Had an Anthropology of Religion course on this very topic last week... Everyone disagreed, it was shit! Anyway...
1. It's impossible to define 'religion'. 'Believing 10 improbable things before breakfast' just doesn't cut it; certain Buddhists don't appear to believe anything much, we all have beliefs as to the nature of human nature, etc, and in lots of places people just aren't sure about whether the ancestors they 'worship' have supernatural powers, or whether they're just paying their respects to granny.
2. Lots of the arguments as to science being like a religion are based on a rather dubious interpretation of Kuhn's idea of paradigms within the history of science; within a paradigm, people aren't actually questioning hypothesis but trying to find supporting evidence for them - and that's like religion. Key problem is that the scientists are still open to the possibility that their foundational ideas (e.g. Newtonian physics) might change or not really be wholly right. Then again, religious doctrine isn't actually set in stone; look at the end of limbo! Perhaps the key differentiation is that science considers the possibility that /anything/ can be superseded, whereas a religion has some basic core tenets that can't be questioned ('there is a god') within that religion. But that's still not bullet-proof...
So I think we have to come back to methodological differences: science has standards for proof and degrees of error, whereas religions are prone to making untestable statements. [String theory's testable in principle, right?] Religion also gets into the business of telling people how to live (morals, ethics, etc) whereas I maintain that science is an exercise in what's possible. Science says "Yes, we have a 13% chance of making this 50-year-old woman pregnant, and the risks of XYZ are this:"; religion says "such medical invasion of the sanctity of life is/isn't acceptable." Problem is that we also have this beastie I call Public Understanding Of Science that does make moral judgements - and it's hard to separate this beastie from Proper Science, where clearly science is culturally/historically influenced in what it chooses to research (e.g. nuclear power) and in thinking its methodology is the best one for producing knowledge in the first place.
An argument I quite agreed with, by Stanley Tambiah, is that at root science and religion are two systems for explaining causality. Science endeavours to use rational logic; religion may explain things in other ways, but essentially these two models of causality are often incommensurable. Where the questions they're looking at are not comparable, there's sometimes no logical way of saying which one's best - it is arbitrary whether you choose science or religion to explain consciousness, perhaps.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2006-10-29 02:28 pm (UTC)1. It's impossible to define 'religion'. 'Believing 10 improbable things before breakfast' just doesn't cut it; certain Buddhists don't appear to believe anything much, we all have beliefs as to the nature of human nature, etc, and in lots of places people just aren't sure about whether the ancestors they 'worship' have supernatural powers, or whether they're just paying their respects to granny.
2. Lots of the arguments as to science being like a religion are based on a rather dubious interpretation of Kuhn's idea of paradigms within the history of science; within a paradigm, people aren't actually questioning hypothesis but trying to find supporting evidence for them - and that's like religion. Key problem is that the scientists are still open to the possibility that their foundational ideas (e.g. Newtonian physics) might change or not really be wholly right. Then again, religious doctrine isn't actually set in stone; look at the end of limbo! Perhaps the key differentiation is that science considers the possibility that /anything/ can be superseded, whereas a religion has some basic core tenets that can't be questioned ('there is a god') within that religion. But that's still not bullet-proof...
So I think we have to come back to methodological differences: science has standards for proof and degrees of error, whereas religions are prone to making untestable statements. [String theory's testable in principle, right?] Religion also gets into the business of telling people how to live (morals, ethics, etc) whereas I maintain that science is an exercise in what's possible. Science says "Yes, we have a 13% chance of making this 50-year-old woman pregnant, and the risks of XYZ are this:"; religion says "such medical invasion of the sanctity of life is/isn't acceptable." Problem is that we also have this beastie I call Public Understanding Of Science that does make moral judgements - and it's hard to separate this beastie from Proper Science, where clearly science is culturally/historically influenced in what it chooses to research (e.g. nuclear power) and in thinking its methodology is the best one for producing knowledge in the first place.
An argument I quite agreed with, by Stanley Tambiah, is that at root science and religion are two systems for explaining causality. Science endeavours to use rational logic; religion may explain things in other ways, but essentially these two models of causality are often incommensurable. Where the questions they're looking at are not comparable, there's sometimes no logical way of saying which one's best - it is arbitrary whether you choose science or religion to explain consciousness, perhaps.