visionsteske

The Future of IRAS

John Teske

I understand the dialogue between religion and science as a kind of meta-disciplinary conversation, rather than either a genuine public realm or an emerging discipline. We take our science quite seriously, thank you, and indeed, find the natural world to be central to our world views. We’re not all religious naturalists, and some of are even theists, or genuine practitioners rather than just commentators upon religion. We do live in an age of science, but I think we violate the basic raison d’etre of our organization when we claim that science can provide the only arbitration of truth or, more importantly, of meaning. I sometimes get frustrated when I think that IRAS is too often mainly a group of grumpy old scientists who, however well meaning, can oftentimes become quite arrogant in their ignorance both of the limits of science and of the value of world views that sometimes seem incommensurate with science. I sometimes think that there is a bit too much metaphysical agnosia (an agnosia is a kind of neuropsychological disorder which renders one incapable of recognizing or responding to a particular kind of objects or events), and can frequently act like the positivist who would claim that if it isn’t empirically testable, it is meaningless. Au contraire.

In its nomological-deductive form, science is largely concerned with repeatable events (which is why thinkers like MacIntyre assert that it is really only about the past, and its repetition), which can be accounted for or explained entirely in efficient causal terms, using publicly available empirical evidence. If religion were constituted merely by sets of propositional beliefs about the world, it might well simply be considered paradigmatically defective. But I think such a claim is a canard. That religion is not centrally about paradigmatic, propositional claims is an idea that has been supported by theologians and religious scholars for at least my lifetime. Religion is not an alternate explanatory account of the natural phenomena with which science concerns itself. I do not think that the efficient causal explanatory accounts provided by science are even themselves comprehensible without understanding them within larger narrative and mythological systems. I think there are worldview differences that are incommensurable but must nevertheless share the planet. I think there are ontological questions which are unanswerable, but I think there are existential commonalities which we all share and about which the dialogue of which IRAS is a part should be centrally concerned. Indeed, I think this is crucial to its very coherence, and central to its purposes. I happily and regularly pirate an insight of my friend and colleague Ted Laurenson that it is the religious and mythological systems of the world which make it possible to address our “perceptions of separateness,” and “the brute facts of individual desire, suffering and death,” for which the factual truths of science may be necessary, but are insufficient. We cannot learn what ends to project from science. Yes, our projections of possibilities are far more realistic the more they are constrained by the facts, but it takes imagination, not science, to project those possibilities. Thank the gods we have hope and faith as antidotes to the despair of recognizing not only what must be done, but of our failings in doing so. We need to know our limitations because people suffer and we seem to be helpless to do much about it, because we are mortal, because we love. These may not be truths from elsewhere, but neither are they scientific truths. Science is just not the symbolic form in which these questions are asked or in which imaginative answers are proposed, which give us the hope that we need, individually and corporately, to go on without surrendering to despair.

IRAS has been, and its future will be, not just an institute dedicated to such discussions, but an embodiment of community, of people who can be free to disagree with each other knowing that their disagreements, however harsh, will always be tempered by what we share, which is not only a commitment to keeping the discussion going, but a celebration in talking, in ritual, in art, in music and dancing, and in sheer bodily presence, of the joys of human communion, and our awe in nature.

VISIONS FOR IRAS