One of the motivations for speaking about the pluralistic landscape of our world today is to make the discourse of science and religion more inclusive in terms of the religious traditions involved. While this discourse originated in the Western Christian context, a first approximation of a more inclusive discourse would probably require making it, to borrow Robert Russell's characterization, more international, intercultural, interreligious, and interdisciplinary (Russell , xiii). The fact that journals on science and religion frequently publish works of self‐critique and self‐questioning of the field indicates that, for the better, the field's boundaries are not fixed and as such there remains the opportunity to expand it and make it more inclusive.

Taking a cue from discussions about religious pluralism, awareness of the pluralistic landscape would mean acceptance of diversity, which, as a consequence, would make it more challenging to find the common ground needed to sustain such a discourse. What distinguishes pluralism from relativism, as standpoints toward diversity, is that the former still, at some point, has to draw boundaries in one way or another. But when boundaries are drawn, what are the criteria? The danger has always been that the more powerful within a diverse field may, albeit inadvertently, hegemonize the other parties it wants to embrace. Boundaries are always contested. The question is how pluralistic, how inclusive are we prepared to be?

Being a pluralist may mean more than simply inviting more parties to the table; although that step is surely necessary, it is not sufficient. At some point, in expanding the science and religion discourse in a pluralistic landscape, we may need to be prepared not only to find some common ground—either in the topics discussed, the methodology used, or even the objectives of the discourse—but to question the ground itself. In this case, two pertinent and interrelated issues concern the very categories of “science” and “religion” and how they are related.

The problematization of the categories of “science” and “religion” has become commonplace as a number of prominent scholars have shown how they were invented in a particular Western Christian context. While we may provide justifications for the wider use of both these terms as understood today, pluralist awareness may require further rethinking. In turn, different conceptions of each of the categories imply different understandings of their relationship. No mere theoretical attempt without consequence, this rethinking suggests how the research agenda in science and religion discourse could be reconceived. We may even go further and ask what if the differentiation of “science” and “religion” does not exist in a tradition in the way it is assumed in current discourse, such that the question about how the two are related need not even arise. As I shall show later, this is a real possibility.

These questions may make those involved in the religion and science discourse wonder whether any attempt to expand it in the pluralistic landscape of today's world might not be futile. But these questions are intended to stimulate critical awareness about what does it take to create a truly pluralistic discourse. Whatever conclusions they may lead into, I believe it will enrich the discourse. In this article, I will start by trying to understand today's science and religion discourse and attempts to problematize it. I will especially discuss two directions in which the notion of “relation” between science and religion can be and has been questioned—one by reflecting on its (Western) history, and the other by looking at the case with the indigenous religions, especially, in the particular context of Indonesia. The Indonesian context will serve my purpose not only in providing the illustration about the issue with indigenous religions, but also as it is a Muslim majority country—actually, a country with the largest Muslim population in the world.

What Is the Discourse About? The Problematic “and” in “Science and Religion”

Important recent sources that describe the relatively new field of science and religion already show the awareness of today's pluralistic landscape and call for an expansion of the field. However, as indicated earlier, further and more radical steps are needed and may start with problematizing the categories of “science” and “religion” and the nature of their relation—or whether the central question is indeed (only) about the relation(s) between the two. One of the first important insights to be gleaned from these sources is that science and religion is about the relation between the two, assuming that they constitute distinctive, if not mutually exclusive, areas.

The Encyclopedia of Science and Religion (Van Huyssteen et al., 2003) begins its description of “Science and Religion” by identifying the question in terms of ways to relate the two areas (Russell and Wegter‐McNelly ). Gregory Peterson starts his article by emphasizing this issue: “A primary concern of contemporary scholarship on science and religion is the question of precisely how the two areas should be related” (Peterson , 756). He sees the main issues in the discussion about the methodology concern how to give an account of the nature of both science and religion, and of how the truths found in the respective fields can be related to one another. This last assertion indicates another characteristic of the field held widely in the circles of science and religion, that is, almost exclusive attention on the “truths,” coming from the cognitive dimensions of the two.

