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Short abstract:

This paper brings a concept of the relationship between thought and truth developed in the study of religion into conversation with the question of the relationship between thought and truth developed by Ludwik Fleck.

Long abstract:

This paper compares the relationship between thought and truth in two thinkers who occupy related “founding” positions in religious studies and science studies: Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) and Ludwik Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1934). Following criticisms of truth claims in religious studies made by Nancy Levene (2017), it argues that there is a distinction missing from both thinkers’ work: both articulate concepts of mind and world, but neither author develops the third position of mind and world’s mutual supportive relation. This prevents both authors from articulating an interpretive position that is adequately responsible for that position’s claims. This paper shows how reflection on the relationship between thought and truth developed within religious studies—a field shaped by its navigation of speculative claims—can empower the science studies, which also discusses speculative claims but which has developed a younger discourse about speculation in thought.

The first section compares Durkheim and Fleck’s thought, which draws the fundamental problems at stake in each field into conversation. Fleck cited Durkheim; this section further expands their conversation. The second develops a supplemented version of their theories. The third demonstrates this analysis in a case study drawn from the Oak Ridge National Laboratories, when ecologists debated the relationship between ethics and truth in the nascent field of systems ecology in the 1970s. This paper shows how a conversation between reflection about the nature of “knowledge” in STS and religious studies might empower both fields when we ask our fundamental questions.

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Short abstract:

This paper argues that Victorian archaeology in the Near East was sustained by the religious questions it promised to answer. The story of late 19th century Biblical Archaeology is key to the history of the relationship between science and Christianity in Britain.

Long abstract:

In late 1872, George Smith, a young cuneiform enthusiast, presented to a London meeting of the Society of Biblical Archaeology his sensational “Chaldean Account of the Deluge” (now known as the Epic of Gilgamesh), emphasizing its similarities to the story of Noah’s Flood. That a newly decipherable canon could corroborate Old Testament stories—potentially disproving Darwinian theories of an ancient Earth and Godless evolution—was extraordinary indeed. The Daily Telegraph, recognizing this public excitement, capitalized on these stakes and announced it would send the inexperienced Smith to the Ottoman site where the tablets had been found, seeking further insight into Biblical antiquity on their readership’s behalf.

Historians of science and religion have long known faith, theology, and scientific investigation to be complexly intertwined. Terence Keel argues that Christian cosmological assumptions shaped 19th century race scientists’ research, even as they claimed to be untainted by religious bias (Divine Variations, 2018). Victorian Biblical Archaeologists had no such qualms, centering religious text in their research as they sought to confirm Old and New Testament chronologies and narratives, contributing to new fields of Biblical criticism in doing so. This paper argues that The Telegraph’s construction of Smith as expert witness to the Christian past shows how theological concerns made archaeological research worthy of British public investment and enthusiasm. By sending Smith East, The Telegraph mediated and coproduced scientific knowledge at a moment in which the press’s social role was in flux, archaeological norms were in vitro, and Biblical authority was under the microscope.

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Short abstract:

By employing the concept of boundary work, this paper analyzes how Anthroposophists, a spiritual group originating from German-speaking Europe, authorize their spiritual discourse by utilizing scientific language, and spiritualize science by claiming the centrality of subjective experience.

Long abstract:

Anthroposophy is a spiritual school founded by Rudolf Steiner in 1912 in German-speaking Europe, which he called “a spiritual science.” In founding the Anthroposophical Society, Steiner aimed at bringing together occult knowledge, natural science, and Christianity. Despite their official discourse, which does not deny natural science but sees it as “one layer of reality,” their followers did constitute one of the two largest groups in demonstrations against Covid-19 measures in Germany, the other group being the Neo-Nazis. In this paper, I delve into the ways in which they negotiate science and spirituality in their official training provided by their world headquarters in Dornach, Switzerland. Employing Thomas Gieryn’s concept of “boundary work,” I look at how they try to strike a balance between spiritual knowledge that originates from the writings of Steiner and their subjective experience, and scientific knowledge of the body. In these trainings, they engage in a double movement: On the one hand, they employ a scientific language to talk about spiritual phenomena, thus authorizing their spiritual knowledge. On the other hand, they spiritualize science by claiming the centrality of subjective experience for an understanding of reality, that is at once physical and spiritual. By focusing on a variety of exercises offered to develop the spiritual organs of the “new human,” I ethnographically engage with Anthroposophy as an object of study that connects science and spirituality in a post-truth and post-pandemic Europe.

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Short abstract:

The crisis of expertise can be seen as a debate between quasi-religious communities. Drawing on STS views of science, the anthropology of religion, and Wittgenstein’s “forms of life,” I show that identifying faith-like commitments on both sides of the crisis leads to productive communication.

Long abstract:

Controversy persists over the trustworthiness of consensus science—the so-called “crisis of expertise.” Climate change, mask wearing, and vaccinations have become politicized, and communication is difficult between groups who seem to live in different realities. Wearing “Trust Science, Not Morons” t-shirts, while insisting on “cold, hard facts,” does not help. Those who identify an “anti-science ideology” among anti-vaxxers too easily ignore the quasi-religious belief structures on both sides in the crisis of expertise. Indeed, the arrogance of believers in consensus science probably increases distrust of experts. The modesty associated with STS—regarding the tentativeness of even the best science—is necessary for communication in our current tribalism.

