Page:Religion and Science from a Postsecular Perspective.pdf/4

Religion and Science from a Postsecular Perspective outcome. This kind of seriousness belies the relegation of both to mere discourses in a culture that does the same with religion and sports, for example, or market forces and religious institutions. Because religion and science claim to possess the ability to understand reality (either in toto or in part), the gravity that attends their interaction should not surprise us. It is for this reason that we find it critical to engage “religion” and “science” as broadtermed discourses at the level of culture even though we admit that there is nothing essentialist about our approach, nor do we endorse a particular view of these discourses over others. Religion and science will stay at the discursive level for us throughout this paper. Hence we concern ourselves with the meaning that each discourse generates and holds for its advocates when they are put into a relationship – a meaning that more often than not attempts to include the “Real” or provide an “Order” to the universe we inhabit.

For purposes of this paper, we define religion in broad terms as a set of beliefs and practices oriented towards a transcendence that guides a way of life and structures a worldview. More specifically, we refer primarily to a monotheistic-religious worldview that still pervades the West, as the lion’s share of work done on the relationship between religion and science has assumed a single divine creator. This choice is, of course, somewhat superficial and arbitrary but instrumental for our purposes. Similarly, we define science in the broadest terms as a set of ideas and theories whose legitimation depends on agreed-upon methods of inquiry, empirical testing, and problem solving that similarly structure a singular worldview. We are concerned with the discourse of science as it relates to the discourse of religion. Therefore, less important is the legitimacy of the findings of scientists over the centuries than the capacity of science to continue to approximate and order nature.

Specifically, we begin by examining and disposing of the view that religion and science have nothing to do with each other (understood in terms of separate silos or as the separation view). We next examine variants of the interaction view, from competition to complementarity to foundation, that describe the different practices of this relationship. We end by arguing how postsecular thinking does not seek to eliminate views that may betray secularism or even modernism because it can critically apprise them without needing to replace them. As such, the postsecular turn may not change the discursive animosity or pettiness displayed at times in contemporary culture, yet it may provide a more useful way with which to highlight the respective strengths both religious and scientific discourses bring to a culture thirsty for an ordered universe without having to necessarily favor one over the other.

The Untenable Separation View

A separation account of the relation between religion and science views both as distinct and possessing equally legitimate methods of inquiry into understanding nature and humanity. Traced back to Francis Bacon’s original articulation of the scientific method and later rooted in modern views of knowledge based on reason, science employs an empirical method in its investigation of the natural world. Whether studying celestial bodies, atoms, heart function, breast cancer, or the environment, science offers the means of understanding physical reality, descriptions, and explanations of it that are open to confirmation (in the tradition of induction) or falsification (Popper). If descriptions and explanations are accepted Journal of Religion & Society