A survey of recent discussions by important figures in science and religion in Zygon@49, a series of recent editions (2014) of the oldest journal in the field, shows that this understanding of the field represents the mainstream. Taking science and religion as a disciplinary field, Niels H. Gregersen suggests that its object of research is the relations between science and religion in historical and contemporary contexts. (Gregersen , 420). While this may sound like common sense and not difficult to accept as a starting point for further inquiry, his next assertion goes beyond Peterson's emphasis on the cognitive dimensions and may circumvent the complexities of the relations and, as such, radically shrink the possibilities for exploring them. “It seems to me that the programs within science and religion need to be committed to some form of metaphysical realism, that is that the world exists regardless of the observer, and consists of a variety of mind‐independent entities or objective relations (including also the observer's interpretations)” (Gregersen , 423).

The issue is not about the validity of that metaphysical realism, or other alternative philosophical positions, but the assumption that science and religion is about (conceptual) views of the world. This seems to be too quickly reducing both enterprises to their cognitive contents or beliefs: science to scientific theories and religion to theological views. Gregersen may acknowledge other, noncognitive dimensions of science, such as practices (of the practitioners or communities of practitioners in both fields), but those seem to lie at the very margin, and study of them is simply one of the arms of the science‐and‐religion octopus (and Gregersen is actually not sure what such studies would contribute to the discourse) (Gregersen , 427–28). I will later provide an illustration about the importance of looking at such practices in the relation between (practitioners of) science and religion; in certain contexts, it may be even more important and consequential to focus on the practices than the cognitive truths taken here as normative goals.

The article published as part of Zygon@49 by the late Ian G. Barbour also assumes that “science and religion” is about relation. Barbour acknowledges that science and religion are not only about religious beliefs, and that there is a social context in which interplay between them takes place. However, when it comes to relation between them, each is understood mostly in terms of beliefs (Barbour , 82–84). What we have seen so far is the wide agreement on the focus of the field as the relation between science and religion, assuming the clear differentiation between the two, and the focus on their cognitive dimensions. Yet, even if we regard beliefs as the most important part or dimension of science and of religion, there is another serious problem lurking here. As Willem Drees () has reminded us from another direction, the “and” in “science and religion” deceptively gives the impression that the two are about ideas and, furthermore, similar in their cognitive kind and status. The typology that presents the two as being in conflict, independence, dialogue, or integration assumes a symmetrical understanding of science and theology, yet the reality may be different (Drees , 372). The discussion so far should motivate us to look more deeply into what constitutes science, religion, and, as a consequence, science and religion.

Before discussing this further in the next section, another limitation of the present discourse is its grounding in the modern Western Christian context. This could of course be understood as a mere historical contingency. But when the field is expected to develop further in the pluralistic landscape of today's world, this characteristic needs to also be brought up. Indeed the call to be inclusive has already surfaced in recent science and religion discourse. The establishment of the International Society for Science and Religion in 2002 marks this awareness. In their assessment of the field, Russell and Wegter‐McNelly () mention the need to bring in additional voices from the world's religious and indigenous cultures. But how open would the field, as they describe it, be for the new voices?

Barbour () too says that the challenge for a journal like Zygon (he may as well refer to the science and religion discourse in general) is “the inclusion of greater religious diversity.” He sees that other religious traditions (such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism) have been involved in the enterprise and would like to see their inclusion in the pages of Zygon develop further, but still it seems that what he sees in them are beliefs. Yet, beliefs may have different significance or play different roles in different traditions. Moreover, even within each of the religions there are different traditions—ranging from the rationalist to the mystical strands, from the conservative to the progressive and liberal.

In the discussion so far, we may then conclude that how science, religion, and “science and religion” are understood turns out to be closely related to the possibility of making the field of science and religion more inclusive. Pluralist attempts to make the field more inclusive may suggest questioning of all three components. Three more specific points are needed here. First, “the inclusion of greater religious diversity” may have much wider scope than simply making the list of religions longer. Within each religion there are different traditions with different emphases on beliefs and practices and the interplay between them.

