For me, the problem is that there is always too much emphasis on what science _is_ versus what religion _is_, when my perception of both of these ideas is that they are processes and not entities. We cannot talk about science or religion without talking about how science or religion work. They cannot be separated from their relationships to communities of people, nor can they be frozen for analysis that ignores their inherently fluid nature. The only book I have encountered (in my limited study of science) that talks about how science works – that really focuses of science as a process and not a thing – is Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. When I compare that to ruminations about how religion works, like T. Unno’s take on the Tannisho or Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling — that puts me into some exciting and fruitful territory. Coming from a Buddhist perspective, putting down dualistic categories like science/religion and watching them instead as processes is more how I like to think.

…Isn’t “filling in” his ontology kind of like Richard Dawkins saying that, just because evolution is consistent with metaphysical naturalism and in some respects points that way, everybody who believes in evolution must also be a metaphysical naturalist?…

Right, that’s actually what I was trying to get at, why it’s important to make one’s metaphysical presuppositions explicit (since they’re always there, acknowledged or not), so as to figure out to what extent data from a scientific methodology could in good faith cohere within different sets of presuppositions (or not). I guess all I’m insisting on is that even meta-level “how”-questions can’t be addressed without the “how” itself already making use of presuppositions about a “what”/”why”/”who.” That is, any discursive analysis is already making use of its own explicit or implicit metaphysical presuppositions — they don’t necessarily have to be full-on Ideals per se, but they’re operational nonetheless…

I still know nothing of Deleuze and Nagri, and I should. But as for Foucault, I think his historical analysis is perfectly possible from a “methodological” rather than “metaphysical” point of view. Isn’t “filling in” his ontology kind of like Richard Dawkins saying that, just because evolution is consistent with metaphysical naturalism and in some respects points that way, everybody who believes in evolution must also be a metaphysical naturalist?

You can talk about the metaphysics of science and religion, but I would insist that you do so within a discourse (subject to Foucaultian analysis), rather than dealing with pre-discursive metaphysical Ideals like “religion” and “science.”

I think the mistake of that AAR panel (or how I interpreted it) was to think that discursive analysis is tantamount to debunking. Darwin, for instance, used motifs from Malthusian economics to develop his own ideas. That doesn’t mean that they’re illegitimate.

The interesting question, I mean to say here, is the how and not the what. Understanding the dynamics at work in Darwin’s appropriation of Malthus is separate from (though related to) the question of whether that appropriation was a productive one that we should applaud.

[1.] …There is no need to appeal to metaphysical, transcendental ideas of “science and religion.”…
[2.] …Whenever there is temptation to speak of “science and religion,” we should take pains to be more specific

I completely agree about needing to always be specific (#2), yet I think there’s also a bigger problem involved (complicating #1), in that any statement whatsoever (whether from everyday, theoretical, scientific, or religious talk/language) unavoidably invokes metaphysical presuppositions; it’s just a question of how self-reflective one is about the presuppositions, IMO. The task of interpretation is never-ending by definition, but the metaphysical presuppositions don’t simply go away, whatever the angle used or phenomenon addressed (the presuppositions can be ignored, of course, but they’re still there). [To Whitehead’s credit, he at least tried to take the implications of that into account within his own system (cf. chap. 1 of _Process and Reality_).] So when “religious” and “scientific” communities agree on what delimits the scientific method, for example, then many so-called “science and religion” wars *can* be decided (for example: creationism is clearly unscientific, in terms of the sci. method as commonly understood, etc.). To me, it’s clarifying and delimiting the presuppositions, and the concepts they birth, that’s actually most crucial. (And if the parties involved are unwilling to do that in good faith then there truly is no room for honest dialogue between parties anyway.) If the presupposition-analysis is what Lewis is implying, then I agree, but I just don’t think all the micro-analysis stuff can ever fully supersede metaphysics per se. (For example: even Foucault’s type of analysis presumes its own unarticulated metaphysics, which is why both Deleuze and Negri can each claim to be filling-in F.’s ontology, etc.)