“Write short note: Religious and scientific world views.” (1983)
A world view is a shared framework for explaining reality and guiding action. The religious world view interprets the world through the sacred and the supernatural; the scientific world view interprets it through natural causes established by observation and testing. Classical sociology first set them in succession, then in coexistence.
Criteria-wise contrast
| Criterion | Religious world view | Scientific world view |
|---|---|---|
| Source of truth | Revelation, scripture, tradition, charisma | Observation, experiment, logical inference |
| Object | Ultimate meaning, the sacred, salvation | Empirical regularities, causes |
| Attitude to doubt | Faith; doubt as a threat | Organised scepticism; doubt as method |
| Status of knowledge | Absolute, often unchanging | Provisional, open to revision |
| Social form | Moral community of believers, ritual | Professional community, peer review |
| Answers | Why and what for | How |
Classical accounts
- Evolutionary view: Auguste Comte‘s law of three stages and James George Frazer‘s sequence of magic, religion and science treated science as religion’s successor.
- Émile Durkheim (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912) argued that the basic categories of thought, such as time, space and causality, were born in religion. Science inherits religion’s cognitive role but cannot replace its role of binding a community in ritual.
- Max Weber (“Science as a Vocation”, 1919) described disenchantment: in principle everything can be mastered by calculation. Yet science cannot say how we should live, so questions of meaning remain with religion and values.
- Vilfredo Pareto (The Mind and Society, 1916) classed science as logico-experimental action and religion as non-logical action, driven by lasting sentiments (“residues”) and dressed in changing justifications (“derivations”).
- Bronisław Malinowski (Magic, Science and Religion, 1948) found Trobriand islanders using sound empirical technique in lagoon fishing and magic only for dangerous open-sea voyages. Every society has both world views, each for its own domain.
Blurring the boundary
- Robert K. Merton (1938) showed that Puritan values encouraged the rise of experimental science in seventeenth-century England.
- Thomas S. Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962) showed that normal science rests on a paradigm accepted on trust, and that paradigm shifts resemble conversions. Science too is a community of shared belief.
Indian illustration
- Article 51A(h), added by the 42nd Amendment (1976), makes developing the scientific temper a fundamental duty.
- Yet the two world views are compartmentalised rather than exclusive: a day before the Chandrayaan-3 launch in July 2023, a team of Indian Space Research Organisation scientists offered prayers at the Tirupati temple with a model of the spacecraft. Milton Singer had found the same compartmentalisation among Madras industrialists.
Conclusion
The two world views differ in method and in the questions they answer, but they are not simple rivals. Science has taken over religion’s explanation of nature, while religion keeps its hold on meaning, morality and community. Modern societies, India most visibly, live with both at once, each governing a different sphere of life.