Page:Religion and Science from a Postsecular Perspective.pdf/11

Religion and Science from a Postsecular Perspective functionality, their colleagues, the reliability of their hypotheses, and the overall ethos of the scientific enterprise (Merton). Faith may mean something different here than it does in religion, but the very notion and its function in both indicates certain parallels and even a similarity between usages.

Likewise, the suggestion that religious doctrine is devoid of any reason is spurious and false, as reasoning is the basic method deployed by theologians and religious scholars with rigor and commitment to logic no less than by scientists. Facts are disputed and examined in both discourses and render both, however differently, partially factual and partially speculative. Scientific hypotheses are offered routinely before any empirical basis for them has been established just as scientific facts and the logic that arrived at them are needed by theologians as boundaries beyond which belief may be justified. Any and all conceptual terms used in one discourse can be easily found in the other, regardless of variation in meaning and application. That concepts typically thought of as existing only in one domain can be appropriated in another domain is not simply a linguistic move: the interpenetration of these concepts between religion and science gestures towards epistemological relationship between the two as well.

For instance, when Albert Einstein is quoted as saying “God does not play dice with the universe,” there is no suggestion that he is speaking religiously or that he no longer speaks as a scientist. Nor is there a suggestion that the allusion to God is accidental, out of character, or improper, against one who may say either you are a scientist or a religionist, but you cannot be both! Instead, this is an example of the linguistic and epistemological fluidity that informs both discourses and the ease with which one uses terms and ideas from the other. Thomas Henry Huxley who already in 1893 was reconsidering the implications of Darwin’s evolution theory argued that if science were to rest metaphysically on a view of temporary and unorganized materiality of humans and the universe, it would not look like what we currently observe. In other words, the very impetus of the scientific enterprise rests on a metaphysical view of an ordered universe, a universe whose divine design allows for humans to study it and even improve on it (Fuller: 23). A more recent example of such usage is found in describing or labeling the Higgs Boson particle found in 2013 as “The God Particle.” Scratching the linguistic surface one learns that in the case of science, the debate is over a deterministic versus a random interpretation of the movements of subatomic particles or celestial bodies, to put it simply. If all phenomena are at a very basic level deterministic in the sense that every effect must have a cause (even if many), it makes sense to search for natural laws that described subatomic and astronomical behavior.

The non-hierarchical plurality that postsecularism pushes is no mere “anything goes” (Feyerabend) in a relativist sense (without rational criteria for choice) or in a pragmatic sense (choices are made ad hoc in terms of what works best now). Instead, this approach is informed by cultural practices that are rhetorical and applied as well as contextualized within particular frameworks within which one can easily make a logical choice between contesting ideas and views. For example, if all medical interventions are proven futile, prayer and hope might elevate a patient’s spirit and induce an improvement in the immune system that may lead to partial or full recovery. Likewise, many religious claims about sacred texts can be scientifically tested (dating scrolls, finding linguistic markers to attribute authorship) rather Journal of Religion & Society