📝 Article Type: Research Paper

Ziyan Wang

The one and only value of any normative axiom for a community, from religions to ideology, would be its unprovability, the source of meaning and existential comfort. This is the moral from the calamities in the twentieth century. From Jim Jones’ ridiculous leftism to Charles Manson’s “Helter Skelter,” we have witnessed the desperate need for spiritual guidance in order to overcome loneliness and anxiety, which only fortifies religious and theistic beliefs in a post-industrial world. Among those who feel detached as highways are built in a blink of eyes, science poses no threat to the realm of divine, and even false prophets sounded “truer” than empirical verification.

Indeed, the dominant epistemology of our age, derived from the Enlightenment that boosted revolutions in both political field and scientific field, is at odds with a personified god, who sits in the heaven and laughs at the kings of the earth. While Nietzsche told us to reevaluate everything, religions asked us to follow an authoritative norm. But such cacophony does not necessarily bring conflict. As Alfred North Whitehead stated: “on the one side there is the law of gravitation, and on the other the contemplation of the beauty of holiness. What one side sees, the other misses; and vice versa.” Beyond his observation, I argue that this possibility of coexistence between beliefs and sciences is actually rooted within the different structure of the two paradigms: whereas the former focuses on the establishment of a normative framework through certain axioms, science seeks naturalistic explanation, using positivist rules and empiricist validation.

Religions and sciences provide entirely divergent knowledge types. The normative knowledge in people’s beliefs differs with secular laws. Secular laws can only prevent the population from doing the worse, while theistic guidance inculcate generations to strive for the “best” by spreading meanings. It speaks of the “ought” of human conduct. On the other hand, scientific knowledge is descriptive. It answers questions of “how,” rather than moral judgments of “why.”

Because normative knowledge serves a deep existential role, it remains impervious when confronting the shifting paradigms of scientific knowledge. In the nineteenth century, when materialist philosophy reached its zenith, Karl Marx proposed his universal theory of historical materialist, which led to multiple revolutions that eventually led to the foundation of the Soviet Union. Despite claiming to be a scientific socialist theory, historical materialism is “Heilsgeschichte in der Sprache der Nationalökonomie (the history of salvation in terms of national economics)” according to Karl Löwith in Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehe. The scientific and economical persistence in original Marxism and its successors are merely based on the central normative statement: “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” The communist dream, as a supposedly scientific claim, was ultimately sustained by the same unprovable axiom derived from traditional religions and theistic belief.

Nevertheless, sciences have threatened religions by depriving their of their elucidative ability, the foundation of their exclusive authority. Before science took over this power, each religion used to be a mighty sovereign within their domain of discourse, where one’s spiritual identity is thoroughly bounded by a single faith, the only way for them to understand the world. Before science, abandoning your belief means to discard an entire worldview. As science takes the lead to construct a universal explanation of the world, regardless of religious differences, the power of a certain belief to grip the totality of a believer’s worldview vanishes. Abandoning a religion or choosing to start believing one is only a fashionable way to demonstrate a performative personality on social media for the young generation, rather than an existential shift. Overall, scientific perspective always preoccupies an omnipresent location, like a silent, rational god.

Yet, by stripping away such a explanatory dimension from religions, science actually performed a vital service for true faith. Theistic belief, by discarding a unwinnable battle over how the world functions, now secures its private territory: the questions towards “why.” As highways of modernity continue to alienate individuals, religions take the vocation to heal and to stitch the existential void. Therefore, sciences can hardly pose any undermining threat to religious belief. Rather, by dismantling the authority-based elucidation power from religions, sciences have cleared the ground for those unprovable, yet indispensable axioms of divine, the realm of belief.