Adam S. Miller - Science and Religion

For Latour, religion and science do have distinguishable magisteria--but these magisteria are anything but "non-overlapping" and, more critically, Latour finds their commonly assigned division of labor laughable.  "What a comedy of errors!  When the debate between science and religion is staged, adjectives are almost exactly reversed: it is of science that one should say that it reaches the invisible world of the beyond, that she is spiritual, miraculous soul-lifting, uplifting.  And it is religion that should be qualified as local, objective, visible, mundane, unmiraculous, repetitive, obstinate, sturdy" (TF 36).  It is the work of science to build fragile bridges of carefully constructed, painstakingly tested, and incessantly extended chains of reference.  It is science that gropes out into the dark beyond and bring us into relation with the distant and the transcendent.  It is science that funds the miraculous, defends the counterintuitive, excavates the unbelievable, and negotiates with the resistant and unavailable.

But the invisibility of the resistant and transcendent is only one kind of invisibility.  The invisibility of the available, obvious, familiar, local, repetitive, sturdy, matter of fact phenomena remains.  This invisibility,while quite different in character, is just as difficult to breach. "The far away is just as foreign, just as difficult to reach, just as unrealistic, and I would add just as unreasonable as the nearby" (WS 465).  Confusion results when it is assumed that all invisibility is reducible to a single kind, and accessible from a single line of sight. In particular, confusion results when it is assumed that the invisibility proper to religious phenomena is identical to that of scientific phenomena.

On Latour's telling, though the analogy is mine, the story of our common confusion about science and religion goes like this:  To great applause, science works out dependable methods that correct for our near-sightedness and bring into focus distant, transcendent phenomena.  However, full of its own success and egged on by religious pretensions, science can't help but draw some unflattering conclusions about its neighbors.  Science borrows some spectacles from religion (spectacles meant to correct for our far-sightedness), puts them on, and then loudly complains that these glasses are useless.  Seen through these lenses, all of science's hard-earned, transcendent objects have suddenly become blurry or disappeared altogether.  

The mistaken assumption that commonly follows--for many religious people and scientists alike--is that religious talk, because it doesn't address the transcendent objects articulated by science, must then be referring to "an invisible world of belief" that is even more distant, even more transcendent, even more miraculous, than the one science itself is articulating (HI 433).  As a result, both science and religion get backed into a corner. Scientists think such religious talk about the super-transcendent is ridiculous and many religious folk feel compelled by the strength of their own practice--knowing that religion does in fact bring something crucial into focus--to make a public virtue out of believing in the super-absurd.  "Belief," claims Latour in response, "is a caricature of religion exactly as knowledge is a caricature of science" (TF 45).  both of these caricatures need to be abandoned.  Science doesn't deal with obvious facts any more than religion deals with magical beliefs and "the fights, reconciliations, ceasefire, between these two 'worldviews'are as instructive as a boxing match in a pitch black tunnel" (WS 464).

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The same competencies needed to be good at science are those needed to be good at religion.  The practitioner needs patience, modesty, persistence, curiosity, concentration, generosity, creativity, rigor, care, and of course, and objective bent.  As commonly understood, neither knowledge nor belief describes the work of science or religion.  Both science and religion require the same compentencies and both science and religion produce the same output.  Both induce revelation.  However, where science reveals transcendent objects by correcting for our myopia, religion reveals immanent objects by correcting for our hyperopia.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 119-122