Intermediatism and the Study of Religion (original) (raw)
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The Truth of Religion: Toward New Dynamics in the Scientific Study of Religion
BRILL eBooks, 2023
This chapter offers a new scientific engagement with the idea of religious truth, suggesting that it is the prerogative of the scholar of religion to take emic ideas seriously and to be open to the possibility that religions access a true level of reality. So long as we deny any truth to religion, we are not scientific and only confirm our own assumptions. The approach suggested here emerges from ideas regarding the social construction of reality: the socially constructed world is cultivated over centuries and reflects the main reality human beings live in. Religious practitioners learn how to navigate this realm, in waking consciousness, in dreams and in altered states. Scholars of religion should be careful before accepting a materialistic understanding of consciousness.
The Intersubjective Worlds of Science and Religion
Science
In this paper I shall present a radical alternative to metaphysical realism, a view that underlies most literature on science and religion, and yet may also set science and religion in fundamental opposition to each other. Those who advocate metaphysical realism maintain that (1) the real world consists of mind-independent objects, (2) there is exactly one true and complete description of the way the world is, and (3) truth involves some sort of correspondence between an independently existent world and our descriptions of it. 1 Various sorts of cultural relativism and constructivism have been advocated as alternatives to metaphysical realism, but while they have proven appealing to many philosophers, they are generally found to be inadequate by practicing scientists and theologians alike. 2 In this paper, I propose a third alternative that emphasizes the intersubjective nature of both scientific and religious truth-claims, one which rejects the leap of faith required for metaphysical realism and equally shuns the nihilism that is implicit in so many versions of relativism. The central theme of this intersubjective view is that science and religion express truths arrayed along a spectrum of "invariance" among diverse cognitive frameworks. All truth-claims are embedded in experience, and their validity is put to the test within the "lived world" of human experience. They are neither confirmed nor refuted in relation to some hypothetical "real, objective world" that exists independently of experience.
Review of Peter Harrison (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion (CUP, 2010)
Review of Peter Harrison's excellent volume that not only introduces and makes important contributions to a series of key issues within science and religion but also serves to stimulate further reflection on the complex ways in which the relations between science and religion have and ought to be characterised. Both are clearly urgent, with the latter of particular relevance in an intellectual landscape that is still largely dominated by either/or narratives of militantly atheistic scientists locked in a perpetual battle with gleefully anti-scientific religious believers. Time and time again Harrison’s contributors reject such antagonistic ‘conflict’ models of either science or religion, along with the related ‘independence’ model that affirms that science and religion should never be brought into conjunction with one another, but rather stand apart in sealed-off isolation one from the other (a position most commonly associated with the palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s notion of ‘non-overlapping magisteria’). Both models, conflict and independence, are critiqued as over-simplifying the rich patterns of relations between science and religion – historically and philosophically, as well as scientifically and religiously – and, crucially, as avoiding the really interesting questions raised by the unavoidable, and one should say generally unlamentable, conjunction of science and religion in contemporary intellectual life. Few would dispute the centrality of science, and the natural sciences in particular, to our intellectual landscape and to our lives more widely; notwithstanding some of the wilder claims of postmodern philosophy, ours truly is an “Age of Science.” And yet (in a theme explored by John Hedley Brooke in his chapter ‘Science and Secularization’), it is equally apparent that religion has not gone away: our Age of Science has turned out to be very different from the ‘secular millennium,’ such as that predicted by the anthropologist of religion Anthony Wallace when he wrote in 1966 that “belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as a result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge” (cited by Brooke, 106). For better or for worse, it is – and as the essays with an historical focus emphasise – always was “science and religion”, and this collection serves as an outstanding companion to the rich variety of ways in which this conjunctive relation can and has been negotiated.
Despite various criticisms and alternative proposals, Barbour's fourfold taxonomy has continued to serve as an intuitive introduction to Science-Religion relations. I offer a new fourfold taxonomy-called the Four 'C's Taxonomy: Conflict, Compartmentalization, Conversation, and Convergence-which improves upon the pedagogical advantages of Barbour's taxonomy, and which avoids the weaknesses of alternative taxonomies. In addition, the new taxonomy addresses the objections against Barbour's taxonomy by distinguishing different aspects of science and religion as the relata, by clarifying the relations as perceived/expressed relations, and by demonstrating their relevance for the explanation of history and of other cultures.
2. No Room for God? History, Science, Metaphysics, and the Study of Religion
History and Theory, 2008
Despite widespread beliefs to the contrary within the secular intellectual culture of the modern academy, scientific findings are not necessarily incompatible with religious truth claims. the latter include claims about the reality of God as understood in traditional christianity and the possibility of divinely worked miracles. Intellectual history, philosophy, and science's own self-understanding undermine the claim that science entails or need even tend toward atheism. By definition a radically transcendent creator-God is inaccessible to empirical investigation. Denials of the possibility or actual occurrence of miracles depend not on science itself, but on naturalist assumptions that derive originally from a univocal metaphysics with its historical roots in medieval nominalism, which in turn have deeply influenced philosophy and science since the seventeenth century. the metaphysical postulate of naturalism and its correlative empiricist epistemology constitute methodological self-limitations of science-only an unjustified move from postulate to assertion permits ideological scientism and atheism. It is entirely possible that religious claims consistent with the empirical findings of the natural and social sciences might be true. therefore historians of religion not only need not assume that atheism is true in their research, but they should not do so if they want to understand religious people on their own terms rather than to impose on them an undemonstrated and indemonstrable ideology. exhortations to critical thinking apply not only to religious views, but also to uncritically examined secular ideas and assumptions, however widespread or institutionally embedded.
All Work and No Play: Chaos, Incongruity and Differance in The Study of Religion
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2009
The last two decades have been fascinating and productive ones for theorists of religion. Recent work has offered a remarkably wide range of theoretical perspectives and possibilities that enrich our field even as they plunge us into vigorous theoretical debates. Amidst this contest-even confusion-some basic principles for guiding future work seem to be asserting themselves. Many think that, after a century of confusion and intermingling between theology and the study of religion, scholars of religion are finally in a position to establish the study of religion on properly academic, theoretical foundations. In this story Eliade's antireductionist discourse of the "sacred" becomes the epitome and, it is hoped, the last gasp of religious studies as a quasi-theological discourse. Yet despite their efforts to guide the study of religion away from Eliade, many remain Eliadan insofar as they accept Eliade's "locative" approach to religion. Yet is it really "theology" that is currently limiting the way we "imagine religion," or might it be instead the refusal to think beyond religion's locative function-a refusal very closely linked to the desire for academic respectability in a historicist age? Mark C. Taylor's After God provocatively disturbs the idea that religion is primarily locative and, in doing so, also disturbs the boundaries between the theological and the theoretical, religion and the study of religion. I consider the significance of this virtual map of religion, by reading After