Developing an anthropologically and sociologically grounded conceptual framework for reframing the relationship between science and religion.

Abstract

The construction of competing knowledges and discourses on “science” and “religion” is constitutive of the epistemic foundations of modernity and has shaped the tensions between Western modernity and Asian traditions. This encounter has led to reinventions and reconfigurations of Asian cosmologies, as well as to challenges to Western dichotomies and definitions of science and religion. In this paper, the authors, an anthropologist and an experimental physicist, will present an approach to taking up these challenges at the ontological and epistemological levels. Abandoning pre- conceived categories of science and religion, we propose to take “epistemic communities” as the unit of knowledge production, comparing how knowledge is generated and applied within different traditions and disciplines. Unpacking the often unquestioned assumptions about the “realism” of science, we find that different religious and scientific epistemic communities hold a wide array of realist and anti- realist positions at the ontological, epistemic, semantic, symbolic and subjective levels. Questioning assumptions about the necessary exclusivity of any coherent system of knowledge, we show how, both in academia and in religion, the concurrent usage of ontologically incompatible models of reality is widespread, in what we call “poly- ontology”.