Meaning and Religion: Exploring Mutual Implications

Within existential philosophy, an individual develops a model of the world through experience and rationality. This model of the world can be disrupted by experiences that challenge the validity of an individual's model. The Meaning Maintenance Model has shown that individuals respond to this disruption through the processes of revision, reinterpretation, and reaffirmation. In the construction of a model of the world, an individual is free to construct his or her own, unique model of the world. However, humans exist within a society. Society contributes to the individual's construction of a model of the world by providing knowledge from both religious and secular sources that can be incorporated into the individual's model. In the following paper, I will describe how individuals construct meaning from societal sources and why meaning derived from religious sources of meaning are more resistant to the disruption of meaning that the Meaning Management Model describes.

2009

This thesis explores religious faith from an integrated interdisciplinary standpoint that draws heavily on Georges Bataille's religious theory, Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytical framework (as distilled through the lens of Slavoj Žižek), and Pascal Boyer's evolutionary model of cognitive inference systems, in order to recast Paul Tillich's faith dynamics in terms of a contemporary critical theory of religion. Focusing on Tillich's understanding of faith as engaging with a depth of meaning, a hypothesis is presented that casts religious faith as a complex natural human phenomenon that functions as a species of generative human 'depth of meaning' engagement within particular hermeneutical frameworks with a focus on the 'Other' (transcendence / the infinite) that were born from the communal symbolic-linguistic system of meaning making that arose with human evolutionary development as a by-product of several cognitive inference systems and as a result of a lost intimacy with immanence. This hypothesis is explicated throughout the thesis in defence of a non-religious analysis of religious faith which is non-reductive and which avoids caricature. Tillich's understanding of faith as the central phenomenon in the personal life of human beings is recast as one form of human 'depth of meaning' engagement, with religious faith understood as providing a mechanism for accepting a certain intra-systematic coherence and a volitional (trust) commitment to an intra-systematic being (God) or principle deemed extra-systematic but inscribed within the particular symbolic universe in which the interpretive framework operates. The historical dialectical hypothesis developed throughout the thesis is tested against contemporary manifestations of religious faith, particularly of a violent geo-political nature, and various implications are drawn out that demonstrate the fecundity and importance of the hypothesis, particularly in terms of a point of departure for further research.

Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 2018

This paper focuses on two contrasting approaches to the theory of linguistic meaning and asks how they color a range of issues of interest to scholars of religion. The so-called truth-conditional approach makes truth basic. It trades on the thought that we sometimes or perhaps often know what someone has said when we know what it would be for what she has said to be true. The other approach pegs meaning to how expressions and sentences are used in communicative situations. Dummett and Davidson are front and center. Davidson is of course in one sense a champion of truth-conditional semantics, but, over the issues I have in view, his case is instructively mixed. This discussion leads us toward an account of linguistic meaning which elevates over truth a family of concepts associated with use, including verification, justification, and pragmatic success.

Literary Herald, 2022

In this paper, a modest attempt has been made to expound and evaluate the criterion of meaning and its relevance in the domains of philosophy of science and the philosophy of religion. The need for a medium of communication which is referred to as a "language" is equally felt in the domains of science, religion, aesthetics, and morality. No single theory of meaning can universally apply to all the domains of life. Hence, there remains the problem of finding and applying one criterion of the meaning of language. Language is very much elastic, and it can be used in many ways. Hence, it leads to diversified functions of words both in science & religion. Adumbrated views regarding the criterion of meaning gather momentum as a key concept in philosophies of science and religion.

2020

In the modern age, religion seems to have abandoned its role as a symbol of meaning to the extent that, conversely, the scientific, rational view of the world has taken over this task. Apparently, there is an exclusive relationship between the two that makes a peaceful and equal coexistence more or less impossible. In this volume of the series "Philosophy and Psychology in Dialogue", Martin Klüners and Jörn Rüsen analyse the role religion plays in human existence and life. While Klüners interprets religion historically as a "pre-scientific" science of the soul and sees the antagonism between the reality principle and the pleasure principle as causally responsible for the opposition between reason and faith, Rüsen locates religion within historical thinking. Like history itself, religion appears as a significant factor in the cultural orientation of human life practice.

2013

Cultural Studies of Science Education, 2013

Epistemological constructions are central considerations in vivisecting an expressed conflict between science and religion. It is argued that the conflict thesis is only meaningful when examined from a specific socio-historical perspective. The dialectical relation between science and religion should therefore be considered at both a macro and micro level. At the macro level broad changes in the meaning of science and religion occur; whereas at the micro level individuals immersed within particular expressions of these concepts socially construct, re-construct, and appropriate meaning. Specific attention is given to expressions of meaning surrounding sacred texts in this dialectical relation. Two ontological forms of meaning are examined through a qualitative content analysis of 16 interviews with individuals from various religious affiliation and academic attainment. A monistic ontology constructs textual meaning as facts that have the qualities of being both self-evident and certain. Potential tension arises with scientific discourse given empirical evidence may either confirm or conflict with scriptural interpretation. The pluralistic ontology constructs textual meaning with multiple categories, which in turn have the qualities of being mediated by human consciousness and uncertain. The science-religion dichotomy appears to be less susceptible to conflict given the uncertainty embedded in this construction of scriptural meaning. This paper implies that truth as correspondence may not necessitate the conflict thesis.

Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 2005

One reasonable response to the vast enterprise of comparing religions, their institutions and the behaviour of their followers is a nagging doubt: after all this, is there much difference among the world religions, or indeed between the world religions on one hand, and the innumerable polytheistic and pagan forms across the planet? Recent work in cognitive psychology applied to religion, especially that of Boyer and Atran (Boyer, 2001; Atran, 2003), both strongly influenced by Sperber (Sperber, 1996), has made a strong case for the claim that practices which, taken together, have come to be classified and bundled together as "religious", can be explained in terms of human evolution. Part of their case rests on the observation of constants across vast distances in time, space and language, while another part rests on experimental evidence from cognitive and evolutionary psychology. In this paper I explain why social scientists cannot afford to ignore this work. 2 Social scientists tend to regard the use of evolutionary explanations of social phenomena with much distrust. Indeed, sociology itself as a discipline was built to a large extent on the rejection of versions of evolution. The reasons for this are several. Firstly, the word refers to a process whereby an institution or set of practices are suitable to the functioning of society-it is therefore regarded as a functionalist argument and vulnerable to the usual criticisms of functionalism-among which are functionalism's alleged prejudice in favour of the preservation of order over change, and its use of effects to explain causes. Secondly, because of the perverse, and perverted, history of social Darwinism and the importance of hostility to it in the history of sociology, evolution carries connotations of a concern with differences among human racial categories, even though these connotations are quite foreign to Darwinian evolution (if not precisely to The cognitive approach to understanding religion Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 131-132 | 2006

2009

This study examines philosophically the main theories and methodological assumptions of the field known as the cognitive science of religion (CSR). The study makes a philosophically informed reconstruction of the methodological principles of the CSR, indicates problems with them, ...