We live in a world permeated with science1 and technology. Compared to, say, the Middle Ages, almost everything surrounding us, as well as the shape of our life from the cradle to the grave, is made possible in the first place by the use of science. If we were to imaginatively strip our world of science-driven products, we would find ourselves quite literally standing naked. But can we live scientific lives? No. We cannot, and we will never be able to. Scientists are no exception here. Living is not a scientific enterprise but a matter of embodied experience and action: its character is visceral and sensory-motor, as well as cognitive. Life exhibits a constant, interested involvement with what is vital for us in our surroundings. We always feel and strive, we try to make sense of our world, to find meaning and value, to cope with hardship and evil, and finally with death. In marked contrast to this engaged everyday attitude, science, as far-reaching and ever-growing its influence is, presupposes a primarily cognitive relationship to the world. Having stripped the life-process, by the use of the very methodology which enables and secures scientific progress, of the emotional and volitional components which indicate first-personal involvement, it still remains crucial in our search for meaning (how things factually are, and what they mean for life is obviously closely related) but is, as a matter of principle, unable to provide it.
In ordinary experience, we always encounter the situations we live through as meaningful, which in its most basic form means: as related to our weal and woe. But we also experience them as parts of a greater whole: our life in general in its relation to the world in general. This is where religions and comprehensive worldviews enter.2 They offer a feeling of belonging (albeit often at the expense of excluding others), a sense of purpose, a global orientation of the will, ethical advice and collective rites that embody meaning in a way theories will never do. All these aspects are primarily incorporated not in the form of (theoretical) knowledge; rather they describe a certain knowing-how, a practical competence of living oneâs own life in relation to âthe whole.â The obvious downside: many of them are at odds with well-established findings of science and unable to tolerate other religions, two shortcomings that often appear as two sides of one coin: rejecting evolutionary theory, for example, and rejecting alternative beliefs go together quite well.
Phrases like âthe worldview of Humanismâ or the âscientific picture of realityâ are quite common and, in a way, indispensable. We should, however, always be aware that we are dealing with convenient and established metaphors here, metaphors that are taken up and used in this book, too. But strictly speaking, the world, as that within which we live and are a part of, cannot be âseenâ or âviewed,â and science offers no picture at all. This is true on several levels: rather banal is the fact that vision is not our only sense, and metaphors based on it exclude the other senses and also the conceptual components of understanding. More important is an epistemological reason: the parts belonging to a whole can never achieve a comprehensive picture of it, since this picture would necessarily have to leave out the very parts for which the picture is given. Pictures cannot contain their spectatorsâor if they did, one would need another spectator, and then another, and so on ad infinitum. Finally, the picture-metaphor insinuates that âthe worldâ can be given to us at once, in a totalized vision. It is true that comprehensive worldviews aspire to some grasp of âit all,â but, at least, in their reflective versions they know that they can never treat their respective ideas as expressions of knowledge about some object of which true pictures can exist. Thus, we have more than enough reason to use the visual metaphors of âviewâ and âpictureâ with care.
But what, in contrast to religions and comprehensive worldviews, is the stance of science? There, we strive for anâcaution: metaphorâobjective picture of the world,3 a description and explanation of phenomena based on causal relations, which are essentially independent from human interests. Obviously, scientists are vitally interested in the inquiries they pursue, and in so doing, they are engaged in what Michael Polanyi calls âpersonal knowledgeâ (Polanyi 1958/2004). But the personal knowledge relevant in science does not pertain to any personal quest for meaning; it rather embodies the skills of the scientific community committed to standards of objectivity. Objectivity, to be sure, is nothing objective (nothing we can simply read off from nature), but a cultural concept with a long history (cf. Daston/Galiston 2007), and thus a contingent product of human cognitive activities. Nevertheless, the concept has played (and continues to play) a crucial role in the emergence of scientific attitudes; attitudes in which we focus on those aspects of reality which are detachable from the personally interested, meaning-seeking stance of ordinary experience. For the longest part of human history, this engaged first-person standpoint (that of the group as well as of the individual) prevailed and dominated cognition, but with the emergence of reflective attitudes in what some theorists and historians call the âAxial Ageâ (cf. Joas/Bellah 2012),4 and even more so with the takeoff of modern science, everything changed. The detached stance of objective inquiry became a reality, which, for the first time in human history, enabled causally efficient intervention into the course of things and threatened the millennia-old concepts of creation and of the human place in the order of being. Evolutionary theory for example, as is easy to see, was oftenâalbeit not alwaysâperceived as having an especially pernicious influence on traditional values and beliefs.
Science and Religion: Changing the Perspective
In our contemporary world, many competing views about the nature of the relation between science and religion are held and fiercely defended: some, most prominently Steven Jay Gould, hold that science and religion belong to ânon-overlapping magisteriaâ (Gould 2003); others, like Richard Dawkins (2006), contend that science has once and for all done away with religions, while the fundamentalists of all religions are claiming that science has to be subordinated to the revealed truth of religion. And these positions mark only the extremes within a wide range of integrative, combative, subordinative, co-ordinative, eliminative, and such stances.
