Religion, Science, and Democracy by Stenmark Lisa L

Author:Stenmark, Lisa L.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780739142882
Publisher: Lexington Books

As I argued in the last chapter, authority is paradoxical. It is the necessary foundation for public life and political experiences, providing the stability necessary for the political experiences of freedom, plurality, and discourse, which are in turn vital to a citizenship of collective action and sound judgment. Without an authority there is no world, no judgment, no discourse, and no collective action. But authority simultaneously undermines freedom, plurality, and discourse and thus threatens not only the ability to act collectively; it undermines our ability to make sound judgments by replacing the exchange of opinions, with an authoritative truth that comes to us from a neutral territory, outside of any particular world. This chapter has suggested a more nuanced understanding of public life, one that was both agonistic/performative and communicative/associative. In the following chapters, I will suggest that these two aspects of public life can be understood as political and social, respectively.

Political experiences and activities are at odds with authority, and they are both threatened by it—authority and truth statements undermine public discourse—and in turn threaten it, since one of the characteristics of action is to challenge existing rules, institutions, and the best known authorities. In place of authoritative statements, politics is the space of judgment, which achieves validity not through a single, neutral vantage point, but by a many-sidedness embedded in the plurality of the world. Social experiences, on the other hand, rely on an authoritative foundation, which both reinforces them and is reinforced by them. In Chapters Five and Six, I will explore the political and the social space, arguing that religion and science play a very limited political role, in part because their truth-telling and authoritative status makes them destructive to public discourse and judgment, except in exceptional circumstances. The main public role for religion and science is a social one, in which they are responsible for world-building, and for protecting the realm of politics from the force of authority. In Chapter Eight I will explore the implications of this for understanding the relationship between religion and science, and the implications for the public role of the Science and Religion Discourse.

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