Is Science Really an Implicit Religion?

Abstract

Our modern Western (that is, European/Anglo-American) civilization has come to be what it is, a religious and, scientific structure, both at once. It cannot be denied that it is both a religious and a scientific culture, but neither can it be denied that there has existed a constant tension between its scientific and religious communities at least since the emergence of modern Western science at the close of the Middle Ages. Indeed so often has that tension deteriorated into outright hostility that it is not at all inappropriate to describe the relationship between them in warfare imagery.² And that has made us rather uneasy, for we suspect that the conflict between the two communities is indicative of a more profound and significant con-flict of concepts and ideas — indicative of the fact that science and religion provide not just different sets of concepts for coming to terms with the world but rather mutually exclusive conceptual structures or frameworks for doing so. Thus, even though there can be no doubt that a modus vivendi between the two communities and, in a sense, between the two sets of concepts, was achieved and gave birth to our simultaneously scientific and religious civilization, there is no longer the confidence that once existed in its validity. The perpetual conflict between the two has come to constitute a kind of prima facie case against it. And there is some apprehension — given that in our society we tend to think more like scientists and less like the religious devotees of bygone days — that religion will somehow succumb to science; that our culture will‘degenerate’into a purely scientific culture. We are loath to give up the benefits that either the one or the other of the structures of thought has conferred upon us — religion having provided us with meaning (meaningfulness) and science with knowledge (power) — although even putting the issue that way may be to draw the distinction too precisely between the two for us to feel comfortable with it. And so we seem to be committed to finding some new interpretation of science, or religion, or both, so as to entail their compatibility and complementarity, both substantively and methodologically. Anything less would force us to acknowledge a fundamental contradiction at the core of our cultural inheritance and existence.