On September 22, 2026, I gave a keynote at the Science and Religion Forum’s “Foundations” Early Career Researchers Conference, held online. My talk argued that what a tradition’s practitioners do determines whether and where its boundary with science lies.
The paper
“Whether and Where: Daoist and Confucian Boundaries with Science.”
Abstract
Drawing on Eastern, non-Christian sources on science & religion, I argue that the question of where a tradition’s boundary with science falls can be corrected: rather, the claim should be that what a tradition’s practitioners do determines whether and where that boundary lies. The field of science and religion has already recognized that its categories are Western and its framing is largely epistemic (Harrison; Smedes; Miller); what it has not done is to change the unit of analysis: as a direct consequence, the term “religion” has stayed generic. In addition, deification has been Orthodoxy’s signature doctrine; its Protestant reception made an embodied practice “an intellectual exercise” (Feng), which shows that the epistemic framing diagnosed here operates inside Christianity too, not only across the East–West line.
Qi 气 (air, breath, pneuma) is the case where the answer to “whether” is no: porosity isn’t a degree, it’s the medium. To use religious Daoism as an example, at the end of the Tang Dynasty the Daoists began to turn their practices from waidan to neidan. Jiang and Tang call that turn a loss of scientific spirit. The question worth probing is: whose yardstick is that? Compared with waidan, neidan keeps, rather than abandons, the elixir and the equipment for compounding it — furnace, tripod, fire — moving them inside the body (Pregadio). Qi is regarded as one continuous medium in which cosmos and body are the same workshop. Waidan was poisoning the ruling class. If we measure it against the goal Daoist practitioners actually held, external alchemy failed at its own purpose, indicating that the inward turn answers the evidence rather than retreating from it. The “decline” is produced by the imported boundary. The frame is not a Western imposition on passive Chinese material: Jiang and Tang apply that yardstick themselves.
According to the Daxue (Great Learning), a Confucian classic, gewu 格物 (investigation of things), as one of the eight items in a chain ending in 治国 and 平天下, is oriented toward governance through self-cultivation (Legge). It differs from the neidan practitioner’s aim in its scope: orderliness and wellness in the family and the state rather than one’s own health. That gewu zhizhi was retrofitted in the late Qing to mean natural studies, then modern science (Bai), is evidence for my thesis. Fung grants “no disagreement among scholars about the epistemic role of gewu” while arguing that zhizhi is not epistemic, which indicates that the Confucian sequence begins in something like inquiry and does not end in knowledge (Fung). While in Daoism the test is whether the body lasts, in Neo-Confucianism it is whether one acts (Zhu Xi). Both boundaries fall outside the epistemic register, but in different loci — the body, and conduct in the social order — because both are tested by outcome rather than warrant. The field cannot decide whether Ru 儒 is a party to the question at all — the same failure, one level up.
Event
- Event: Science and Religion Forum, “Foundations” Early Career Researchers Conference (online)
- Role: Keynote 2
- Date and time: Tuesday, September 22, 2026, 11:15–12:30 BST (conference September 21–22, 2026)
