HOW can you tell when someone is a member of a family? In the absence of DNA testing, it is often possible to identify telltale physical features that pass from generation to generation.

Different members of a family may have noses that look alike, eyes of similar colour and shape, or ears that stick out in a particular way. A single family member will usually possess some of these but not all. Within a given family, then, one can typically uncover a stable set of physical features that together characterise its members. Someone who fails to exhibit any of these and yet claims family membership is probably an impostor.

This thinking in terms of “family features” lies at the heart of Nick Spencer and Hannah Waite’s insightful new book about science and religion. The Landscapes of Science and Religion argues that science and religion each are best understood as families, whose members between them possess a stable set of features, but each member of which possesses only a subset.

In part one, they apply this Wittgensteinian approach (after the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein) with great effect to the transcripts of extended interviews that they conducted with 101 experts from science, religion, and the field of science and religion. Listening to how those experts talk about science and religion, Spencer and Waite disaggregate the former into six distinct features — pertaining to method(s), subject, presuppositions, objectives, values, and institutional structure — and the latter into five: transcendence, belief, commitment, formalisation of belief in theology and doctrine, and formalisation of commitment in rituals, laws, and offices.

Something is more fully science or religion, they argue, when it possesses more of these features. Indeed, two things can equally be science if each possesses (say) four of Spencer’s and Waite’s six features of science without each possessing the same four features. This sliding-scale approach improves on others, more vexatious, that rely on substantive definitions that must be satisfied in an all-or-nothing manner.

In the second half of the book, Spencer and Waite use this approach to identify with precision where the conflicts between science and religion really lie. The four sites that they name — metaphysics; methodology; anthropology; and public authority and reasoning — are each areas that experts in the field of science and religion have been analysing for years, if not decades.

The book’s analytical approach and associated notion of “gradated belonging”, nevertheless, offer a fresh and illuminating way of thinking about science and religion individually, and a useful grid through which to locate points of current actual and potential future tension between the two. This book is, therefore, a very welcome addition to the science-and-religion literature.

Dr Peter Jordan is Research Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion in the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford.

The Landscapes of Science and Religion: What are we disagreeing about?
Nick Spencer and Hannah Waite
OUP £35
(978-0-19-887875-9)
Church Times Bookshop £31.50