Imagine, Peter Harrison suggests at the beginning of The Territories of Science and Religion, a historian who claimed to have discovered evidence of a war between Israel and Egypt that took place in 1600 AD. We’d be justifiably skeptical, and the evidence could be refuted with a swipe of the hand: The states of Israel and Egypt didn't exist in 1600.
Harrison argues that claims about an early modern war between religion and science should be greeted with the same skepticism. They couldn't have been at war in the early modern period because neither science nor religion as we conceive them existed. At that time, religion wasn't what we think of as religion, and science wasn't what we think of as science.
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