Yazata
Active Member
I'm not convinced that science has a single essence that can be captured in a few words. I perceive it as a collection of closely related cognitive practices that arose in particular cultural contexts and are thus rather contingent.
But attempting to do just that, I guess that it's observation of physical reality (I don't really accept that the 'social sciences' are in fact sciences) using the conventional physical senses. (It doesn't recognize any putative spiritual senses, knowledge obtained through meditation or anything like that.)
Physics (the first modern science) goes beyond description by trying to correlate regularities observed with the senses by use of mathematics (which is arguably kind of an inconsistency, since mathematics is far more conceptual and isn't really something observed with the senses). So physics produces as its product mathematically formulated relationships between empirically observable variables.
The biological sciences are rather different in that they rarely result in those kind of mathematical formulations. Biologists remain far more descriptive, describing what they find inside organisms (anatomy and histology) and how organisms interact with their environment (ecology in the scientific sense, before activists hijacked the word). Where physics produces explanations by fitting observed events into mathematical regularities, biology is more likely to produce explanations by constructing 'mechanical' models of interacting parts. Biologists are also very fond of producing reductive explanations in terms of chemistry. An overarching framework tying all of the biological sciences together into a conceptual whole is probably the idea of evolution by natural selection.
Again, I don't believe that religion possesses a single defining essence. I follow Wittgenstein in thinking of it as a family resemblance concept. Religions that we are familiar with display a variety of attributes. We observe similar cultural formations in foreign cultures that display many of the same attributes. But probably not every one. There may not even be a single property that all religions possess and that only religions possess. There probably isn't. But if some foreign cultural formation sufficiently resembles what we already think of as a religion, we will call that foreign cultural formation a religion too.
What are some of the qualities that seem particularly common among religions? A very basic one might be the idea that human beings should attune themselves somehow with whatever is thought of as ultimately real. The ultimately real might be conceptualized many different ways, though its often personalized in terms of deities (one or many). That attunement often has a very obvious moral component and we often encounter the idea of morality being somehow divinely revealed. A basic thing about religion as opposed to science is that religion has a prescriptive should component that it wears on its sleeve, it presents a prescription for how people should live their lives in attunement with whatever reality's ultimate principles are imagined to be.
Interestingly, science in its contemporary popular manifestations is veering closer to religion in the way that it's turning into moral exhortation. Pick up a copy of Scientific American these days, and the reader might think that he or she has stumbled into a meeting of 17th century Puritans. Perhaps it's inevitable, as religion recedes in cultural significance in the modern world, replaced by science as the grand cultural authority, that science will expand to fill the cultural space once occupied by religion and thereby become more religion-like.
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