Ricoeur used this term for the ways in which Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche understood (or misunderstood) religion. The work that these thinkers require for a religious hermeneutics may be compared with what Paul Ricoeur called "the hermeneutics of suspicion". It is not a matter of simply taking note of religious assumptions and cosmic principles and carrying on from there. Our understanding of all phenomena and texts is to be governed by and integrated into the Traditionalist worldview.įor Bultmann, Plantinga, and Nasr, the application of a religious hermeneutics will require considerable work. Everything is to be understood in terms of a grand perennial system of principles. 1įor Nasr, there will certainly be a sacred form of hermeneutics that is informed by the principles of perennial philosophy. But here is a rough rule of thumb: the relevance of a bit of science to this contest depends upon how closely that bit is involved in the attempt to come to understand ourselves as human beings. There is no neat recipe for telling which parts of science are neutral with respect to this contest and which are not, and of course what we have here is a continuum rather than a simple distinction. But many other areas of science are very different they are obviously and deeply involved in this clash between opposed worldviews. Perhaps parts of science are like that: the size and shape of the earth and its distance from the sun, the periodic table of elements, the proof of the Pythagorean Theorem- these are all in a sensible sense religiously neutral.
It would be excessively naïve to think that contemporary science is religiously and theologically neutral. Hence, there will be a specifically religious understanding of social phenomena, but no specifically religious social sciences, although there is a specifically religious hermeneutics of social phenomena. In dealing with historical phenomena, however, Bultmann insists that we cannot limit ourselves to objectifying inquiry. On this view, it would be a mistake to try to apply a religious hermeneutics to the social sciences, for the social sciences, as sciences, are a part of objectifying inquiry while religious hermeneutics requires us to take a stance toward social phenomena that falls outside the realm of science. For Bultmann and van Fraassen, there is no ultimate contradiction between science and religion because science is objectifying inquiry while religion speaks to the attitude one takes toward one's existence in all its subjectivity.
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