Religion in an Age of Science by Ian Barbour
Chapter 3: Similarities and Differences
III. Religious Pluralism
3. Conclusions
arbitrariness and individual subjectivity. The interpretation of initiating events, formative experiences, and subsequent individual and communal experiences goes through a long process of testing, filtering, and public validation in the history of the community. Some experiences recur and are accepted as normative, others are reinterpreted, ignored, or
discounted. But clearly the testing process is far less rigorous than in science, and religious communities are not as intercultural as scientific communities.
2. Coherence. Consistency with accepted theories and internal
coherence are sought in science. We have learned from Lakatos that the continuity of a research program is maintained by commitment to its central core, which is protected by making modifications in auxiliary hypotheses. Religious beliefs, too, are judged by their consistency with the central core of a tradition, but here the core is correlated with story and ritual. The interpretation of story and ritual involves auxiliary hypotheses that are subject to modification. Anomalies can be tolerated for considerable periods, but the capacity to respond to them creatively without undermining the central core is a sign of the vitality of a
program. Theological formulations are corrigible and have changed substantially in the course of history. New principles of scriptural
interpretation and new concepts of God are characteristic of the modern period. More recently, feminist and Third World writers have helped us see some of the biases in the classical tradition. Theology as critical reflection is also concerned about the coherence and systematic interconnection of beliefs.
3. Scope. A scientific theory is more secure if it is broad in scope and extensible, correlating diverse types of phenomena in domains different from those in which the theory was first developed. Religious beliefs, too, can be judged by their comprehensiveness in offering a coherent account of diverse kinds of experience, beyond the primary experiences from which they arose. Religious beliefs must be consistent with the well-supported findings of science, and this may sometimes require the reformulation of theological auxiliary hypotheses, as we will see in subsequent chapters. Religious beliefs can also contribute to a
comprehensive metaphysics, though they are not the only source of such wider integrative frameworks that are broader than either science or religion. Metaphysical assumptions in turn feed back to affect paradigms in religion, as they do in science.
4. Fertility. Theories in science are judged by their achievement and
promise in contributing to the vitality of an ongoing program over a period of time. In line with the goals of science, scientific fertility refers to the ability to stimulate theoretical development and experimental research. Religion has more diverse goals, so fertility here has many facets. It includes the capacity to stimulate creative theological
reflection. But it also includes evidence of power to nourish religious experience and to effect personal transformation. Beyond this, fertility includes evidence of desirable influence on human character and the motivation to sustain ethical action. The apostle Paul said that "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness,
faithfulness, gentleness, self-control" (Gal. 5:22). The philosopher William James discusses saintliness as one criterion. We can also ask about practical implications for the most urgent problems of our time, such as the ecological and nuclear crises. Criteria for evaluating such individual and social consequences are of course strongly paradigm- dependent.
In short, religion cannot claim to be scientific or to be able to conform to the standards of science. But it can exemplify some of the same spirit of inquiry found in science. If theology is critical reflection on the life and thought of the religious community, it is always revisable and
corrigible. There are no controlled experiments, but there is a process of testing in the life of the community, and there should be a continual demand that our concepts and beliefs be closely related to what we have experienced. There is no proof, but there is a cumulative case from converging lines of argument. Rational argument in theology is not a single sequence of ideas, like a chain that is as weak as its weakest link.
Instead, it is woven of many strands, like a cable many times stronger than its strongest strand.56 Or, to use an analogy introduced earlier, religious beliefs are like an interlocking network which is not floating freely but is connected at many points to the experience of the
community.
Can these same criteria be applied to comparative judgments between religious traditions? Ninian Smart refers to world religions as
"experiments in living."57 Could one ask about their comparative
success as experiments in living? By the first criterion above, it appears that each set of religious beliefs is in agreement with experience, but each focuses selectively on particular types of experience. Next, each has elaborated beliefs that are coherent, consistent with its heritage, and expressive of its stories and rituals. Moreover, thinkers in each tradition have worked out comprehensive conceptual systems of wide scope. The
transformation of personal life has occurred in varying degrees within all the major religious traditions.
When it comes to ethical consequences, there seem to be saints and hypocrites around the world. The ideal of love may be extolled in each tradition, but it has been realized only by rare individuals or in monastic orders and relatively small, dedicated communities -- though the ideal may have affected the lives of millions. The actual history of each tradition has seen violence, cruelty, and greed as well as compassion, reconciliation, and dedication to justice. Each heritage seems to have its characteristic strengths and weaknesses, its particular virtues and
temptations. One can indeed make some comparative judgments between them in terms of their ideals, if not in terms of their practice.
