Science and Religion: An Origins Story

Abstract

In recent scholarship, the science and religion debate has been historicized, revealing the novelty of the concepts of science and religion and their complex connections to secularization and the birth of modernity. This article situates this historicist turn in the history of philosophy and its connections to theology and Scripture, showing that the science and religion concept derives from philosophy's earlier tension with theology as it became an academic discipline centered in the medieval, then research university, with the centrality of Scripture changing under the influence of historical criticism. Looking at Thomas Aquinas and Friedrich Schleiermacher on theology and Scripture's connection to science, it offers a new framework for theorizing science and religion as part of the history of philosophy.

The Myth of Secular Philosophy: Philosophy of Religion’s Origin and Fate

“…At its founding, the university created a distinct kind of legal and epistemic territory in the Middle Ages, which, in a fractal manner, each faculty (Medicine, Law, Theology, and the Arts) reproduced, and which has in turn continued to be reproduced in, and stand as the hallmark of, academic departments, namely, the power of self-governance (see Loncar 2021). Law professors cannot say what counts as medicine, just as biologists do not get to say what counts as philosophy, or philosophers what counts as nuclear physics.…”

“…I have previously developed such a perspective vis-à-vis analytic philosophy (Loncar 2016) and the topic of science and religion (Loncar 2021) and aim here to develop that critical philosophy in relationship to my own core field: philosophy of religion. The very power of the university's institutional forms would suggest the value and even necessity of subjecting them to critical philosophical inquiry.…”