Modern Western history is fascinating precisely because it reveals the human mind forging ahead under this
scientific discipline in the diverse fields of the
physical sciences. It was assumed in the last century, the wake of the revolutionary advances of the physical sciences, that any knowledge outside the fields of the physical
sciences could not be called scientific. It might be termed private belief of faith, but could not be given the status of verified truth which is science.
The official
approach of the West to
religion was of the former type; religion was the product of a final revelation to be accepted in faith and not to be questioned by human reason; it dealt with the supernatural, whereas science dealt with the natural, with reason as its instrument. The approach of the West to both sciences and religion gave rise to a whole host of dichotomies and irreconcilable contradictions such as, natural
versus supernatural, science versus religion, reason versus fait, and secular versus sacred. Western religion, on its part, carried these contradictions further into the field of inter-Christian and Christian-non-Christian relations as well.
This parallel running of religion and science can at best be a short term tactical device based on social expediency. This was the position at the end of the nineteenth century, which saw the failure of religion to suppress emerging science during the previous three centuries, the final triumph of modern science, and the relegation of religion itself to the position of being a dangerous error, to begin with, and a harmless illusion, in the end.
It was unfortunate that the organisation of ignorance and prejudice against science came from the side of religion. But let not the truth be missed that this was only a Western experience; it was a product of the official Western approach to both science and religion. The approach of the great mystics anywhere, was scientific in being experimental and experiential.
Western approach to science in the last
century tended to equate science with physical science and to set up a permanent wall of separation between the world of facts and the world of values, denigrating the latter and impoverishing human life in a fundamental way in the process.
Even though twentieth-century science, in spite of its revolutionary advances, has found, officially speaking, no valid basis for religion, several individual scientists, some of them eminent, acknowledge the limitations of their science to comprehend reality and accept, as valid, the approach of religion, as also of art, to reality, in their own special ways.
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