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see, i dont know about that opposition, tec.
and i'm not a believer at all in this whole god business.
but if you look at how various christian denominations change over time, they are continually adapting to and being adapted to changing circumstances--the meanings ascribed to the main signifiers that order the tradition are continually being reworked--so a mainline old-school catholic's understanding of this god character would be very different from a charismatic's understanding, if only because of the relative importance of the notion of the holy spirit, what it does and where it does it. this is a pretty big torsion and has only developed since the early 1970s...go figure.
a seemingly unrelated example---i am still struck by walking over the pnt d'alma a bunch of times during the last year i was living in paris and seeing this huge, odd shrine to diana spenser (whatever) develop--lots of little pieces of paper were attached to it, many of which had notes written on them that effectively treated diana as already a saint and asked for her intercession with the god-guy on their behalf.
i think this kind of stuff happens all the time at the local level...differentially as a function of the particular context--but still. so for example in alot of southern hemisphere contexts you have a far more dynamic type of catholicism--particularly at the level of saint-creation--than you have in the north--and FAR more dynamic that the vatican's official understanding of the church to be.
so i'm not sure that the distinction helps separate what scientific knowledge might produce from what "religious" knowledge might produce, nor do i see it designating a helpful general description of the social space occupied by science as over against that occupied by "religion"...what i do see is an index of different political constructions of the two areas--first on your part, tec--and secondly as a reflection of aspects of the internal ideologies of these respective zones of activity (this is a compressed restatement of what i was arguing above--hope it makes sense)....but neither is a description of how either space operates.
you can see a ton of conservatism within scientific communities, particularly if you see them in terms of longer-term history.
you can also see a ton of dynamism in religious organizations/movements.
you can see these areas as engaged in quite similar dependencies on central orthodoxies at some periods and as engaged in accelerated rethinking or overthrowing of them in others.
seems to me that the distinction lay more in the types of claims generated.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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