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FAITH, RELIGION, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (The text recognition software will not recognize this pdf)

 Schubert M. Ogden

1. According to the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, the fundamental generalization to be made about human existence is that a human being is "a symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animal," for whom "the drive to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and as pressing as the more familiar biological needs." But to seek meaning is to presuppose that some meaning is to be found, just as the drive to make sense out of experience evidently assumes that sense can in fact be made out of it. Recognizing this, I allow myself the generalization about human existence that to be human is both to live by faith-namely, the basic faith that life does somehow make sense and that it has a meaning that can in some way be foundand to seek understanding-namely, that understanding of religion and science are both in their respectively different ways particular forms. 

2. The basic faith that life has some kind of meaning and that sense can be made out of experience has historically found its primary explicit expression in what we are accustomed to call religion, or the religions. And this is true even though, being as fundamental as this basic faith is, it is and must be expressed at least implicitly in all the other so-called secular forms of culture as well. But insofar as we view religion not only functionally, as the primary explicit form of basic faith in the meaning of life, but also substantively, as consisting in certain metaphysical and moral beliefs that contrast with certain other such fundamental beliefs, we may incline to think of religion as but one particular species of a genus that we call "ideology." So, for example, it may seem less paradoxical to us to speak of Marxism or Communism, humanism or, for that matter, Eastern-style capitalist humanism as an ideology that to speak of it as a religion--"religion" in our cultural tradition being peculiarly associated with the theistic religion, or belief in God, that has been formative of this tradition. In the strictly functional sense of the term "religion," however, it is arguable that Marxism is as much a religion for many Marxists as Christianity is for Christians, Judaism is for Jews, Islam is for Moslems, and so on.

3. But if to be human is perforce to live by faith, with our without the explicit understanding of religion or even ideology, one cannot be human at all except by somehow understanding oneself and one's world as they are disclosed through one's senses and learning how so to predict and control the events of one's experience as to live, to live well, and, so far as possible, to live better. In other words, simply as human beings we are beings who understand both in the sense in which understanding is involved in our basic faith in the meaning of life and experience and in the sense in which understanding is involved in coping with the events of our experience in the way just described. All the higher forms of life maintain themselves not only by adapting themselves to their environments but also by so altering their environments as to adapt the environments to themselves, their needs, their possibilities, etc. In short, to be human involves leaning how to control the course of events of which one is a part, and for this reason it also involves science and technology, in the very general senses of the words, according to which "science" means the human activity of so understanding events in the world as experienced, human as well as natural, as to be able to predict and control them for the sake of human good, and "technology" means the application of such understanding so as to develop effective instruments of such prediction and control.

4. In my understanding, then, science is most basically a mode of understanding, or, more exactly, of inquiry-a way of asking a certain kind of question that arises out of our existence as human beings given our distinctive vital interests in living, in living well, and, if possible, living better. But so, too, as I understand it, is religion, most basically, a mode of understanding or inquiry-a way of asking a related by also different kind of question that likewise arises from our existence as such given its vital interests. To be sure, by "religion" we commonly mean the answers that have been given to this question, just as we sometimes use the word "science" to refer, not to the process of critical questioning that is distinctive of science, but to some or all of the results of such questioning as of a given time and place. But in religion even as in science any answer can be called into question by all contrary or contradictory answers; and so one is forced back on the process of religious questioning as always more fundamental than any of the products of such questioning. In religion just as much as in science, answers are not and cannot be as fundamental as questions.