Lecture XI (Nr. 0104)

[101] 1) The first step is Religion and the Natural sciences--what the word "science" means in the narrower sense. 2) The next will be Religion and History--historical research and historiography. 3) The third step will be Religion and Philosophy. You may ask whether there is nothing else but these three involved in the subject "Religion and the Cognitive Realm." The reason I don't go, for instance, into social sciences here, including psychology, is that in these realms it is not the special method which puts us before the problem Religion and Cognition, but it is the content, and from the point of CONTENT, they will come into the picture definitively and intensively; but from the point of method, it is enough to compare religious knowledge with scientific knowledge, with historical knowledge, from the point of view of the methodological approach in these three realms. Therefore our first consideration goes at the problem of religion and the cognitive realm. When I go to the question of religion and science, then something happens to our emotional reaction. We all--and our whole culture--have a very definite and very disturbing remembrance of the past, through which we went in the last thousand or 2000 years--or even 3000 years. Our historical memory is not only a matter of historical knowledge in the theoretical sense, but it is the matter of something which has formed our subconscious, and therefore produces emotional reactions all the time, when we come to this subject religion-and-science. The reason is that for centuries, or for millennia, more exaclty [sic.], deadly conflicts took place between these two realms of man's spiritual creativity, and that fear and hate are still in the depth of most people today, on the basis of these conflicts. You can test that any time, when you speak to somebody, an ordinary man who is not philosophically educated, but you speak about Science and the Church, or something like that, you will immediately feel that there is a scar, that something has happened, even to this man, although it actually happened perhaps hundreds of years before his birth.