Religion and Science from a Postsecular Perspective
relationship is an assumption about scientific materialism and biblical literalism as if they were wholly contained in their respective silos. This, of course, leads to obvious ontological, metaphysical, and hermeneutical issues undergirding the different approaches endorsed in these views.
Religion and science, at first glance, may seem like odd bedfellows. Very few scientific
papers investigate what the afterlife looks like and very few sermons from the pulpit describe
how our immune system works. Yet when scientists claim to be able to describe all of reality
or advocates of religion demand a say in the writing of science textbooks, it seems that one
is encroaching on, perhaps hoping to overtake the other’s discursive territory. Whether the
argument is that one should intrude on the other or that the relationship between the two is
inherently antagonistic, these arguments often presuppose that religion and science are like
sports teams or countries at war – each has clearly defined boundaries so that terms like
“encroachment” or “enemy” can be used in a literal sense. Religion and science, at a second,
more careful glance, may not be able to be contained in neat packages with clear, distinct
purposes and content that purportedly differentiates the two. J. Z. Smith asserts, “religion is
solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by
his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization” (xi). This is not to say that religious
beliefs and practices have not been around for millennia; rather, this is a more technical and
even political assertion that reflects the beginnings of religion becoming an object of study.
With the onset of Religious Studies and the creation of religion as a practical and conceptual
object, categories were also established that separated (perhaps artificially so) the world into
two spheres: the religious and the secular; the sacred and the profane. The political issue at
stake involves these very classifications: Who determines where the sacred ends and the
profane begins? What gets classified where? Who has the power to relegate one practice into
this or that domain? (Arnal and McCutcheon) In this sense, then, the very designation of
“religious” remains contested so that when we talk about religion in this paper, we are
cognizant of its history and plasticity, despite our consistent use of the term religion.
Likewise, one may argue that science itself is a historically-informed discourse, just like that concerning religion. There are numerous debates about the very definition, classification, methodology, and authority of science as well as its relation to technology and the capitalist system (Agassi). Some may argue that science, as a discourse that formulates its empirical findings in propositional form, does not quite undermine religion the way technology does as the primary mediator of religion in the West. It is the materiality of technology (or technoscience) rather than the more theoretical scientific discourse that puts the two – religion and technology – in a close relationship. Science, on the other hand, as a historically conditioned discourse would relate to religion, as a fellow discourse, more like sports, whose advocates have a better grasp of reality. The shift here is from relating essentialized categories of religion and science to relating their discursive practices (how they construct meaning). This shift also mirrors, and is no doubt influenced heavily by the shift from modernity to postmodernity as the postmodernist is now able to contextualize old universals, question binaries, and then correlate seemingly dissimilar discourses and practices, such as those under consideration here. Despite these postmodern moves, one need look no further than to recent debates over teaching Creationism in public schools to realize that debates between religion and science rage today as if lives depended on the
