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Arguments over the compatibility of religion and science are hardly a new phenomenon. Answers to this age-old debate have ranged over the years from absolute rejection of one side or the either, to attempts to "reconcile" the two spheres, to positing that these paradigms be bracketed and kept apart.

As the books by uncompromising atheists such as Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens as well as those of the "Left Behind" series top the best-seller lists, this issue is surely one that continues to captivate a wide swath of the public.

Yet beyond these popular works, in the upper echelons of academia, relatively new fields of scientific inquiry have reignited the debate. Into this climate enters Barbara Herrnstein Smith's new book, "Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion," a slim volume that is nevertheless densely argued.

In the book, Herrnstein-Smith, a professor of comparative literature at Duke University who was trained in biology, experimental psychology, and philosophy, addresses the limitations of the so-called New Naturalist theorists of religion's methods.

These scholars' dogmatic reliance on evolutionary theory and cognitive-neuroscience, Herrnstein-Smith argues, obscures more than it illuminates.

"It is in these two respects -- that is, an explicit orientation toward a particular type of psychobiological/adaptationist explanation of human behavior along with a tendency toward earnest and sometimes aggressive scientism -- that these works constitute what I am calling here the New Naturalism in the study of religion," she writes.

In other words, these scholars posit that religious belief and practice is largely dictated by built-in mental mechanisms that have developed over generations in order to enhance a community's ability to survive and cope with the hardships and travails of life.

Though this model, Herrnstein-Smith writes, lends itself to "theoretical coherence," it also "tends to lock their thinking into a rigid set of ideas and conceptual moves that limits both what they notice about religion and what they take into account as relevant to its explanation."

The book is thus best understood as a critique of the methodology to which these New Naturalists cling, who Herrnstein-Smith condemns as being guilty of the same crime that they accuse others of.

What these New Naturalists fail to understand, Herrnstein-Smith writes, is the fluidity of mental processes or as she puts it, "more or less continuously shifting -- strengthening, weakening, and reconfiguring -- elements of larger systems of linked perceptual-behavioral disposition" that dictate belief in religion or any other non-empirical conviction.

"In the face of such evidence of the fluidity, variability, and heterogeneity of cognitive states, cognitive processes, and mental content-types, the continued invocation and deployment of static, atomistic, logicist, and dualistic conceptions of belief by philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists is itself a revealing example of the peculiar (and officially irrational) operations of human cognition," she writes.

The book, heavy on generalities, light on specifics, does not offer a programmatic model by which to access the complex study of religion, but rather argues, and successfully at that, that such research must take a holistic approach, incorporating diverse lines of inquiry.

"In seeking to grasp the effect of such multi-scaled dynamics on what we call 'religion' or the place of specifically religious beliefs in this complex interplay we require more extensive and diverse intellectual resources -- empirical, theoretical, analytic, and interpretive -- than those currently offered by 'cognitive' or 'evolutionary' approaches alone," she writes.

According to Herrnstein-Smith, such an approach will help scholars avoid the pitfall of looking at religion and science as spacial categories, where the two compete for a finite amount of Truth. As she rightly points out, the picture that emerges from this paradigm of the two in perpetual competition with one another is wholly alien to many who fully embrace both faith and empiricism.

"For many people however, accepting, applying, and/or producing scientific knowledge and being religiously observant are no more in conflict than would be, for any of us, both playing the violin and practicing law," she writes.

Don't be fooled by the book's relative brevity at 149 pages. While short in length, it is long on argument, making the book hardly a "recreational" read. However, for those wishing to go into the trenches and witness the warfare that takes place in the academic study of religion, the book is a good place to start.