Example research essay topic: Religion And Science Science And Religion - 1,753 words

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Psychology of Religion The relationship between religion and science is a problem significant for a psychology based on the notion that individuals construct their own worlds. The issue is equally pertinent to any of the constructivist perspectives but is most clearly seen in one particular psychology, personal construct psychology. In this last perspective, we see the clearest example of the apparent tension that arises between that psychology's model of the person as "scientist" on the one hand, and religion -- which traditionally stands opposed to science -- on the other. Through a reconstruction of religion, we see a way out of the impasse.

An old debate in the history of ideas concerns the question of the relation between religion and science. The common wisdom once was that science and religion were incompatible, with consequences such as arguments made that religion has no place in schools or the creationism versus evolution theory debated in science classes. It was often claimed that there could be no legitimate concept of a Catholic -- or for that matter a Marxist -- university: A university was concerned with critical inquiry, which is incompatible with closing off any area or domain to critical inquiry or with the specification of an appropriate methodology or test of truth that was prejudiced toward a particular view of the world. Thus, the idea that there was a peculiarly Catholic form of inquiry -- or a Marxist one -- or that there was a domain of knowledge appropriate for scrutiny and a domain that was beyond question was rejected. (Feyerabend, 1975). Since the days when this common wisdom was being distilled, science itself has undergone something of a revolution in terms of our understanding of what it is.

Philosophers of science and social philosophers have serious questions about it being as value free and objective as was being claimed. There has also developed a related question of whether there can be such a thing as social science, and whether something other than the aims of physical science -- explanation, prediction, and control -- are more appropriate. In the latter case, there has developed, for example, verstehen analysis, and hermeneutics, which consider meanings imputed to social situations by the actors involved in them; social science is thus seen as an exercise in teasing out these meanings so that we may understand, rather than explain things. Again, teleological explanation appears more relevant to social science than does the causal explanation appropriate in the physical sciences. The questioning of science took the now familiar trajectory from Lakatos and Musgrave to Feyerabend, and beyond -- a trajectory that concerned Passmore in that he thought "the baby was being thrown out with the bathwater" in the overly zealous criticism of science. Indeed, it might be questioned whether some of that over zealousness was motivated by an interest in reinstating religion as a credible epistemological perspective. (Passmore, 1978).

These observations suggest that it is useful to make distinctions between the formal and the living aspects of science, that is, science as it essentially is, and as it has become. In considering what science has become, the essential nature of science is seen as having been deformed by pressures of life in advanced technological society. That essential nature of science is inquiry, critical inquiry, whereas technological society imposes pressures to control and direct that inquiry to solve merely practical problems. More generally, the debate emerges as a tension between pure and applied science, the former struggling in advanced technological society just as the social sciences and humanities struggle to maintain a properly human focus (Tesconi & Morris, 1972). Religion, too, has not been static. Apart from the considerable internal disagreements within particular religions and the disagreements between the various religions, there are new conceptions of older religions.

One example will suffice, and this is the reinterpretation of Christianity as an ecological religion in the idea of "creation spirituality" (Fox, 1989). In general, what emerges from these developments is the value of distinguishing practiced religion, or doctrinal religion, from something else, for example, a belief in a spiritual level of existence or a spiritual dimension to our life, even a belief in "capital B" Being, wherein Being does not necessarily signify a creator. (Fox, 1989). Despite the fluid state of matters in relation to both religion and science, I begin from a premise that the very bedrock notion of science as inquiry is incompatible with the basic bedrock notion of every religion in a claim to know at least one objective truth. Simply put, science is about unfettered, critical inquiry; religion, at some level, holds certain beliefs to have the status of knowledge, as beyond question, beyond inquiry. An interesting illustration of the very fundamental nature of the distinction being made here, as well as its continuing significance, is given by Hawking. He reports an experience of attending a conference on cosmology organized by the Jesuits in the Vatican in 1981, around the time that Catholicism "forgave Galileo. " (Hawking, 1988).

