Abstract
Many in modern Western culture believe that science and religion are pitted against one another, at an impasse due to mutually exclusive and divergent worldviews. This assumption is based upon a problematic epistemological dichotomy in which scientific knowledge is considered concrete and certain, whereas religious knowledge is regarded as existential and experiential. Yet, such a division misrepresents both the nature of science and religion. By highlighting the mediated nature of human understanding, Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy envisages science and religion as approaches to knowledge with potentially compatible epistemological commitments. For Ricoeur, knowledge of the world is always mediated by signs and symbols; these semiotic constructs, such as language and paradigm, enable communication. Indeed, both science and religion use these tools to investigate truth and to transmit knowledge. For this reason, Ricoeur’s epistemological assertions may indicate effective methods for teaching about science and religion. Because teaching methodology ought to arise from understanding of the subject matter itself, viewing science and religion through the lens of Ricoeur’s philosophy suggests the use of particular pedagogical methods, such as visual models, narrative, and other figural means of communication, to explain scientific concepts, religious concepts, and the interaction between these disciplines. This method of teaching, far from detracting from scientific and theological enquiry, in fact mirrors the ways in which humans learn and communicate about the world they inhabit. It is also indicative of means of learning already employed by children and young adults, thereby drawing upon strengths implicit in learners.
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Notes
- 1.
Ian Barbour suggests that some of this conflict is brought about due to a failure ‘to distinguish between scientific and philosophical questions…These are alternative belief systems, each claiming to encompass all reality’ (1997, p. 81). Emphasis in quotations here and throughout is original unless otherwise noted.
- 2.
My use of the term ‘science’ refers to the general contours of the discipline as understood in everyday parlance. In reality, the field to which it refers is widely diverse with varying epistemologies and methodologies. In this instance, it is expedient to refer to science as it is understood by the average student in Western culture.
- 3.
For proponents of the conflict thesis, Barbour proposes that ‘[a]s a rough approximation, we may say that religion asks why and science asks how’ (1997, p. 82). He notes that this distinction requires clarification, yet his assessment remains broadly within a modernist framework.
- 4.
Significantly, Barbour’s model makes use of typology, a way of grouping ideas based on conceptual models and hermeneutic reasoning. As will become clear, this type of reasoning is founded upon semiotic structures of communication.
- 5.
- 6.
Barbour defines a model thusly: ‘Broadly speaking, a model is a symbolic representation of selected aspects of the behaviour of a complex system for particular purposes. It is an imaginative tool for ordering experience, rather than a description of the world’ (1974, p. 6).
- 7.
Substantial differences exist between ways of knowing in these disciplines, but rather than rehearsing the well-trodden ground of dissimilarity, I will here focus on similarities in their epistemologies that enable beneficial cross-disciplinary dialogue. These are significant considerations to which we will later return.
- 8.
Barbour suggests that a paradigm is ‘a tradition transmitted through historical exemplars’ (1974, p. 9).
- 9.
Further, Harrison proposes that this is a product of ‘the distorting projection of our present conceptual maps back onto the intellectual territories of the past’ (2015, p. 4).
- 10.
Harrison suggests that it is the conceptual and linguistic misapplication of these terms that has precipitated confusion (2015, pp. 183–185).
- 11.
To be clear, we must note with Janet Soskice that ‘[m]etaphor is by definition a figure of speech’ (1985, p. 16). Its basis in language, however, does not preclude extension of such reasoning into the ‘world’ of the individual, as Paul Ricoeur (1973) argues. Here, perhaps, we diverge from Soskice’s view.
- 12.
Cf. (Harrison 2015, p. 177). This is predominantly a modern viewpoint that hides the moral import understood by many premodern thinkers to be inherent in the subject matter that has come to be termed ‘science’ and ‘religion’. The moral framework that underlies both scientific and religious enquiry, Harrison argues, is the true source of the supposed conflict at hand (2015, pp. 178, 197).
- 13.
No unique epistemology is inherent to either science or religion; however, as Harrison aptly displays, each discipline has come to be associated with specific ways of knowing.
