In-between Science and Religion

Abstract

Stripped of its seventeenth and eighteenth century Deistic, if not theistic, sensibility, science entered the twentieth century as agnostic and indifferent, if not outrightly antagonistic, toward religion. Religion was often viewed as the enemy of modern science; and its theology was presumed to be intellectually vacuous. “Real science” was clearly understood to be objective, empirical and rational. It bore no relationship to theology, none of any cognitive import — except perhaps to eliminate theology as contributing toward any understanding of the cosmos. This view of the relationship between science and religion was further reinforced by logical empiricism. In the latter’s view science aimed to establish empirically testable, generalized explanations of observable but problematic phenomena. Such phenomena might be freely falling bodies or the deviation of a planet from the expected path of its usual orbit. As the phrase “logical empiricism” suggests, in its view the objectivity of science rested with an evidential base of empirical facts, facts which were independent of any hypothesized theory under question and available to all through sense observation. And the rationality of science was ascribed to the logical testability of its explanatory hypotheses.