Second, all the examples mentioned above by Barbour are well‐known world religions. Of course, these are examples, but just so that we do not miss out on important kinds of knowledge and wisdom, we need to explicitly acknowledge the variety that is usually called indigenous religions, which are still living realities in many parts of the world. Though in many places they tend to be smaller or even on the edge of extinction and, in most cases, are pressured and repressed by the ever larger and more dominating world religions, they (or fractions of them) are still there, surviving. (Examples from Indonesia that I will discuss later will be especially pertinent in this regard).

Third, when we try to include more religions, we will then also need to be open to the possibility that these religions may display quite different characteristics. The significance of theology in these religions, the scope of their worldviews, and the interaction between faith and knowledge may all be different, to the extent that the very distinction between science and religion may not even make sense.

In the next sections, I shall try to develop the claims made above, using illustrations from Indonesia, which show how different the agenda of the field of science and religion could be when pursued within different religious, cultural, and geopolitical contexts.

Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives

Historians have shown how “science” and “religion” as understood today results from reifications throughout the history of the past few centuries. History is always good therapy for essentializing tendencies in abstract discourses whether in theology, philosophy of science, or science and religion. A very promising starting point in this direction is John Hedley Brooke's historical approach to science and religion (Brooke ; Brooke and Cantor ). It seems not an exaggeration to say that what John Brooke did for science and religion is similar to what Thomas Kuhn did for philosophy of science: producing a decisive transformation in the image of science and religion by which we are now possessed.

As Brooke says, “Without an understanding of the many meanings with which the words science and religion have been invested, attempts to establish definitive relations between them can easily be naïve. Conversely, definitions proposed for both science and religion sometimes reflect decisions already taken on the relations between them and how they are to be presented for polemical purposes” (Brooke , 749).

This theme is raised and given further argumentation in a recent anthology dedicated to Brooke's works (Dixon, Cantor, and Pumfrey ). The reification of science and religion can be traced back to the point when these categories emerged to name realities that previously were called by other names. Science has not had a fixed meaning over the centuries—it is different from previous studies of nature such as natural philosophy or natural history. Many recent works on the history of science show that science as a modern discipline emerged only in the nineteenth century. It was not a coincidence that the idea of an enduring conflict between science and religion gained prominence in this century too; one way to define science was by distinguishing it from religion, or even showing that the two are in conflict (Harrison , 26–29).

Religion, too, as students of religious studies now usually learn quite early, was the result of reification around the same time science acquired its distinctive character. A classic study by Wilfred Cantwell Smith () shows how Christianity was not regarded as a “religion”; it was primarily understood as faith or piety, not a systematic body of doctrines. Once Christianity became a religion, the next move was to identify “similar” religious traditions and call them “religions.” The encounter with other religious traditions took place especially in the nineteenth century through imperialism. The realities had always been there, of course, but their reification has a definite history. So, first, Christian faith was reified, and then, other traditions were reified as “religions”—using the standard of “religion” from the paradigmatic Christianity. Reification, for Smith, is “mentally making religion into a thing, gradually coming to conceive it as an objective systematic entity” (Smith , 50). More studies have appeared in the last few years, which have brought this historical insight to better understand how “world religions” or “eastern religions” were invented, usually in the image of the paradigmatic religion, the origin of reification, which was Western Christianity.

Another important line in the rethinking of “religion” is criticism of the modern secular tendency to conceive religion primarily as belief. Cantwell Smith has pointed out how this was not always the case in Christianity; later anthropologists such as Talal Asad have gone further in their idea of religion mostly as practice, not (propositional) beliefs. Another argument that strengthens the argument is raised by Golinski () who takes up Bruno Latour's notion of religion as performative, without beliefs.

So what we see here are separate developments in the construction of categories of science and religion. The relation between the two, undoubtedly, was constructed after the eighteenth century. The old debate on faith and reason was not necessarily a precursor of today's polemical debate about science and religion. The two enterprises were so connected that “relation” between science and religion was not an issue. “‘Science’ and ‘religion’ were not independent entities which might bear some positive or negative relation to each other, and to attempt to identify such connections is to project back in time a set of concerns that are typically those of our own age” (Harrison , 26).

