Religion and Science from a Postsecular Perspective
following testing, they serve as the bases of our understanding of and, perhaps, justification for intervening in the natural world.
Alternatively, theistic religion offers an understanding of nature and humanity based on
divine revelation and its interpretation, often expressed in sacred texts and reinforced
through the beliefs and practices of particular faith traditions. Whether investigating God,
the soul, miracles, morality, or immortality, religion offers descriptions and explanations of
metaphysical or spiritual existence that are open to confirmation by religious authorities in
particular spiritual communities, whether they be one’s own experience or that of another. If
accepted, such descriptions and explanations serve likewise as the basis of our understanding
of and, perhaps, the tools for intervention in the present and transcendent worlds. It should
be noted here that unlike the scientific discourse, religious confirmation could be highly
personal and subjective.
In a separation account of religion and science, the approaches employed by each are
seen to be parallel or so distinct from each other that they hardly matter to the other. While
the objects of inquiry and methods to understand them are different, they do not undermine
each other. In fact, they are deemed independent enough to ignore each other completely.
Where science studies the physical world and employs an empirical method to understand it,
religion studies transcendent or metaphysical realities and employs a faith-based
methodology to discern truth (Barbour: 78). Whereas scientific claims are open to change
depending on empirical evidence, religious claims endure insofar as they are based on
revelations consonant with sacred texts, teachings, and experience. This is not to say that
scientists cannot appeal to faith and believers cannot appeal to reason in their
understandings of the world. Indeed medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas encouraged
scientific exploration of the world (Hannam), and the contemporary geneticist Francis
Collins admits no conflict or cognitive dissonance between his scientific and evangelical
Christian views. Separatists accept parallel, albeit differing, accounts of nature and humanity
obtained via different methods of knowing, where “evidence” or “fact” means respectively
something radically different.
In such parallel accounts, the difference between religious and scientific explanations is just that – a difference without hierarchy or as Stephen Jay Gould put it, “nonoverlapping magisteria,” where “magisteria” are domains of discourse that provide appropriate methods for knowing. According to Gould, the magisteria reflect “a sound general consensus, established by a long struggle among people of goodwill in both magisteria” (70). But the inevitable incommensurability of these two discourses remains practically untenable. We all live in the same culture and as such hear the conflicting claims of religion and science: they may be separate conceptually or even in their respective approaches and practices, but their discursive pronouncements are shared in the cultural marketplace of ideas, where consumers of all walks of life encounter their differences as mutual challenges rather than unrelated sets of claims. In other words, the separation view is predicated on an ideal realm of science and an ideal realm of religion and therefore, they can be separated in an ideal world. In the real world, scientific discourse has always already been “infected” with a religious discourse and vice-versa as both discourses are reliant upon the cultural norms and forces, specifically that which capitalism generates, to express themselves. Indeed, the postsecular perspective accounts for culture, which means that it brooks no such separation between any sets of
