Rethinking the relation between science and religion: Some epistemological and political implications

Abstract

In contemporary western societies we have become used to thinking of the relation between “science” and “religion” (or between “faith” and “reason”) in disjunctive terms, assuming a necessary opposition and/or the overcoming of one of them by the other (science as an understanding of the world necessarily opposed to religious beliefs and practices, one which tends historically to overcome the latter in the progress of civilization). An example of this pervasive assumption is the widespread narrative that frequently appears in elementary and secondary school history programs regarding the Church’s persecution of Galileo and his final condemnation for heresy due to his pioneering scientific discoveries. Another perspective that was influential in forming this same pervasive assumption was the clear-cut Kantian separation between a theoretical use of reason —capable of yielding an objective, necessary and universal scientific knowledge of empirical phenomena expressed in the laws discovered by science, as distinct from the practical use of reason to guide us in how to live, beyond the limits of all positive knowledge of the world. This same conception was formulated later in the distinction drawn by Weber between the “facts” that social sciences are called on to describe objectively and the “value judgments” relegated to the subjective spheres of morality and religion. Without attempting to identify the precise historical origins of this widespread interpretation of a necessary opposition between science and religion, how would you, in your work as a historian of science / as a theologian, submit it to a critical assessment and, hence, argue in favor of reconsidering this dominant conception of the relation between science and religion as an unbridgeable dichotomy?