SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE, RELIGIOUS BELIEF, AND HUMAN EXPERIENCE

It is often argued that religious belief and scientific knowledge provide us with two different and irreconcilable visions of reality between which we must ultimately choose. If naturalism is understood as asserting a purely physical nature of causal relations within a causally closed universe is true, and religious belief is taken to admit the existence of a transcendent realm in which human values and freedom are grounded, they are indeed irreconcilable. I shall suggest however that the choice between these two visions of reality is not one motivated solely by their respective claims to objectivity, but also by how they reflect our subjective experience of reality. I suggest that the relation of the scientific and religious world views to our experience can be usefully compared with the tension between Christianity and tragedy. I argue for two claims: firstly that tragedy and Christianity present us with irreconcilable visions of the world, and secondly that, although irreconcilable, these visions have a common root in the human experience of the world allowing for a perspective, in which each is to a degree open to the other. I shall suggest that understood in this way these two perspectives, are not merely competing systems of thought, but are, as science and religion, uniquely capable of capturing particular aspects of human experience.