When Our Bodies Do the Thinking, Theology and Science Converge

ISBN:

01943448

URL:

http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1032925581&Fmt=7&clientId=65345&RQT=309&VName=PQD

Keywords:

Theology; Religion; Science

Abstract:

In my own recent work on interdisciplinarity I have, from a philosophical point of view, rejected the idea that the domain of religious faith and the domain of scientific thought are in any sense exemplified by rival or opposing notions of rationality.3 The rather modernist notion of a universal rationality that is presupposed by such a conflictual approach typically demoted religious and theological forms of rationality to the domain of personal opinion, while also taking for granted, not only that all rational persons conceptualize data in one and the same way, but also that, because the honest observer is allegedly able to put aside, or rise above the prejudices of prior commitment to belief, he or she would also report the same data, the same facts, in the same way.4 Closely related to this is precisely the typically modernist development, on the one hand, of distinct domains of knowledge and practices whose disciplinary autonomy were ultimately institutionally recognized and protected, but which, on the other hand and at the same time, were unified by a formal and universal notion of human rationality.5 On an epistemological level this modernist mode of inquiry was of course definitively challenged first by Michael Polanyi, then by Thomas Kuhn, and post-Kuhn by various strands of postmodern science.