DISSATISFACTION WITH SCIENCE AND RELIGION

A. One may approach the situation from the scientific or rationalistic tradition. We have been looking for something - knowledge, power, hap­piness; success for the human race. We had expected to attain it with no outside help.

Is this self-reliance rationality? Or is it empirical science? It is hard to tell. As long as one is pleased with this attitude, with any attitude for that matter, one need not bother to clarify it and to nail down fine distinctions concerning it and related attitudes. But something may go wrong. Some of our expectations may meet with deep disappointments. What should be radically modified? It may be reason, science, or self-reliance.

Alternatively, we may try to keep our old attitudes substantially in­tact, and modify them only to the extent necessitated by the addition of a new ally - whose task should be to undo the disappointment. This attempt is plausible and shows great respect for the old attitudes, even though they proved to be less potent than previously hoped. As it turns out, however, the intruder, like a cuckoo, soon outgrows and expels the older inhabitants.

B. Let us now approach matters religiously. There is an imperfec­tion in man which science promises to remove but fails. And the ques­tion is, can religion succeed here? The perfection sought is what reli­gious thinkers call grace. This is the meaning of the word grace (at least in this context; but, I suggest, even more generally). Grace, as we are told, is never a right; although we are not entitled to it, we may be granted it, especially if we fulfill certain conditions.

Not only one who has attained grace, but even one who listens to him in the hope of emulating him - regardless of how and why - has nothing to do with our discussion, even if the latter never will attain grace. The situation is similar to that of those theories of reason which have never fulfilled their promises of certitude or near-certitude in science; so long as one accepts the promise no problem arises. To be drawn to our pres­ent discussion, the religious person must be dissatisfied, disappointed, frustrated. He may, then, look to reason for consolation. And, taking a dose of reason to support his religion, he may, indeed, all too easily de­stroy his religion. But this alone will not do. He has to be doubly frus­trated: Reason destroys his religion and fails to replace it.

C. The problem, then, is whether religion and science are comple­mentary. Assuming that neither religion nor science alone is a sufficient means of attaining perfection in man, perhaps a combination of them would be. And even if a combination of the two would not perfect man, perhaps it would bring him nearer to perfection more rapidly than either component alone. This idea - of reconciling science with religion, the view that science and religion are complementary - must nowadays be quite popular, since it is peddled in all sorts of literature, from phi­losophy, history of religion, and science to sheer science fiction. Also popular, of course, is the traditional idea of separating science from religion, a result of the view that mixing science with religion destroys both. One might reconcile these two ideas of complementation and of separation in the following way: Science and religion may help each other perfect man - but only if use is made of each in its separate place. This view, that science and religion should be separate but comple­mentary, is the one now coming into vogue within the scientific com­munity. It is the chief aim of the present chapter to argue that this idea destroys the vitality of both science and religion, and is thus doubly ob­jectionable.

III.