constructs, science and religion

Lois Shawver ( rathbone@crl.com )
Sun, 16 Jun 1996 13:49:56 -0700 (PDT)

Gary,

Well, I would often feel stifled, myself, if I have to decide if
something is "religion" or "science". Sometimes it would be like trying
to decide if a book is a cup or a chair. I feel a need to stretch to at
least half a dozen categories of knowledge before I feel I can make any
sense of our categories.

In addition to "religion", I would want, at least, "romanticism" (or call
it phenomenology or existentialism -- we would need a name to lump them
together). I think this is the basis of old fashioned (as in Protagoras
as represented by Plato's dialogue) relativism. It is the sense that
human consciousnessness is the measure of all things. It sometimes leads
to a kind of solipsism. People in psychology who work within this realm
talk of "awareness" and discuss the possibility of "empathic reading of
others". There is a lot of this inward introspectionism in psychological
theory and I would be hard pressed where to classify it if I was
restricted to the dichotomy of "religion vs. science".

What do you think?

..Lois Shawver

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