But these judgments are inescapably ambiguous and reflect the norms of one’s own traditions.58
I believe that the Christian tradition has the potential to meet these criteria better than other traditions, but I have to acknowledge that it has seldom lived up to this potential. I can learn from other traditions,
coming to appreciate some of their ethical sensitivities, meditation practices, and models of God, which can be part of my life. Even after trying to learn from them, I am still an outsider whose understanding is fragmentary, and I am not in a position to pass judgment on them. If I take a confessional stance, I can only witness to what has happened in my life and in that of the Christian community; my main task is to respond to the deepest insights of my own heritage.59
The differences among religions are too great for us to adopt the Identity of Essence thesis, despite, the appeal of its universalism in a global age. The Approximations of Truth position seems difficult to maintain if beliefs and criteria are strongly paradigm-dependent. It may be defended, however, by reliance on revelation, which has no parallel in science. The dangers of Absolutism can be avoided if revelation is not identified with infallible scriptures, revealed doctrines, or
authoritative institutions. If revelation occurs through the lives of persons, the human character of theology and the human failings of the church can be acknowledged.
Pluralistic Dialogue allows us to give preeminence to revelation and salvation in Christ without denying the possibility of revelation or salvation in other traditions. It differs from Approximations of Truth in its greater openness to the possibility of distinctive divine initiative in
other traditions. It also goes further in accepting the historical
conditioning of our interpretive categories. Yet it differs from Cultural Relativism in insisting that there are criteria of judgment, so we do not have to end in skepticism.
The first three criteria, in particular, do exhibit some similarities with science, even if their application is more ambiguous and paradigm- dependent. If we looked only at the noncognitive functions of religious language, such as personal transformation and liturgical celebration, we might accept a total relativism because no truth claims about reality would be asserted. But if religious language does make implicit and explicit claims about reality -- even tentative and partial claims -- we cannot abandon the use of criteria to evaluate concepts and beliefs.
Critical reflection guided by such criteria is primarily motivated by our own search for truth rather than by the desire to prove our superiority over others. But it does imply that there are limits to tolerance. We cannot avoid passing judgment on cannibalism, Satanism, or Nazism or raising questions about what we see as the inadequacies of other
religious traditions.
Perhaps Pluralistic Dialogue ends closer to relativism than to
absolutism, but it can be distinguished from both. It brings liberation from the quest for certainty, which is one of the motivations of
absolutism. We have said that certainty is not possible, even in science, and that all understanding is historically conditioned. Yet we do not need to accept the skepticism to which extreme relativism leads in the interpretation of both science and religion. Such skepticism would in the long run undermine the commitment that is balanced against
tentativeness in both the scientific and the religious community. Of all the alternatives, this path offers the greatest prospect for religious cooperation in a global age, as we will see in part 3.
Pluralistic Dialogue between religions is compatible with Dialogue between science and religion concerning boundary questions and methodological parallels (chapter 1). But it is also compatible with a closer Integration between science and religion (through natural
theology, a theology of nature, or systematic synthesis). Critical realism encourages such integration, for it holds that some statements in the two disciplines refer to a common world. Instrumentalists maintain that ideas of various kinds have dissimilar functions in life; linguistic
analysts hold that there are independent language games having little in common. But critical realists affirm that the theories of science and the
beliefs of theology both make claims about reality -- and that at least some points these claims are related to each other. Some of these relationships are explored in part 2.
Footnotes:
1. Carl Becker, "What Are Historical Facts?" in The Philosophy of History in Our Time, ed. H. Meyerhoff (New York:
Doubleday, 1959), p. 132.
2. William Dray, Laws and Explanation in History (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 150.
3. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), part V.
4. Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1958).
5. C. G. Hempel, "The Function of General Laws in History," in Readings in Philosophical Analysis, eds. H. Feigl and W. Sellars (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1949), p. 459.
6. William Dray, Philosophy of History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1964); Patrick Gardiner, ed., Theories of History (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959).
7. Terence Bell, "On Historical Explanation," Philosophy of Social Science 2 (1972): 182 ff.
8. Holmes Rolston, Science and Religion: A Critical Survey (New York: Random House, 1987), chap. 6.
9. Gordon Graham, Historical Explanation Reconsidered (Aberdeen, Scotland: Aberdeen University Press, 1983).
10. Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), chaps. 2 and 6.
11. Phillip Clayton, Explanation from Physics to Theology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
12. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984).
13. See James B. Wiggins, ed., Religion as Story (New York:
Harper & Row, 1975); Michael Goldberg, Theology and
Narrative: A Critical Introduction (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1982); Gary Comstock, "Two Types of Narrative Theology,"
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55 (1987): 687- 720.
14. David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad Press, 1981).
15. Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1974).
16. Sallie McFague TeSelle, Speaking in Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975);
John Dominic Crossan, In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).
17. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (New York:
Macmillan, 1941).
18. James McClendon, Biography as Theology: How Life Stories Can Remake Today’s Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 1974).
19. Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).
20. Van Harvey, The Historian and the Believer (New York:
Macmillan, 1966).
