Jack Preston King
Jul 20, 2017 · 2 min read

There is a philosophy of science. But religion and philosophy aren’t interchangeable, are they?

Put it this way, there is a philosophy of science, but the natural world science studies is real, yes? Same with religion. There are many philosophies of religion, but the supernatural world religions study is real. Same thing. A philosophy is a way of thinking about something, but it’s not the something itself.

How do you define “religious way”?

I think that article What Science Isn’t does a great job of answering that question, so I’ll quote the relevant paragraph here:

It was the jobs of priests for thousands upon thousands of years to give the simple folk a world-story, without such as story anxieties rise and existential doubt creeps in. The crafting and dissemination of a world-story has since been split up from between priests to spread into other areas and specialists such as philosophers, academics and of course, scientists.

On one level, you present science as strictly an effective method for observing objective reality and drawing useful conclusions — which I would argue human beings have been doing long before the scientific method was devised. But you also take science’s word for how the universe got here, how life began, how species evolved over time, all kinds of things science can’t really know for sure, they’re just the best theories we’ve come up with so far, but they tell a compelling world story that calms believers anxieties and existential doubts. That’s relating to science “in a religious way.”

Note that observation,experimentation, and drawing conclusions regarding experience with the real supernatural world is where we got religion, mostly. I find that most people with a religious relationship to science adamantly refuse to believe a supernatural world exists or is even possible, but not because science has ever disproved it’s reality (or even seriously addressed it), but rather (in my opinion) because the existence ofGod or a supernatural dimension of reality conflicts with the science world-story.

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    Jack Preston King

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