Religion: Impediment or saviour of science?

Science and Education

Volumn 5, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 155-164

  Turner, Harold ^a  

^a NONE   (New Zealand)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0002151315     PISSN: 09267220     EISSN: 15731901     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/BF00428615     Document Type: Article

References (9)

1. Russell, B., The Scientific Outlook, W.W. Norton, New York, 1931, p. 58.
2. Science and the Modern World, University Press, Cambridge, 1927, eh. 1.
3. In Mind, vol. 43, no. 172, Oct. 1934, pp. 446-68.
4. A detailed phenomenological, historical and theological study of space in religion and of the temple-to-synagogue paradigm change will be found in my From Temple to Meeting House, Mouton, The Hague, 1979.
5. In 1983 a conference of seventy-five Philoponos scholars facilitated translations and publication of these essential writings, and Duckworth of London began their publication later in the decade. A good account is available in Sam Sambursky, The Physical World of Late Antiquity, Basic Books, New York, 1962, ch. 2.
6. The Epicureans, Anaxagorus and other Greeks had earlier rejected the animistic heavenly bodies but on wrong grounds and unsuccessfully.
7. For the medieval period see A.C. Crombie, Medieval and Early Modern Science, Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1959, and his other works.
8. Further reflection on the pervasive nature of constructivism prompts the question whether the authors have not also constructed a version of religion that is unrecognisable to the vast majority of the race, past and present (who practice some form of religion and presumably know most about it). They seem to have constructed a version of religion that serves their personal and theoretical positions, that embodies the dualist inheritance and contemporary relativism of our culture, that selects for its construction supporting sources and ignores so much available and firm historical material, in short that is not governed by openness to the realities of the field of study, which must always be on its own terms. And still further, a theory so detached from practice, from the essential involvement appropriate to the particular kind of data, is much out of line with the direction in which post-Cartesian and post-Kantian relational epistemologies are moving in philosophy, science and theology.
9. S.L. Jaki, 1988, The Savior of Science, Regnery Gateway, Washington, DC. If sampling only, try ch.1, and if merely dipping try pp. 38-42.