At the conclusion of the conference an audience with the Pope was arranged for the conferees, and Hawking noted: He told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he did not know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference -- the possibility that space-time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation. I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo. This conception of the relation of religion to science would seem to have something very important to say for a psychological theory that takes as its model of the person that of the person as scientist. It would also seem to run into some difficulties at a meta-theoretical level, if proponents of a constructivist position wish also to remain committed to a religious position.

The problem applies equally to a position that says people have their world constructed for them. And it applies equally to any of the constructivist positions (Mahoney, 1991), raising methodological and epistemological difficulties for them. However, if there is a genuine tension between science and religion in general, and within constructivist psychology and personal construct theory in particular, a solution may lie in a uniquely "personal construct interpretation" of religion, in terms of a construal of religion following G. W.

F. Hegel's interpretations. But what does the thesis that religion and science are incompatible say for personal construct theory as our exemplar of a more general constructivist perspective? As a first approach to this question, we can consider what appears to be a rare specific piece of deliberation in relation to religion and personal construct theory in a study by Todd. Todd examined the meaning of religious belief to individual believers and found that the personal construct methodology was helpful in disclosing the different aspects of what religious belief meant to different (Christian) believers. He suggested that if one's constructs of religious belief formed a constellation with few outside implications and separated from superordinate constructs, then religious constructs have little importance to one's ultimate life concerns and vice versa.

Todd analyzed two grids to show the marked difference between two Christian believers in what aspects of their beliefs they emphasized or valued most. (Todd, 1988). Thus a dialogue was opened that might assist reflection on what one believes, and that might open up the personal dimensions of belief, clarifying it and assisting its articulation. Todd in his introductory observations to the foregoing study was generally sympathetic to religion, noting three possibilities for religious belief under threat: fundamentalism, a watered down humanistic version, and a rediscovery of religion's experienced reality expressed in a renewed or newly invented language. Although he discussed religion in terms of psychological factors that boiled down to two (historical traditional factor and a personal faith factor), he did see religion as a generally positive force in individual and social life, part of some general spiritual quest in which all people are engaged. (Todd, 1988). There are, however, other perspectives that are less friendly. Bertrand Russell, for example, argues that religion is based on fear.

Further, an argument can be made that the idea of the holy posited by Otto or the courage to be theorized by Tillich grow from an underlying dynamic that expresses a fear of freedom, a submissiveness, and, given the right social conditions, an eventual authoritarianism (Fromm, 1972). Whatever the resolution of these last controversial matters, the question being raised here is different from that raised by Todd. The present question arises out of the type of thinking that finds religion restrictive rather than expansive for individual and group life. My question concerns the methodological issue of how the model of the person as scientist, that is, as critical inquirer, allows commitment to an area of belief that at some basic level makes knowledge claims that are beyond substantive critical inquiry.

If the model of the person as scientist -- and the model of cognitive functioning leading to knowledge of the world that underlies constructivism generally -- leads to a relativist theory of knowledge, how does this square with the absolutist claims of most religions? (Todd, 1988). The old debate concerned the question of whether a scientist could be, say, a committed Christian. That debate centered on the manner in which the scientist went about his or her work, basing opinions and theories on observable, publicly available facts or on rationally argued theories that expressed tentativeness and an incredulity about the world. By contrast, as a religious person he or she appealed to another world, to unseen and sometimes private experiences that could not be scrutinized in anything like this same public, objective fashion. The present concern might be stated generally as an interest in the underlying philosophical anthropology of constructivist psychology. That is, what is its underlying response to the fundamental philosophical question: "What is Man?" For personal construct theory, the answer is that Man is characterized by inquiry.

People are meaning making beings who are faced with the terrible irony that that to which they give their individual meanings may be "ultimately and forever meaningless. " However, while qua person, it is appropriate that a peculiarly religious meaning arises just as easily as does a nonreligious one; this poses problems for the absolutism of religious...

Research essay sample on Religion And Science Science And Religion