Religion has experiential as well as intellectual dimensions. The latter is reflected in a time-honored discipline which approaches religion in ways similar to what obtains in the scientific realm. Known as theology (etymologically, a systematic study of God), its goal is to analyze, understand, and formulate in a reasoned framework the doctrines and worldviews of…
Questions relating to the historicity of the personages and episodes mentioned in religious literature have been vexing scholars for at least two centuries. It is difficult for some to take as a historical fact that Moses met with God and received the Ten Commandments personally from Him. Many papers and volumes have been written on…
Religion has been defined by philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and others in different ways. In certain traditions, the Judeo-Christian notion of religion does not even hold. Some Hindu and Buddhist scholars contend that the Western model of religion was inappropriately imposed by colonial writers on their systems of shared beliefs and behaviors where some the Abrahamic…
Many science-religion dialogues become controversial when participants ascribe different meanings to the terms science and religion . When scientists reject certain claims of religionists, it is often because their view of science is not the same as that of an opposing commentator, and vice versa. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a non-practitioner…
Practically every human culture has evolved some kind of religion or other, invoking supernatural powers, beings, and principles. God may be regarded as the personified essence of these. The rise of scientific and naturalistic explanations of the world has had the effect of transforming, even diluting, some of the traditional views of God, but they…
We live in an age which is rich in its knowledge of the world around us. We have come to know a good deal more about mute matter, throbbing life, measuring mind, and the expansive universe than ever before in human history. But even as we probe deeper into the mysteries of the universe, our…
Reactions to mixing metaphysics and modern science We see from all this that a slow revolution has been occurring in science’s backyard, as it were, reformulating scientific methodology and epistemology. Not all practicing scientists are happy with this turn of events. They feel that these efforts are based, not on experiments but on extrapolations, inspired…
Theology and science The serious discipline of theology offers reason-based interpretations of scriptural worldviews. Whereas religious practitioners are generally content with the experiential, ethical, and community aspects of religion, inspired by trust in religious institutions and faith in some aspect of the Divine, academics and theoreticians strive to put the faith in a rational framework….
In the second half of the twentieth century, science-religion dialogues became a possibility in the West, and are slowly spreading elsewhere also. In 1953, the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS) was established [13]. Zygon, a journal devoted to scholarly discussions on science and religion, was initiated at about the same time…
What is beyond question is that ever since the Copernican revolution there have been confrontations between scientific theories and traditional Christian religious worldviews. Galileo’s trial by the Roman Catholic Church is only the most famous of them all. Martin Luther’s opposition to Copernicus is not as well publicized. Speaking about the author of the Copernican…