the contributions that spurred the discussion between Harrison and Reeves (Harrison and Milbank 2022; Harrison and Tyson 2022). These contributions are, some of the rhetoric notwithstanding, still part of science and religion discussions, showing very richly the new theological and historical possibilities of renewed discussions, focusing on concrete theological questions and scientific problems and doing theology mindful of science and science mindful of theology. Harrison’s own work could also be considered an example, since despite objections within his historical work to forms of analysis in science and religion discussions such as “dialogue,” it provides at least a fruitful starting point for further work, as the volumes alluded to show. The second and third examples are What Did the Romans Know?: An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking by Daryn Lehoux (2012) and Don’t Think for Yourself: Authority and Belief in Medieval Philosophy by Peter Adamson (2022). In their own ways, both show a conscious understanding of how historical research addresses contemporary questions directly. Lehoux focuses on the Roman world to address contemporary questions around “fact-making” and their contexts, and Adamson raises the question of making judgments when we need to trust an authority because we do not possess the expertise, especially in the aftermath of COVID-19. The final example is Bernard Lightman’s (2019) edited collection Rethinking History, Science, and Religion. This is a historical work that self-consciously attempts to move from Brooke’s suggestion about the complexity of the historical interaction between science and religion towards topics that show the intermingling of practices, technologies, theories, etc. Such developments in the historiographical literature, alongside the other examples given, show how science and religion discourses are indeed hermeneutic things—locations of interpretive connections between the undefinable science and religion, mediations between times, clearly rooted in the enduring questioning of the human spirit from our contemporary experiential vantage point.