Nature of Religion & Dialogue Between Science and Religion
Dennett, Daniel C.. Breaking the
Spells: Religion as a Natural phenomenon. New York: Penguin Books. 2006.
Barbour, Ian. Religion and Science; Historical And Contemporary Issues.
Cambridge: HarperCollins, 2007.
McGrath, Alister. Science and
Religion; An introduction. Oxford: Blackwell publishing, 2010.
Religion
is a way of life for its members. Every religious community has its distinctive
forms of individual experience, communal ritual, and ethical concerns. Above
all, religion aims at the transformation of personal life, particularly by
liberation from self-centeredness through a commitment to a more inclusive center
of devotion.
Dennett
define religion as ‘social systems whose
participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to
be sought’.
Dialogue between Science and Religion
Religion and science are two of the most powerful cultural and
intellectual forces in today’s world. Science now seems to be opening up
religious questions, rather than closing them down, or declaring them to be
meaningless. It is increasingly being recognized that natural science can
“throw up questions that point beyond itself and transcend its power to answer”
(Polkhinghorne). The dialogue between science and religion sets out to ask
whether, in what ways, and to what extents, these two conversation partners
might learn from each other. Given the cultural importance of both science and
religion, the exploration of how they relate to each other has the potential
for both conflict and enrichment.
Three
reasons are often given for this judgment.
(i) Neither science nor religion can claim to
give a total account of reality.
Science and religion are perhaps better thought of as operating at
different levels, often reflecting on similar questions, yet answering them in
different ways. The science and religion dialogue allows us to appreciate the
distinct identities, strengths, and limits of each conversation partner. It
also offers us a deeper understanding of things than either religion or science
could offer unaided.
(ii) Both science and religion are concerned about
making sense of things.
Perhaps most importantly, science tends to ask “how” questions,
where religion asks “why.” Science seeks to clarify mechanisms; religions offer meaning. These approaches do not need to be seen as being in competition, or as
being mutually incompatible. They operate at different levels.
(iii) In recent years there
has been a significant increase in awareness within the scientific community of
the broader issues raised by its research, and limits placed upon that
community’s ability to answer them.
Historical
Survey of Science and Religion Dialogue
Science
as a discipline of learning came to us in the middle sixteenth century with
the works of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and of course with Newton. The new
development is known as ‘modern Science’ which bring the scientific revolution. The
word ‘science’ was used only since the eighteenth century when it replaced the
term ‘natural philosophy’. Till the middle of the sixteenth century, there is no
antagonism, perhaps, the conflict between science and religion because of no
proper distinction between science, philosophy, and religion during that time.
In fact, during those times, the Scientist were philosophers, theologians, and
clergy by themselves. Till the sixteenth century, in the Western world science
was under the control of the Church. The Church dictated what to write, read
and believe and under such conditions, there could be no viable conflict between
science and religion.
With
the publication of Copernicus’s ‘De Revolutionibus’ in 1543 the
atmosphere set to turn in a new direction. With Copernicus, our Universe was
inverted, the earth no longer at the center. With Newton, the living universe
became an unthinking machine whose fully predictable, deterministic, clock-work
regularity seemed to leave no room for us to act, let alone for God. The ‘age
of reason' replaced the authority of revelation and the Church as a surer guide to
knowledge and behavior. By the nineteenth century, the age of the earth had been multiplied from mere thousands of years to millions of years.
The intricacies
of organic life, which had once seemed the product of a loving God, were being
explained the opposite by Darwin as the product of natural selection and by
‘blind chance’. The real conflict between Religion and Science begun
indisputably.
Relativity
Theory, Quantum Mechanics, big Bang Cosmology, Chaos and Complexity, Human
Genetic Engineering, etc are challenging even tearing down, the rigid and
simplistic. The discoveries of Einstein, Heisenberg, Hubble, Hawkings, etc
point towards a nature more open, subtle, numinous, interconnected than we have
known for centuries. In and through the work of philosophers of science, such
as, Popper, Kuhn, Polanyi, Holton, Fearabend, Lakatos, etc we came to know that
scientific knowledge, scientific theories, and discoveries are subject to their
socio-cultural and religious context.
These
scientist-philosophers help us to witness the fading out of the negative the distinction between science and religion- that science is objective, universal,
rational, and based on solid observation evidence whereas religion is
subjective, parochial, emotional, and based on faith. This new discovery opens
wide a door for science and religion dialogue.
Please
read ‘How to relate Science and Religion: Ian Barbour
four Models, Ted Peter, Michael Stenmark’.
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