Religion and Science from a Postsecular Perspective
haphazard by-product and more of a crucial instrument that ensures the existence of humanity.
Both groups contend that humans are innately religious on a genetic basis. Bearing more
on the relationship between religion and science is the contention that for the homo religiosus,
religious tendencies precede and even mold other, later means of understanding the world,
including the scientific. Whether it is the imagination that is necessary for theoretical
physicists to hypothesize or the belief required to trust the outcome of a yet-to-bedetermined experiment, defenders of this view classify these aspects of science as reliant
upon unseen, unproven things or on that which our religious nature provides. Moreover,
instead of each discourse claiming to grasp reality either in conjunction or separately, the
view of the innate religiousness of humanity disarms both discourses from any potential
rivalry and shows a more specific way of their complementarity, though a foundational one.
This variant of the relationship of religion and science also explains the fundamental
motivation for and the eventual development of science over time (Fuller).
A postsecular perspective on the third variant of the relationship between the two
discourses helps explain several perplexing realities in ways that other views cannot. Religion
persists today after the secularization in the West over the last three centuries because, no
matter how successful science has been, the religious impulse has always and will always be
in us. As such, this view can be utilized by both the religious person and the scientist to
support respective worldviews without having to destroy each other. If religion is innate,
perhaps it reveals the image of God in all of us, so some theists could say. If religion is
innate because of its advantageous properties that helped humans to succeed in the “survival
of the fittest,” then it is science that has provided the evidence, not the Bible or divine
revelation. While there are biologists who honor the homo religiosus view in a way that obviates
the need for traditional religious sources, the religious worldview is far from being rejected.
Unfortunately, we must admit that religious fanaticism and militant atheism seem to escape
the religion promoted by those upholding this view.
The Postsecular Perspective
As the argument of this paper has illustrated so far, there are various ways in which religion and science have been perceived to interact in the cultural domain. Understood discursively – that is, neither in terms of the deep beliefs held by these respective practices nor in terms of specific institutional doctrines and structures – the postsecular perspective sheds a different light on this relationship. Religion and science are seen as using each other’s rhetoric and methodology and as such display neither separation between nor replacement of each other. Similar to what postmodernism claims about any two or more sets of discourses (in Lyotard’s sense) or practices (in Foucault’s sense), religion and science, in the broadest terms that have been discussed here, in fact cannot claim superiority over the other in any real sense. Hence they draw strength from each other and feed off the discursive moves either of them makes in response to historical contingencies. For example, conceptual binaries, such as faith and reason, fact and value, knowledge and belief can be found in both, even when deployed differently. That is to say that the reliance on faith is not exclusively the purview of religionists who, in the tradition of Soren Kierkegaard, implore a “leap of faith,” but can be found daily by scientists who have faith in their instruments and their
