Yves Gingras's new book is an invitation to critically analyse the dialogue thesis of science and religion. He details the impossibility of a dialogue between science and religion, and the necessity of a conflict between science and religion. The first four chapters are historical in nature, where he shows from the lives of various men of science how the conflict between science and the Church prevented independent scientific thinking. We encounter various historical figures who engaged with the authorities of Church, promoting free thinking, and argued for a separation of philosophy from theology, and later science from theology/religion. One figure who dominates in the historical narrative is Galileo. It is mainly through Galileo's life that Gingras tells us the story of the necessity of conflict between science and religion. He shows how Galileo struggled with the authority of the Church to get permission to write his important works. What is interesting in the first half of the book is Gingras's discussion of the life and afterlife of Galileo's ideas. We see how the Church engages with his ideas differently in different time periods, and we also see how different figures gradually came to embrace his ideas for their own struggle with the Church. In order to talk about the complex nature of the Church's relation with Galilean and Copernican ideas, Gingras writes,

The first four chapters deal with the question of the power and authority that the Church possessed and how that authority was used against sciences when scientists challenged biblical knowledge of the workings of the world. These four chapters narrate how science was censored and the manner in which various scientists engaged, questioned and challenged the authority of the Church. Through the lives and ideas of various important figures, including Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Kant, Descartes, Comte and Darwin – actors from different time periods – Gingras demonstrates that the Church always tried to stop the secularization of the sciences. These instances are used by Gingras to demonstrate the perennial conflict between theology and scientific thought.

After detailing in four chapters how the idea of a conflict between science and religion was inevitable and necessary, Gingras in the next two chapters attempts to understand the logic of contemporary claims to a dialogue between science and religion, especially coming from historians of science since the 1980s. This is the part inadequately developed in the book. The author calls the existing scholarship an ‘industry’ of science and religion as they were funded by the Templeton Foundation. Therefore he calls the vibrant scholarship that challenged the existing historiography of science and religion ecumenical.

Gingras, while looking at scholars who were funded by the Templeton Foundation, totally ignores the fact that these historians of science and religion are distinguished scholars, professionally respected by fellow historians and trained in history of science, who work in public and secular university departments, where they also teach history of science at various levels. It is from their training and expertise that many of them became interested in the discussion of science and religion. It is also important to note that these historians had no training in theology; therefore it is methodologically problematic to argue that they researched science and religion because they were funded by the Templeton Foundation. Here one should make a distinction between doing science and religion in departments of history and of history of science, and in theological seminaries. The former is done by trained historians of science and the latter by theologians. Gingras also ignored scholarship that goes beyond the binary of conflict and dialogue, for example the intervention of Bruno Latour, especially in his book An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (2013), where he argues that science and religion are two different modes of existence. Sociological and anthropological works show us that when it comes to the everyday life of scientists, the calls for both dialogue and conflict have their limitations. The recent literature on science and religion goes beyond the binary of conflict and dialogue, and in that process criticizes the call for both dialogue and conflict.

In Chapter 7 Gingras uses the Kennewick Man controversy to instantiate the inevitability of a conflict between science and religion. The Native Americans claimed Kennewick Man as their ancestor and therefore refused to let the scientific establishment use the skeletal remains for experiments, instead asking for the reburial of the remains for cultural and religious reasons. Here Gingras attempts to argue that the two sciences that dealt with this case – archaeology and physical anthropology – were in crisis as the claim made by the Native Americans was ‘dangerous’ for scientific growth. The fact that in the case of Kennewick Man, the court ruled against the indigenous people and stood with the scientists (p. 188) clearly tells us the power that science and scientists have in modern times. When the author spends the largest part of the book talking about the authority of religion, he does not write about the authority of the sciences in our times. It is also surprising that he presents even a discipline like physical anthropology as an innocent victim of tribal beliefs and practices when it is clear from the very history of the discipline that it produced various racial stereotypes through physical characteristics, especially in the colonies. This uncritical reading of science is as dangerous as an uncritical reading of religion. Science and scientific authority are not innocent victims. It would have been extremely interesting if the author had engaged with the STS scholarship on the authority and domination of science and scientific establishments.

Having said that, this book is undoubtedly an important work to understand the other side of science–religion debates and will be an unavoidable text for historians of science and religion. Students of science and religion cannot afford to miss reading this work as part of their training. This will surely make an impact in the scholarship of science and religion.