Khosrow Bagheri Noaparast's article “A Review and Critique of the Book From Secular Science to Religious Science”

The book From Secular Science to Religious Science (Golshani, 1998/2013) is the result of an effort to critique the secular approach to science and to call for a religious approach to science. The author takes two fundamental steps in critiquing the secular approach. First, he argues that science requires direction; a direction that derives from the scientist's worldview. In the course of this argument, the author critiques the positivist view and attempts to show that science has metaphysical presuppositions. Second, science, in the application of its findings, needs ethics, without which it leads to destruction. In the present article, using the method of internal and external critique, it is argued that despite the author's attention to the relationship between science and metaphysics, he has not succeeded in explaining this relationship because he has, on the one hand, related it to the realm of application and ethics, and on the other hand, limited it to the a posteriori addition of a metaphysical framework to science.

This same additive and a posteriori approach has forced the author to acknowledge the neutral nature of science, which itself indicates his incomplete liberation from positivism. The suggestion of the present article is that the appropriate concept of religious science depends on attention to the organic relationship between science and metaphysics. This relationship, despite the conception of Reichenbach and, following him, Stenmark, does not subject science to a reprehensible relativism; although it does entail an appropriate degree of relativism.

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PDF file of this article

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A Review and Critique of the Book From Secular Science to Religious Science by Mehdi Golshani

Author of the article: Khosrow Bagheri Noaparast (Professor at the University of Tehran, Faculty of Psychology and Education, Department of Philosophical and Social Foundations)

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