In what follows, my intention will not be to contribute an additional position to this already confusing multitude of science-religion relationships. Rather, I would like to nudge the debate in a hitherto neglected direction. Science and religion, or so I will argue, can never be related to each other directly, be it in an antagonistic or in an apologetic manner. In order to understand their contribution to human life, they have to be considered with regard to the life-process from which they developed. The epistemic intuition behind this idea is inspired by the philosophy of classical pragmatism and based upon methodological naturalism , a concept that will be further developed below in this chapter and in greater detail in Chap. 3. Unfortunately, the term âmethodological naturalismâ has often been identified with a reductionist attitude toward the world that denies the reality of values. As I understand it, following the classical pragmatists, William James and John Dewey, it is metaphysically neutral, resolutely anti-reductionist and includes all human practices, epistemic and non-epistemic, rational and emotional, and so on. Theists and atheists, for example, may both subscribe to it, since methodological naturalism signifies the scientific attitude of dealing with questions of mind and meaning in a non-dualistic manner, that is, in continuity with the organic life-process, as it is produced by evolutionary forces, and to refrain from the evocation of transcendent causes. If we stick to this methodological stance, we gain a new perspective both on science and on religions and worldviews, because we are enabled to see them in the relations they entertain to the challenges of what it means to live a human life.
From the perspective of non-reductive, pragmatist methodological naturalism, the common ground for science and religion, the necessary and often overlooked tertium comparationis, is our ordinary, first-personal experience. All human beings both undergo and actively shape it during the course of their life as social and cultural organisms in an environment. All cultural enterprises emerge from this basic structure, of which a propensity to articulate meanings is an integral and crucial part. These meanings may be quite mundane and ordinary, but humans also entertain, as the linguistic and self-conscious creatures they are, a vital relationship to the entirety of all the conditions with which their life is connected. In a way, this pertains to every living creature: to be alive means to be vitally connected to every aspect of the environment crucial for oneâs own survival and well-being. But for human beings, there is no biologically fixed environment or way of living. Both of them have to be carved out by culture. Comprehensive ways of living or cultural life-forms will somehow have to deal with this ability to sense the embeddedness of our short lives into something bigger. This existential relation may be ânothing butâ an unarticulated sense of reality, a vague feeling of the whole, or it may mainly be acted out in a certain (e.g. pessimistic or optimistic) attitude toward life in general. But it may also develop into a full-fledged worldview, holding, for example, that God is the creator of the universe or, conversely, that there is no God and all that there is consists of interactions between subatomic particles. In all these cases, the question that Thomas Nagel has recently phrased so succinctly is virulent: âHow can one bring into oneâs individual life a recognition of oneâs relation to the universe as a whole, whatever that relation is?â (Nagel 2010, 5) If we try to answer this question, the realm of possible experience is transcended, extrapolated, generalized into the articulation of our relation to a whole that can never be the object of scientificâor any otherâknowledge , but is nevertheless evoked in religions and worldviews.
Nagelâs question has the additional advantage of leaving no doubt that the religious (or worldview-oriented) attitude is not about constituting a relation to âthe wholeâ but about recognizing it. The relation he talks about is always already enactedânot as a relation between two independent substances, the self and the universe (or God or the eternal order of things or whatever), but rather as a part-whole relation, which the reflective self acknowledges as having temporal and logical priority over the attempt to articulate its meaning. Nagelâs question pertains to the most general subject-matter of inquiry: How we are to transform an unclear, albeit meaningful, situation (roughly spoken, the human condition as perceived from a specific personal and sociocultural viewpoint) into a new situation that is sufficiently determinate (articulated and framed in habits of action) to enable the continuation of life on a new and henceforth better integrated level? In order to do so, we have to venture beyond the borders of the here, the now, and the actual.
To put it somewhat paradoxically: human life transcends human life. But the fact that this utterly human phenomenon of transcending organic life inevitably exceeds what is experientially accessible in both ordinary life and scientific knowledge should not obscure its continuity with the life-process. For the ability to transcend organic life is nonetheless a life-function, emerging from our specifically human life-form and developing in the history of human culture. This culture is that of a social organism that is at the same time situated in the here-and-know of her or his body and able to escape this confinement with its symbolically enlarged mind. The same is true for science. It also emerged out of the need to achieve control in an unstable, precarious world, and soon gained relative autonomy from this pragmatic starting point.
Instead of contributing another book to the seemingly endless âscience and religionâ debate, I will therefore try to draw attention to the different manner in which both expressions of human culture are related to the ordinary human experience with its quite extraordinary features, among them the ability to both detach ourselves from our life-interests and to develop and articulate a relationship to that which can never be objectified: the whole of which we are a part. Almost 2500 years ago, Aristotle already had developed a helpful distinction, which will be put to use here: instead of treating science and religion as phenomena on the same level and investigating their mutual tense relation ...