Holism is any attitude toward explanation that places emphasis on the importance of a whole system as against that of its individual parts. Holism is thus an epistemological term, reflecting a particular approach to explanation. The term was first used in English by South African statesman and author Jan Christiaan Smuts in 1926. Its roots within Western philosophy, however, go back to the German thinker George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), with his insistence that "the truth is the whole."

The concept of holism is important to three areas of the science-religion debate: (1) in the philosophy of science, where it is in particular tension with falsificationism; (2) in considerations of causation, including divine action, where holism is in tension with reductionism; and (3) in ecological thinking, where it is in tension with dualism and anthropocentrism.

Holism in the philosophy of science rests on an insight...