Stereotypical thinking in the historiography of science and religion: creation and reception history of Reijer Hooykaas’s Religion and the Rise of Modern Science

Historians of science and religion have occasionally resorted to stereotypes, rejecting harmonious accounts without clear justifications. This article chronicles the creation and reception history of Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (1972), written by one so-called harmony promoting historian, Reijer Hooykaas (1906-1994). Over the decades, the book has received substantial criticism and praise. Based on our research on publications and archival materials - primarily comprising correspondence between Hooykaas, friends, colleagues, and publishers - we show that the multifaceted creation history of Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (RRMS) has significantly impacted its reception. We argue that the book, and, by extension, Hooykaas's scholarship on science and religion, has been too easily discarded as Protestant apologetics at worst and as an attempt to harmonize science and religion at best. Painting a picture of the dynamics of the science and religion field during its formative years from the 1960s onwards, this article is a call to take the complexity principle seriously when conducting historiography in the science and religion field instead of merely framing previous research as a counterpoint.