- 14.
- 15.
Certainly, this also could be seen as a claim to a different sort of ideological metanarrative. For Ricoeur, a paradigmatic ideology is inescapable, but the mediated nature of knowledge does not mean that truth is inaccessible. Ricoeur maintained that the mediation of language in knowledge does not devolve into utter subjectivity (1973, p. 108). In fact, the tension between the truth described by a metaphor and the referent of the metaphor is emblematic of the dialectic nature of human existence more generally (Ricoeur 1978, p. 247).
- 16.
- 17.
Cf. (Ricoeur 1973).
- 18.
Soskice (1985, p. 137) as well as Barbour are proponents of critical realism, which Barbour suggests ‘avoids naive realism, on the one hand, and instrumentalism, which abandons all concern for truth, on the other’ (1974, p. 11). Cf. (Barbour 1997, p. 89). Care must be taken to preserve the ontology of the relationship between the metaphor and its referent, however. The reality of this relationship is significant for the compatibility of scientific and religious knowledge and is foundational for many within both scientific and religious communities. See (Ricoeur 1984, p. xii).
- 19.
- 20.
Cf. (Soskice 1985, p. 66).
- 21.
Ricoeur proposes that ‘all objectifying knowledge…is preceded by a relation of belonging upon which we can never entirely reflect. Before any critical distance, we belong to a history, to a class, to a nation, to a culture, to one or several traditions. In accepting this belonging that precedes and supports us, we accept the very first role of ideology…the mediating function of the image’ (1991b, p. 267).
- 22.
Alister McGrath suggests that secularity is itself a mediated, narrated interpretation of reality (2002, p. 107). In this understanding, the natural sciences are a tradition wherein scientific methodology, community and even output is influenced by social forces (2002, p. 114). Hence, McGrath argues that ‘[a]llegedly neutral, transcendent or “objective” disciplines—such as the social sciences—are in reality no more than narrated interpretations of reality which possess no privileged status permitting them to judge or police others’ (2002, pp. 118–119). Thomas Nagel (2012) further compellingly argues that a natural materialist position is not fully explanatory of human experience.
- 23.
Even within the sciences, an opposition between explanation (physical science) and interpretation (social science) could be understood to exist. Ricoeur does not maintain this distinction and, in fact, sees his work as mediating between the two (Ricoeur 1981a, p. 36).
- 24.
For Ricoeur, the relationship between metaphor and discourse is founded upon the polysemic nature of language in which words derive meaning contextually. Thus, just as the meaning of a word is determined through its context, so too the metaphor derives its meaning as a part of the discourse between symbol, referent and context (Ricoeur 1981b, p. 169).
- 25.
- 26.
Ricoeur suggests that the hermeneutical circle ‘entails a sharp opposition to the sort of objectivity and non-implication which is supposed to characterise the scientific explanation of things’ (1981b, p. 165).
- 27.
For example, Black (1962).
- 28.
For example, Hesse (1966).
- 29.
See Kuhn (1962).
- 30.
Citing (Ricoeur 1982, p. 16).
- 31.
McGrath, too, emphasises the importance of metaphorical conceptualisation in both science and religion (1998, pp. 165–206).
- 32.
In Ricoeur’s thought, the mediation of human knowledge introduces both distortion and possibility. Some potential distortions will be considered shortly.
- 33.
I will not here be able to address specific teaching strategies for the use of metaphor and analogy; I only highlight some beneficial aspects of this type of teaching and their philosophical underpinnings.
- 34.
Significantly, Duit cites Kuhn’s understanding of scientific paradigms as the theoretical basis for the construction of new schemata in learning.
- 35.
Cf. (Ricoeur 1981b, p. 167).
- 36.
See also Midgley et al. (2013).
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White, N.H. (2019). The Mediated Nature of Knowledge: Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy as a Means of Teaching Students About Science and Religion. In: Billingsley, B., Chappell, K., Reiss, M.J. (eds) Science and Religion in Education. Contemporary Trends and Issues in Science Education, vol 48. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17234-3_6
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