(a) Discuss the relationship between religion and science in modern society. Do they necessarily remain in conflict ? (20…

(a) Religion and science in modern society

Framing: religion and science are two institutionalised systems of knowledge and authority. Classical sociology expected modernity to replace the first with the second.

The displacement thesis:

• Auguste Comte's law of three stages (theological, metaphysical, positive) ends in positive, scientific knowledge;
• Max Weber described the disenchantment of the world (Entzauberung) through rationalisation. In "Science as a Vocation" (lecture, 1917) he also conceded that science can tell us how to act but not what to live for.

The secularisation debate:

• for decline: Bryan Wilson and Steve Bruce on religion's declining social significance; Peter Berger's The Sacred Canopy (1967) on the collapse of religious plausibility structures;
• against: Berger later spoke of desecularisation (1999); Thomas Luckmann (The Invisible Religion, 1967) found religion privatised rather than gone; Grace Davie described "believing without belonging"; José Casanova (Public Religions in the Modern World, 1994) documented the deprivatisation of religion, from liberation theology to religious nationalism;
• Habermas now speaks of a "post-secular" society in which religious and secular citizens must coexist.

Evidence that conflict is not necessary:

• Robert K. Merton's thesis (Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England, 1938): Puritan values of empiricism and utility encouraged early modern science;
• Weber's Protestant Ethic likewise found religious sources of rational conduct;
• Stephen Jay Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria": science deals with facts, religion with meaning and value;
• historians treat the "warfare" model of Draper (1874) and A.D. White (1896) as a nineteenth-century construction.

Evidence that conflict is real where jurisdictions overlap:

• evolution and creationism, bioethics, reproductive and genetic technology, end-of-life decisions;
• Merton's CUDOS norms of science (communism, universalism, disinterestedness, organised scepticism, 1942) clash with dogmatic authority: religion claims revealed certainty, science offers provisional, testable knowledge.

Science is itself a social institution:

• Thomas Kuhn's paradigms show science resting on communities and shared commitments, not pure reason;
• Foucault links knowledge to power;
• Ulrich Beck's risk society shows science producing new uncertainties, which reopens space for faith.

Indian context:

• Nehru's "scientific temper" is a fundamental duty under Article 51A(h) (added by the 42nd Amendment, 1976);
• T.N. Madan ("Secularism in its Place", 1987) and Ashis Nandy argue that secularism sits uneasily in a deeply religious society; Meera Nanda criticises claims of "Vedic science";
• coexistence is everyday: scientists and engineers consult astrologers and perform rituals, and space agency officials offer prayers before launches.

Verdict: conflict is contingent, not necessary. It arises when either side claims jurisdiction over the other's domain. Modern societies more often show differentiation and negotiated coexistence than the replacement of religion by science.

(b) Interpretativism versus positivism

The core divide: positivism treats social reality as objective and law-governed, to be explained causally; interpretativism treats it as meaningfully constituted by actors, to be understood from within.

Positivism:

• Comte's positive stage and the unity of scientific method;
• Durkheim's The Rules of Sociological Method (1895): "consider social facts as things", external and constraining, applied in Suicide (1897), which explained suicide rates by integration and regulation;
• strengths: quantification, causal explanation (Erklären), reliability, replicability and generalisability; in India, the Census, NSS and NFHS reveal patterns such as the child sex ratio that no single account could.

Interpretativism:

• Wilhelm Dilthey distinguished the natural sciences from the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), which need Verstehen;
• Weber defined sociology as the interpretive understanding of social action for a causal explanation of its course, using ideal types;
• Alfred Schutz (The Phenomenology of the Social World, 1932): the life-world and typifications;
• Herbert Blumer's symbolic interactionism: meanings arise in interaction;
• Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology (Studies in Ethnomethodology, 1967) and breaching experiments;
• Clifford Geertz's thick description; Peter Winch (The Idea of a Social Science, 1958).

The case that interpretativism is more effective:

• social action is meaningful, not mere behaviour, so measurement that strips context misses the phenomenon;
• Jack Douglas (The Social Meanings of Suicide, 1967) and J. Maxwell Atkinson (Discovering Suicide, 1978) showed that suicide statistics are themselves the product of coroners' interpretations, which undermines Durkheim's data; Aaron Cicourel made the same point about juvenile justice records;
• it gives validity and depth and recovers the standpoint of the marginalised (Dorothy Smith's feminist standpoint, Dalit and subaltern voices);
• Indian field studies, such as M.N. Srinivas's Rampura, revealed caste as lived rather than as described in texts.

The case against:

• small samples, weak generalisation, little replication;
• researcher subjectivity and the risk of "going native";
• blindness to structure, power and unintended consequences that actors themselves cannot see (Marxist and structuralist critiques).

Beyond the dichotomy:

• Weber himself combined Verstehen with causal adequacy;
• Popper's falsificationism replaced naive positivism;
• Roy Bhaskar's critical realism distinguishes real structures from observed events and actors' meanings;
• Giddens's double hermeneutic (1976): sociology interprets a world already interpreted by its members;
• Norman Denzin's triangulation (1970) and mixed methods combine the two.

Verdict: interpretativism is more effective for meaning, identity and micro-processes; positivism is more effective for patterns, distributions and comparison. Effectiveness depends on the research problem, and the strongest designs combine both.

(c) Durkheim: religion as a social fact

What a social fact is: in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), a social fact is a way of acting, thinking or feeling that is:

• external to the individual;
• constraining;
• general throughout a society;
• sui generis, existing independently of its individual manifestations. It is to be studied as a thing.

Religion as the paradigm case (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912):

• Definition: religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is, things set apart and forbidden. These beliefs and practices unite all adherents into a single moral community called a Church, so religion is collective by definition.
• Sacred and profane: this is a classification that society imposes, not a property of objects. The individual meets it as external and binding.
• Totemism: Durkheim treated the totemism of the Arunta (Aranda) of central Australia as religion's elementary form, drawing on Spencer and Gillen's ethnography. The totem is at once the emblem of the clan and the sign of the god, so in worshipping the totem society worships itself.
• Collective effervescence: the exalted force people feel when the clan assembles is real, but its source is the group. It is objectified as the sacred, so it is produced by interaction yet stands above individuals.
• Rites: negative rites (taboos), positive rites (sacrifice, commemoration) and piacular rites (mourning) periodically renew the collective conscience and solidarity. They constrain individuals and outlive them.
• Categories of thought: time, space and causality have religious and social origins (Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 1903).

Wider relevance: Durkheim expected new "effervescences", citing the French Revolution's cults. Robert Bellah's civil religion (1967) and national rituals such as Republic Day show secular forms of the sacred.

Critique:

• E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Alexander Goldenweiser doubted the totemic evidence and the generalisation from one case;
• the argument is charged with circularity;
• Malinowski stressed individual anxiety rather than society.

For Durkheim, religion is social in origin, object and function. It is society experienced as sacred, which makes it a social fact rather than an individual belief.