The crisis of expertise can best be analyzed in terms of ideology, by which I mean an inevitable worldview (and not Marxian false consciousness). Each “side” should be understood as quasi-religious believers in their facts, not in the sense of deistic belief, but rather as occupying a community with shared practices and a common language. I draw upon (i) T.M. Luhrmann’s anthropology of religion, which sees religious experience and practice as skills derived from repeated attention to, and training in, a set of beliefs, and (ii) Wittgenstein’s notion of Lebensform (form of life) and the work of those in STS inspired by his later philosophy, to conceptualize the opposing sides in the crisis of expertise as quasi-religious communities. Reconceiving science as tentative, together with recognizing each side’s faith-like commitments, will best serve the goals of persuasive communication with respect to scientific disputes.

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Short abstract:

In Daniel 4, Nebuchadnezzar's transformation is reevaluated through the lens of modern animal to human organ xenotransplantation, blending religious and scientific realms.. This analysis bridges religious belief and scientific progress, disrupting an evolutionary framework of human nature.

Long abstract:

In Daniel 4, the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar is transformed into a nondescript animal and sent to pasture for 7 years in order to learn humility. Scholars debate to what degree Nebuchadnezzar was transformed, ranging from diagnosing Nebuchadnezzar as a lycanthrope, to acknowledging the king’s miraculous transformation. These heuristics have been cast as real and unreal possibilities, or sacred and secular. Yet, the second successful transplantation of a pig heart into a human, casts Daniel 4:16—"let his heart be changed from man's, and let a beast's heart be given unto him"—in a new eerie light. Through the use of genetic engineering, surgical advancements, and pharmaceutical interventions, Lawrence Faucette's pig-to-human heart xenotransplantation challenges traditional boundaries. Like Nebuchadnezzar’s story, it merges the previously separate domains of humans (viewed as an isolated system), animals (considered not in continuity with humans), and the divine (concerning humanity’s reflection of God). The realization of what was once deemed physically impossible beckons a reevaluation of our established categories of religion and science. By reading Lawrence Faucette’s case with the biblical story in Daniel 4, this paper challenges a linear progression of scientific knowledge. I explore the dynamic interplay between religious belief and scientific truth, suggesting that these spheres not only coexist , but influence each other. This analysis aims to illuminate the complex relationships between advancements in medical science, religious narratives, and the conceptual boundaries that define what it means to be human.

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Short abstract:

Here we are fifty years later, and Effective Micro-organisms (EM) have crossed time and space (from Japan to Europe). Today, they are used by small communities of practice, notably in France. The question then arises as to what EM have retained of their religious roots...

Long abstract:

"A little science takes you away from God, but a lot brings you back", reportedly said Louis Pasteur, the 19th-century microbiologist. But do microbiology and religion make good menage, and even more so, do they make good household products?

Our reflection on the relationship between religion, science and technology is based on the case study of EM: a liquid product composed of various micro-organisms with a wide range of applications. A mouthwash, a phytosanitary product or even a household cleaner, this biotechnology was born in the 1980s from the imagination or rather the "epiphany" of Teruo Higa, a horticultural researcher (Xu 2006). The story of this scientist and his invention is intimately linked to a Japanese religious organization (shinshūkyō): the Church of World Messianity and its agricultural movement, Nature Farming (Staemmler 2011).

Nature Farming is one of the alternative movements that emerged alongside the industrialization of agriculture in the 20th century. Like Fukuoka's natural farming, Steiner's biodynamics and Rodale's organic agriculture, they share (among other characteristics) a critique of the vision of science deemed too "materialistic" (Kirschenmann 2010) and propose alternative conceptions of biology, driven by a syncretism of "philosophical, even esoteric speculations, empirical observations and scientific approaches" (Besson 2009).

This paper shows how these movements have given rise, through human acquaintances and shared practices, to the establishment of "bundles" (Schatzki 2016) where EM circulate today, taking advantage of these configurations to spread from continent to continent while adapting to the local scientific, religious, or spiritual context.

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Short abstract:

In the age of social media and AI, a new techno-scientific socially constructed narrative about the future and our physical universe emerged which is both redefining traditional religions but also becoming a “religion for atheists”: the simulation hypothesis.

Long abstract:

The simulation hypothesis, an idea that has emerged in the past decade as one taken seriously in techno-scientific circles, has been called “religion for atheists” by religious scholars, and “science for believers” by scientists. In showing how technoscientific narratives emerge within societies shaped by modern technology, it has also been referred to as the first “meme religion” for virtual natives ( millenials and GenZ), emerging after decades of both atheism and “spiritual but not religious” growing to a significant part of the religious landscape in the west This paper looks at parallels between different religious traditions and narratives and shows how they now have parallels within this new techno-scientific narrative, which has been promulgated by a new techno-optimistic disposition of innovators, techno-philosophers, scientists and other academics (including religious scholars) in the age of social media, video games, transhumanism and artificial intelligence. British transhumanist philosopher David Pearce has, for examples, Bostrom’s simulation paper “…the most interesting argument for the existence of a creator in 2000 years”. This has created a new kind of “technoscientific spirituality” that is a hybrid of traditional religions, technological progress, and scientific epistemologies of the world. This paper hopes to understand how the social construction of science and religion play together, how scientific epistemologies and techno-deterministic views about the future make scientists and technologists views about the future fit into new western, colonialist narratives which may already have started displacing traditional religious narratives, via one of the most prominent technoscientific narratives, simulation hypothesis.