Of course showing how the categories were constructed, and further detailing the construction of religion as primarily a matter of belief, is not a mere interest of historians. The least we can learn from such histories is that while terms are unavoidably constructed, the awareness of their constructed nature should help us to be more sensitive to the contestations behind them and as such avoid overgeneralized conclusions, which assume that, for example, “religion” means the same thing for today's Christians, Muslims, and Hindus in different parts of the world. And behind such construction usually there is politics.

One of Harrison's conclusions may seem rather disastrous for an attempt to expand science and religion discourse beyond its original Western Christian context. Considering the history of how categories of “religion” and “science” as well as their “relations” were born in a particular history of the West, he suggests that “science and religion” is primarily a Western problem (Harrison , 41). Recent literature has shown how Islam and Buddhism have dealt with these issues as well, though probably in different ways, but others, such as Eastern religions, especially when they do not consider themselves to be “religions,” are in general indifferent. Would our pluralist awareness export alien problems to them, out of the good intention to be more inclusive of more religions?

As I will touch on again later, much of the issue of science and religion in the Muslim world is not the result of exporting a Western problem. The questions are responses to the Western science introduced to the Muslim world through imperialism. While modern science has been exported from the West, the modern discourse on Islam and science that responded to it developed in the different contexts of colonized countries (cf. Kalin ; Iqbal ).

The concrete implications of the historical approach should be clear by now, and I will add more illustrations in the next sections. By taking up the case study of Indonesia, I will next examine whatever can be said about science and religion discourse in that context, and see how the preceding concerns about the boundaries of science and of religion and the politics involved in the reification figure in significantly here.

The Case of Indonesia

In this section, I will start by describing two main spheres of the existing science and religion discourse in Indonesia, which does not exhaust the whole area but sufficiently represents it, followed by specific discussion of indigenous religions that are quite relevant to the discourse but have not been studied as part of it. The first two areas may prompt us to ask Harrison's question—is science and religion discourse a Western problem? An important part of the discourse among Muslims in Indonesia, as a majority Muslim country, represents the Islamic discourse, which mainly responds to the introduction of modern science. While responding to modern science, the discourse itself cannot be said to be exported from the West. The next question then is, does such a discourse in a non‐Western context display different characteristics? With regard to the third area, on indigenous religions, I will follow up the move of blurring of categories of science and religion and further discuss ways to expand the discourse.

What Is “Science and Religion” For?

This article began by problematizing “science” and “religion,” and the relation between the two as a central question in today's science and religion discourse. The intention to expand the discourse by taking into account the pluralistic landscape that we know and experience today requires not simply inviting more participants from different religious traditions but also demands the expansion of the conceptions of “science” and “religion.”

The research agenda related to a Muslim response to modern science and the project of finding some Islamic identity in the teaching of modern sciences are relatively easier to accommodate, as we can still find parallels between them and the discourse as it develops today in the United States and Europe. However, even here, we need to understand the different context, which is determined by the introduction of modern science through colonialism as part of seemingly inexorable modernization. The reflection on indigenous religions may be seen simply as one among other agendas in religion and science, but, due to its radical blurring of modern categorizations of science and religion, it may as well be a primary guiding framework to help expand the discourse in a more pluralistic way.

At this point, an important question we need to address is (to return to a formulation posed by Drees): “What do we seek to do when we do religion and science?” He answers: “Although reflections on religion in a scientific age often seem to be driven by other questions, I suggest that a moral and motivational interest may be more prominent than is often recognized or acknowledged” (Drees , 367). He lists the moral questions that drive many of the science and religion engagements, including “how the joint reflection of scientists, philosophers and theologians can contribute to the welfare of human community.” Understanding such motivation, and observing the fate of indigenous communities around the world, it seems natural to put them rather centrally in the science and religion discourse as they are among the most marginalized. Taking this issue seriously may help us to reformulate the boundaries of science and religion and, further, understand what is at stake in this discourse.