RETHINKING RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE IN THE AGE OF SCIENCE
Keywords:
Science, ReligionAbstract
Relation of science and religion has been at the centre of many discourses in the past as well as in the recent times. Some of these were meant to refute religious claims in the light of scientific truths about the world, while others took the pain of explaining the essential compatibility between the two. The former subjects religion to the scrutiny of science while the latter reads science in religion or religion in science.1 Both these attempts are ill-conceived as they conflate the logic of one with the other. Ian G. Barbour, who has pioneered the philosophical debate between science and religion, provides four typologies to relate the two domains of science and religion, namely, conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration.2 Nevertheless, his position is one that treats the two as distinct disciplines and yet sharing a common ground rather than two separate and conflicting discourses. In what follows, we attempt to understand the nature of the interaction of these two, science and religion, from a phenomenological perspective. In order to do that, we have to look into the ‘life-world’ (Lebenswelt) that engenders science and houses religious experiences.
References
Ian G. Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion, New York: Harper and Row,
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Aron Gurwitsch, “Galilean Physics in the Light of Husserl’s Phenomenology” in Phenomenology and Sociology: Selected Readings, ed. Thomas Luckmann, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978, 72.
Ray Spangenburg and Diane K. Moser, The History of Science: From the Ancient Greeks to the Scientific Revolution, Hyderabad: Universities Press, 1999, 68-75. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953.
Koshy Tharakan, “Science amidst Religion: The Politics of Knowledge,” Current Science 94, 6 (March 2008), 714.
W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” in Classics of Analytic Philosophy, ed. Robert R. Ammerman, Bombay/New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Co., 1965, 196-213.
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