Anthropology Archive

Are science and religion contrastive in nature

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Besides the missing moral component in a scientific world-view, how different an engagement with the world is represented by the evolution from religion to science? Are science and religion contrastive in nature?

On this point, anthropologists seem divided, as is nicely represented by a debate between John Beattie (1966) and Robin Horton (1967). For Beattie, religion should be understood as essentially expressive and dramatic behaviour more akin to art than science. Religion concerns symbolic statements, not practical procedures, and a premium is placed upon the elaboration or involution of symbolism as an end, value and beauty in itself. To the extent that religion possesses procedure—as in ritual—the efficacy of the latter resides in its expressiveness, in its being expressed and enacted in particular ways. The procedure is far from being intellectual or explanatory activity, based on experimental propositions or the testing of rationally formulated hypotheses. Religion is not grounded in a mechanistic universe at all, and to the extent that religious beliefs treat empirical facts, causes and functions ('among the Nuer, incest causes leprosy'), then these are secondary to their main purpose, and arrived at intuitively or poetically, and without theoretical or experimental mediation. The main purpose of religious ritual and belief is, rather, to influence, by imprecation, sacrifice and prayer, an intentioning universe replete with personalized beings.

In short, religion and science are like two very different, if not opposite, cultures. Religion is a kind of artistic language, a distinctive way of saying something, whose values lie in how well that thing is said. Dramatic assertion is here an end in itself, rather than aiming for any more instrumental effectiveness. Even if religion and science come to be entwined in one socio-cultural setting, then, they remain contrastive ways of imaging and engaging with the world: two types of attitude to experience, two kinds of truth, two forms of practice.

For Horton, however, this distinction between 'expressive action' and 'technical action' does not hold up. In science, religion has been replaced by a form of knowledge and construction of meanings which is basically and directly comparable: from Judaeo-Christian Genesis to the Big Bang; from God as single, absolute truth to physical nature as an objective reality; from God as disembodied agency beyond time and space to scientific reasoning and rationality.

Horton's argument against the likes of Beattie rests on four main refutations. First, religion is contrasted with science due to the claimed symbolic proliferation of the former compared to the simplicity, consistency and non-capriciousness of the latter. However, this difference is merely superficial. Whatever the elaboration of supernatural forces in religious cosmology, these come down to a relatively few kinds by whose action experience is explained. Each kind of being, moreover, will be appointed certain regular functions concerning the world of observable happenings, which a religious expert will be able to construe. This limitation in the number of kinds of ordering entity and process underlying the disorderly diversity of experience makes of religion a fundamentally explanatory phenomenon. Second, religion is as much an empirical pursuit, interested in natural causes, as is science, only the idiom is different: personalized beings as opposed to impersonal forces. In both, the visible, tangible world of commonsensical effects is superseded by reference to theoretical entities—'the anger of spirits', 'the fusion of hydrogen nuclei'—which transcend a limited, quotidian vision and link events to more distant, antecedent causes. Third, religion, like science, possesses levels of explanation for application in different kinds of situations. Thus events can be placed in relatively limited causal contexts—one's community and one's immediate environment, say—or the widest possible—the origins of the universe or of life—as one refers, contingently, to tutelary spirits or molecules, to the supreme being or the law of gravity. Fourth, the theoretical notions which religion and science employ are in both cases transpositions of familiar analogies from commonsensical worlds. That is, given their different assumptions of where everyday order resides—the personal (religion) and the inanimate (science)—theoretical order is similarly arrived at: gods are like patriarchs or patrons; Brownian motion is like bouncing billiard balls. In both cases, too, only part of the analogy is adopted to fill out the new explanatory setting: gods are like patriarchs but not so in the patriarchs' mortality; atoms are like billiard balls but not in the balls' colouration. In each case, theoretical explanations are arrived at by abstracting from what is commonsensically known so as to provide the bedrock for the extraordinary wisdom which is demanded. Religious explanation and scientific explanation, in short, are both metaphorical in inspiration.

Differences of idiom aside, then, Horton's conclusion is that religion and science share the same explanatory nature and ethos. Any dichotomization—emotional versus intellectual engagements; mystical versus rational, fantastical versus causal, supernatural versus empirical— points up merely superficial contrasts.