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31. Science and Religion
- Fordham University Press
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31 Science and Religion The world is a democracy and the principle of irreduction guarantees that, when objects get up in the morning, they all go to work. Similarly, the principle guarantees that, fundamentally , all objects are engaged in the same kind of work. Every object must wrestle with the grace of resistant availability. When a historian sorts through the archives, when rain falls from the sky, when an exegete interprets a text, when a scientist looks in a microscope, when a bird flies, when a mason lays bricks, when a plant bends toward the sun, when a preacher prepares a sermon, they are each doing the same kind of thing. The grace of this work shines on both the just and the unjust. This root parity frames, for Latour, what can be said about the difference between science and religion. According to Latour, both science and religion are engaged in the same work of making objects visible. The visibility of an object depends on the varying degrees of 118 resistance and availability that characterize it relative to a given line of sight. Developing an image depends on optimizing the balance between an object’s resistance and its availability. Objects that are either too resistant or too available will fail to appear. Both the unavailable and the acquiescent tend toward invisibility. In one case, the object is too distant, too opaque, too transcendent. In the other, it is too close, too transparent, too immanent. Science and religion differ in that they address two different kinds of invisibility. Where science aims to illuminate resistant but insufficiently available objects, religion aims to illuminate available but insufficiently resistant phenomena. Science is a thirdperson exposition of the unavailable. Religion is a firstperson phenomenology of the obvious. Science corrects for our nearsightedness, religion for our farsightedness. Mark this distribution. On Latour’s account the field of religion is immanence, the discipline of science is transcendence . This division of labor is relative and conditioned. But with this distribution of work, Latour means to untangle religion from the web of vestigial expectations that now only serve to hamper it. In defending religion, he says, ‘‘I am not longing for the old power of what was in effect not religion but a mixture of everything,’’ politics, science, philosophy , mythology, psychology, art, and so on. (TS 217). Rather than being royalty, it is enough for religion to be one among many ‘‘different types of truth generators’’ or ‘‘regimes of enunciation’’ that help relate and articulate the multitude of objects at work in the world (TF 28). Latour’s originality lies less in his attempt to identify a more modest but still viable role for religion than in his striking redistribution of its responsibilities in relation to science. For Latour, religion and science do have distinguishable magisteria—but these magisteria are anything but Science and Religion 119 [54.242.220.142] Project MUSE (2024-04-10 07:33 GMT) ‘‘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, soullifting , 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, 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...