The occurrence of conflict and compatibility narratives in our data, as well as the need for additional framings, may be understood in light of the importance of the secularization hypothesis in the public imagination since the mid-20th century. Proponents of the secularization hypothesis have been regarded as exemplary of conflict narratives.[50] Correspondingly, critics of secularization theory[51] are readily interpreted as advancing some version of compatibility between science and religion. Popular media portrayals offer ample material that implies an either-or between conflict and compatibility alternatives. Consider the following journalistic article titles: “‘Faith vs. Fact’: Why Religion and Science Are Mutually Incompatible” in the Washington Post[52] and “Can Science and Religion Get Along?” in Science Magazine,[53] or a Pew panel: “Religion and Science: Conflict or Harmony?”[54] The propensity to dichotomize—to reduce complex information to two opposites—is a common cognitive trait,[55] which may make compatibility-conflict views intuitively appealing.

Nevertheless, our analyses yielded additional relationships that should not be reduced to either compatibility or conflict because they convey unique, valuable information characterizing how people think about science and religion. Consider nested relationships, for example, which might otherwise have been assimilated into dichotomizing conflict/compatibility narratives. If religion and science are imagined as vying for primacy, these might be viewed reductively as conflict; if the issue of coexistence between religion and science is most salient, then they might be reductively glossed as compatibility. Although both interpretations may be justified in their own ways, neither captures the specific arrangement in nested relationships, whereby religious and scientific positions are both accommodated, yet one takes explanatory or teleological precedence over the other. These may be especially relevant for individuals who have firm commitments to a scientific (or religious) epistemology, but are able to integrate religious (or scientific) information in a way that leaves their epistemic commitments intact. O’Brien and Noy observed a type of nested narrative, termed “post-secular,” in their research, but these primarily comprised individuals whose appreciation of science was nested within religious commitments.[56] “Directional” relationships between religion and science, as described by John H. Evans and Michael S. Evans,[57] also eschew conflict narratives but presume that religious views influence the development of science—again, nesting science within religion. It is important to note, therefore, that in some of the nested relationships we observed that science, rather than religion, played the primary role. Discrete domains relationships similarly might be interpreted to have elements of both compatibility and conflict: they tend to separate religion and science, and yet support meditators’ applying either in a practical fashion, as needed and when needed.

Complementary relationships, on the other hand, may be reduced to examples of compatibility. However, this would lose an important feature of these narratives: when practitioners invoked complementary views, they made cases for why religious and scientific approaches should both be applied in the context of meditation. For practitioners who articulated a need for meditation instructors or mental health providers to be informed with both religious and scientific approaches, this suggests more than tolerance or reconcilability, but an affirmative wish for integration. Finally, a subset of compatibility narratives we observed involved purification narratives. Although traditional purification narratives, which do not include scientific frameworks, can be found among many religious traditions, the narratives we observed among Western Buddhists are notable for their flexible capacity to accommodate both religious and scientific—especially psychological—views, while offering departures from the more orthodox interpretations of either. This may be due to the particular affordances provided by purification narratives for addressing meditation-related challenges, such as the construal of distress as a necessary part of one’s meditative path.

Rather than proposing a new model for how relations between science and religion should be categorized, this article offers data that describe these relations among a group of Western Buddhists who have experienced meditation-related challenges. Nevertheless, our findings may be relevant to the ongoing development of theories on the relationship between religion and science. As noted earlier, prior theorizing on the relationships between religious and scientific worldviews has tended to reference Abrahamic traditions. Although these are likely to inform Westerners’ worldviews, they may not readily translate to practitioners of Buddhism. As discussed earlier, Buddhism has often been portrayed in the West as largely compatible with science, and may therefore not be as marked by a polarization between religion and science. It is also noteworthy that our themes do not map readily onto Barbour’s structure. Legare and Visala[58] join Barbour’s critics[59] in observing that his (and others’, such as Mikael Stenmark’s[60]) typologies primarily speak to Christian theology and its concerns, are abstract and may not be relevant to applied science, and—if applied stringently—are so rigid and etic that they do not reflect the thinking of ordinary individuals. Barbour has acknowledged these limitations.[61] Legare and Visala call for empirical evidence of how individuals actually relate science and religion, particularly in situations where there are pressing needs for explanation—such as illness—and highlight the importance of dynamism, change, and variety within individuals’ views.[62] Our data helps to answer this call.