Response

16 Historically Speaking May/June 2007 intimate connections between location and locution, students of science and religion need to become more aware of the rhetorical spaces speakers and their listeners occupy rather than taking pronouncements simply at face value/ Time and again, we find speakers having to control their tongues in particular settings and fitting their rhetoric to the audiences they address. For all the persuasiveness of Brooke's advocacy of complexity, however, his stance has not been without its critics. Here he mentions two charges that have been laid before him. The first attack, namely that emphasizing complexity has the effect of masking real conflict, stems from a misunderstanding . As Brooke rightly notes, acknowledging complexity is not intended to deny conflict. To the contrary, it is to recognize warfare where it has occurred , but to resist elevating it into a ubiquitous metanarrative as some contemporary publicists are only too inclined to do. The second criticism, which revolves around the contention that complexity recedes into particularity and thus disables generalization , is taken more seriously by Brooke. And I, too, sense the force of this accusation. Perhaps one potential way of getting a handle on the problem is to pursue a little more vigorouslv the cartographic image with which I began these reflections. Just as mapping can be carried out at many scales from the local to the global, so historical encounters between science and religion may be mapped at every scale from the micro to the macro. Some studies will illuminate the relationship at the level of the individual biography or even of a fragmented self. How did individuals deal with the claims of science and religion ? Were their views consistent or did their stance shift over time or space? Others might dwell on the physical and social spaces such individuals occupied and the ways these venues shaped the rendezvous between scientific claims and religious convictions. Still others might focus on the larger communities of which commentators were a part. No doubt such collectives—whether they are institutions, informal associations, or religious traditions—will not be monochrome; but it may well be possible nonetheless to discern certain patterns. As with any distribution map, some generalization must take place at this scale of mapping. It's the same when we move to the regional level. Shifting to this layer of analysis will likely deliver some still more general patterns— comparable to, say, an agricultural map, or a population map, or a median income map of the state. At every cartographic scale something is lost even as something is gained. As we move from large scale to small scale, specificity is necessarily sacrificed to generality. The key question about any map, therefore , is never simply "is it accurate?" Accuracy is a relative, not an absolute, value. Maps are only more or less accurate with respect to their purposes. A small-scale map of the world is useless for planning a walk around a market town; a large-scale town plan is of no value for determining the employment patterns of a country. It's the same with mapping science and religion: different scales deliver different insights for different purposes, and it is a mistake to substitute one scale for another. From my viewpoint, then, Brooke's piece is pleasingly sprinkled with geographical terms: he speaks of sites of knowledge, of mapping local contingencies , of philosophies working "according to time and place," of "topographies of complexity," of the local and the global. This leads me to suspect that thinking more geographically about the complexities of the history of science and religion might enable us to work more effectively at different scales of analysis, but all the while recognizing that scale is always relative to purpose. David Fivingstone isprofessor of geography and intellectualhistory at theQueen's University of Belfast. In 2004-05 he served aspresident of the Geography Section of the British Associationfor the Advancement of Science. His most recent book is Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2003). ' WB. Gallie, "Essentially Contested Concepts," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1956): 167-198. ' Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (John Murray, 1 901), 241 42 , 945. 1...