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Willem Drees’s Religion, Science and Naturalism (Cambridge University Press,
£40/$59.95, ISBN 0 521 49708 6) is a profound and taxing book. For
Drees, the lines normally drawn by those engaged in the religion versus science
debate are too rigid. He contends that religion and morality are as much natural
phenomena as the subjects of the natural sciences are, and that they have
evolved in the same way. To follow his argument, it is essential to understand
what he means by “naturalism”, so the reader must wrestle with Drees’s long
dissertation on his terms—naturalism may be “hard” or “soft”, for
instance. It isn’t easy.