21. Goldberg, Theology and Narrative, p. 240.
22. Roy MacLeod, "Changing Perspectives in the Social History
of Science," in Science, Technology, and Society, eds. Ina Spiegel-Rossing and Derek Price (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1977); Sal Restivo, ‘Some Perspectives in
Contemporary Sociology of Science," Science, Technology &
Human Values 35 (Spring 1981): 22-30.
23. J. R. Ravetz, Science and Its Social Problems (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1971).
24. Barry Barnes, Interests and the Growth of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977); David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966); Karin Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge (Oxford: Pergamon, 1981); Science Observed, eds. Karin Knorr- Cetina and Michael Mulkay (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1983).
25. Mary Hesse, "Cosmology as Myth," in Cosmology and Theology, eds. David Tracy and Nicholas Lash (New York:
Seabury, 1983); also her Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), chap. 2.
26. Paul Forman, "Weimar Culture, Causality and Quantum Theory, 1918-1927," Historical Studies in Physical Science 3 (1971): 1.
27. Andrew Pickering, Constructing Quarks (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984).
28. Rubem Alves, "On the Eating Habits of Science" and
"Biblical Faith and the Poor of the World," in Faith and Science in an Unjust World, ed. Roger Shinn (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1980).
29. Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973); José Miguez-Bonino, Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975).
30. See Robert McAfee Brown, Theology in a New Key (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1978).
31. For example, James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury, 1975).
32. Ruth Bleier, Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and Its Theories of Women (New York: Pergamon Press, 1984).
33. Helen Longino, "Scientific Objectivity and Feminist
Theorizing," Liberal Education 67 (1981): 187-95. See also Ruth Hubbard, "Have Only Men Evolved?" in Biological Woman: The Convenient Myth, eds. R. Hubbard, M. Henifin, and B. Fried (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1982).
34. Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism (San Francisco: Freeman, 1983) and Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
35. Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 250.
36. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).
37. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1978); see also Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, chaps. 4, 5, and 6.
38. For example, Elizabeth Clark and Herbert Richardson, eds., Women and Religion: A Feminist Sourcebook of Christian Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Letty Russell,
Feminist interpretations of the Bible (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985).
39. Rosemary Radford Ruether, New Woman/New Earth (New York: Seabury Press, 1975) and Sexism and God-Talk (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1983).
40. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973); Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow, eds., Womanspirit Rising (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979).
41. Richard Swinburne, "The Evidential Value of Religious
Experience," in The Sciences and Theology in the Twentieth Century, ed. Arthur Peacocke (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 190. See also his The Existence of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), chap. 13.
42. William Alston, "Christian Experience and Christian Belief,"
in Faith and Rationality, eds. A. Plantinga and N. Wolsterhoff (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983).
43. Steven Katz, "Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism," in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, ed. S. Katz (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 46. See also Richard Jones,
"Experience and Conceptualization in Mystical Knowledge,"
Zygon 18 (1983): 139-65.
44. Peter Donovan, Interpreting Religious Experience (London:
Sheldon Press, 1979), p. 35.
45. Ibid., p. 72.
46. Ninian Smart, "Interpretation and Mystical Experience,"
Religious Studies 1 (1965): 75 and 79. See also his
"Understanding Religious Experience," in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, ed., Katz.
47. Barbour, Myths,, Models, and Paradigms, chap. 7.
48. William Rottschaefer, "Religious Cognition as Interpreted Experience: An Examination of Ian Barbour’s Comparison of Epistemic Structures of Science and Religion," Zygon 20 (1985):
265-82, agrees that there is no uninterpreted religious experience that could yield direct knowledge of God, but he criticizes my view of interpreted religious experience. He argues that there is no religious experience as such; religious beliefs are inferentially acquired and then used in the interpretation of "ordinary
nonreligious experience." This might fit some religious literature, but I do not believe that it adequately reflects the distinctive character of the experiences that have been considered most significant in most religious communities.
49. John E. Smith, Experience and God (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1969), pp. 52, 84.
50. On religious pluralism, see Owen Thomas, ed., Attitudes Toward Other Religions (New York: University Press of America, 1986); John Hick and Brian Hebblethwaite, eds., Christianity and Other Religions (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980).
51. John Hick, God Has Many Names (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1982), p. 52.
52. Ibid, p. 75.
53. John Hick, Problems of Religious Pluralism (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1985), chap.3.
54. John Cobb, Beyond Dialogue (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), explores ways in which Christianity and Buddhism can learn from and modify each other.
55. Paul F. Knitter, No Other Name? A Critical Survey of
Christian Attitudes Toward the World Religions (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books, 1986); John Hick and Paul F. Knitter, eds., The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987).
56. The metaphor of chain and cable appears in Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931-1935), 5:264.
57. Ninian Smart, Worldviews (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), p. 170.
58. See Hick, Problems of Religious Pluralism, chap. 5.
59. On confessionalism and the dangers of trying to prove superiority, see Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation, chap. 1.
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