Religion and Science from a Postsecular Perspective
matter of time, so many scientists argue. An undiscovered fundamental principle of physical reality or holes in an otherwise efficacious theory should never prompt one to look outside the natural world for a complement. Likewise, more fervent religious adherents argue for the sufficiency of faith to understand all of reality, though in the face of the authority of science, this position is difficult to maintain. Therefore, the complementarity view is typically employed by advocates of religion wishing to use the claim that science has limits to reintroduce a God/creator as a necessary supplement to what science has accomplished.
A postsecular perspective endorses this approach to the pursuit of epistemological
comprehensiveness and appreciates the modesty that necessarily must accompany any
discourse. With the complementarity view, both discourses are seen as plastic and protean
which complement each other to varying degrees without claiming full compatibility
between them. What is welcomed in this more pliable view of the relationship between the
scientific and religious discourses is that the specter of ascendency or superiority is
vanquished; the continuous coexistence of these discourses is a tribute to their respective
validity; and the cultural plane on which both discourses operate and interact with each other
is taken much more seriously.
The third variant of the interaction view, the foundation or homo religious view, begins
with the idea that human beings are innately religious. If human beings are, in a sense, hardwired to be religious, then religion cannot be separated from the past, present, or near future
of human beings. First articulated by Mircea Eliade who wrote about the undeniable human
need for an experience of the sacred, this view assumes that a religious lens used to
understand the world is a priori or at least prior to a Baconian or any other scientific
worldview. Two implications for the relationship between religion and science flow from
this and they differ from the competition and complementarity variants covered above. One,
religion, however disdainful to some who are scientifically inclined, cannot be conveniently
distilled out and excised from the human experience; therefore, claims of its irrational,
dangerous, and especially misanthropic effects are severely undermined. Two, if it is
primarily evolutionary biologists that are providing the data that demonstrate this view,
traditional ways of explaining and/or justifying religious belief and practice are similarly
undermined. Hence if religion is insistent on gaining its legitimacy from divine revelation or
transcendent truth, then science may be offering an alternate source of religion that, perhaps
ironically, replaces the long-established sources of religion. The homo religious, then, puts the
religious and scientific discourses into an unexpected and complex relationship – one that is
mutually reinforcing with extensive overlap yet potentially antagonistic at the same time.
The scientific point of view given by those who argue that the existence of religion can be explained by evolution can be broken down into two general camps. The first group, represented most prominently by anthropologist Maurice Bloch, claims that religion is a byproduct of other brain functions that were needed to survive. In other words, religion did not develop as a needed adaptation on its own but flowed from established neural architecture that allowed for thinking about things that were not immediately present to our five senses. The second group, of which Robert Bellah and Barbara J. King are a part, argues that religion grew in response to a direct need, such as building social solidarity to increase the probability of survival and reproduction. This group positions religion as a more essential facet of human life than the first group in that religious expressions are less of a
