Abstract
Like all other organisms, human beings need to orient themselves in life. Yet we are special in having a consciousness open not only to our local environment but to the world. And even if a complete scientific account of reality would be possible, it would still leave out its meaning as appreciated by human beings having to live their lives. Hence the ubiquity of worldviews and religions, which strive after articulating this meaning and thus providing orientation. The special features of human languages are crucial for this process.
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- 1.
Mostly, I will focus on the natural sciences, since they are the key players in technology-driven social transformation and crucial for the emergence of naturalistic worldviews. The humanities, however, will also be considered in their important role, when the relations between the varieties of human experience and scientific inquiries are treated (Chap. 2).
- 2.
A neutral term for subsuming both religions and comprehensive, nonreligious worldviews under a single concept just doesn’t exist. And if it would, many Christian theologians, for example, would strongly object against subsuming the Christian faith under any neutral classificatory term (most prominently among them Karl Barth). In lack of a better alternative, I have decided to leave the matter unsettled and mostly to operate with the somewhat clumsy and vague phrase “religions and worldviews,” thereby indicating any comprehensive human attempt to relate to it all in a manner comprising practical and cognitive orientation together with emotional appraisal.
- 3.
In Chap. 2 it will become clear that this is an oversimplification: instead of talking about a single scientific picture, we should rather expect an irreducible multitude of “pictures,” some of them strongly, but others only loosely related to other pictures. Without metaphors: the scientific project is made up out of many different sciences irreducible to one basic and unifying science.
- 4.
Originally made popular by the philosopher Karl Jaspers in his 1948 book “Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte,” the concept of an “Axial Age” is nowadays discussed extensively in historical scholarship and the social sciences. The basic idea is that during an especially important period of history, roughly between 800 and 300 BC, decisive social, moral, scientific, and religious breakthroughs occurred at different places and partly independent from each other. In China, India, Persia, Greece, and ancient Israel, so the theory maintains, reflective modes of thought (second-order thinking) were developed, and the ideas of the good and the divine were conceived of as transcending the actual and factual reality.
As might have been expected, the idea of an “Axial Age” is hotly contested. Some objections aim at the time frame, others at the exclusion of, for example, African traditions, still others at the very concepts of transcendence and/or second-order thinking. The Axial-Age discourse has profited greatly from these doubts and proven to be indispensable for dealing with large-scale questions about world religions and comprehensive worldviews. Used with the necessary caution, the respective concepts are crucial for understanding the historical pathways on which reflective attitudes and visions of life and cosmos emerged out of narrower life-forms entirely bound up with local demands.
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- 6.
Notwithstanding that, the question immediately suggests itself: Is the intention to live life without principles not itself a principled intention?
- 7.
These reflections leave the idea of objectivity entirely intact. Irreducibly plural perspectives (a) can often still be related to one and the same, objective state of affairs (think about a car crash and the different perspectives on it the perpetrator, the victim, or the bystanders will take up), are (b) constrained by objective facts (no perspective can turn a car crash into a, say, scene of relaxed small talk) and, most importantly, (c) are generally nothing else but the manner in which reality reveals itself to organic beings. As G.H. Meads says, paraphrasing Whitehead: “[…] so far as nature is patient of an organism, it is stratified into perspectives […]” (Mead 1932, 163).
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- 9.
Chapter 7 will come back to the question of fundamentalism in more detail.
- 10.
The New York Times Bestseller The Gene. An Intimate History (Mukherjee 2016) offers an excellent example. It convincingly intermingles third-personal knowledge about genetics with two narrative strands, the first taken from the author’s personal family history, and the other from the research history of genetics in its cultural embeddedness. With explicit worldview implications, Richard Dawkins’ books often also use combinations of storytelling and scientific explanations in order to convey what Dawkins takes to be the worldview message.
- 11.
See Hans-Julius Schneider (DZPhil 2014, 62[2]: 333–338) for a poignant criticism of reductive approaches to religion, in which the semantics of religious language is assimilated to epistemic truth-claims about the causal properties of supernatural agents (spooks) and events.
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Jung, M. (2019). Introduction: Orientation as a Life-Function. In: Science, Humanism, and Religion. Studies in Humanism and Atheism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21492-0_1
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