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Abstract

This chapter explores the nature of one feature of modernity, secularism. This is done primarily with regard to how secularism relates to its dual, religion, and to its frequent colleague, science. I argue that from a practical point of view, religious and secular worldviews are means for fulfilling certain psychological, cognitive, and social goals. Although religions and secular philosophies to some extent succeed in accomplishing those goals, they are both subject to superstitions, myths, and false ideologies. Importantly, the foundations of a secular worldview are epistemically malleable, but religious foundations rarely are—they do not bend so much as tend to break, so that foundational change becomes also denominational change.

Though open to epistemic change, a secular worldview is not necessarily scientific, in that there are irrational secular worldviews and non-empirical secular worldviews. In brief form, the central proposal of this chapter is that a scientific worldview is one that is rational, empirical, secular, and eager for epistemic progress. Science does have certain core principles, but it does not have an unassailable canonical literature.

Although the concepts of ‘religion,’ ‘secularism,’ and ‘science’ diverge, clarifying them opens up the possibility for convergence, where religious, secular, and scientific worldviews may overlap.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As much as it is widely used, it is widely known that the expression “oral literature” is self-contradictory. For the sake of simplicity and brevity, in what follows a terminology where “literary” includes “oral” is reluctantly adopted.

  2. 2.

    See, for example, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (NY: Mariner Books, 2008), which has provoked a wave of responses, such as Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker’s Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins’ Case Against God (Ohio: Steubenville, Emmaus Road Publishing, 2008); and Alister McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine (SPCK Publishing, 2007).

  3. 3.

    (NY: Oxford University Press, 1988).

  4. 4.

    A comprehensive justification of Enlightenment ideals can be found in Paul Kurtz & T. J. Madigan (Eds.), Challenges to the Enlightenment: In Defense of Reason and Science (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994).

  5. 5.

    Richard Bulliet et al., The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History, Brief Edition, 5th ed., vol. I: to 1550 (Boston, MA: Cengage Learning, 2011), 380.

  6. 6.

    Socrates, 469–399 BCE; Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama), c. 563–c. 483 BCE; Confucius (Kongfuze), 551–479 BCE; Zoroaster (Zarathustra), c. 628–c. 551 BCE.

  7. 7.

    For example, besides Buddhism, Confucianism, and Zoroastrianism being all still current, Catholicism has Socratic ancestry via the Islamic-Aristotelian heritage, as do scientific and skeptical worldviews; while Islam has a mix of Arabian, Hellenistic, Jewish, and Christian influences.

  8. 8.

    Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 98.

  9. 9.

    Peter Watson accepts the idea of an axial age. In Peter Watson, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud (NY: Harper Collins, 2006), 107.

  10. 10.

    Professor Amir Hussain of Loyola Marymount University kindly brought to my attention the following work edited by Robert N. Bellah: The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 266–267 and 239–240. In it there is some commendation of the axial age hypothesis, but also strong criticism, particularly for cases that do not fit the Semitic and Indo-European traditions, such as the Chinese and African cases.

  11. 11.

    Auguste Comte, Cours de Philosophie Positive (1864). Cited in: Frederick C. Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. IX: Modern Philosophy: From the French Revolution to Sartre, Camus, and Lévi-Strauss (New York, NY: Image, Doubleday, 1994), 78.

  12. 12.

    This might lead to accusations of a Eurocentric bias. To respond in the manner of a reductio ad absurdum: if a mathematically calculated calendar, physically constrained energy requirements, chemically synthesized medications, biomedically aided fertilization, and historically structured institutions and values are confined to Europe, then this is Eurocentric. Yet universal truths and universal phenomena, such as those of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and historical sociology, by fact of being universal, are not Eurocentric. Instead, concentrating on the integration of these disciplines and their relationship to human development is rather Earth-centric. Certainly, there are stark cultural differences and alternative social trajectories, but equally there are common denominators. For a well-researched analysis of human historical commonalities, see J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History. New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003.

  13. 13.

    To be precise, mental and emotional states or events are states or events of the (central) nervous system, in interaction with the endocrine system. For an exposition from a philosophical standpoint, see, for example, Mario Bunge, The Mind–Body Problem: A Psychobiological Approach (Oxford: Pergamon, 1980).

  14. 14.

    Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (NY: Penguin Books, 2012), 61 and 116.

  15. 15.

    James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 28.

  16. 16.

    Ṭalāl Asad, Jīnālūjiyā al-Dīn, trans. Muḥammad ʻAṣfūr (Beirut: Dār al-Madār al-Islāmī, 2017), 9.

  17. 17.

    It “is inevitable that a modern society will have an increasing number of religions.” In Giuseppe Giordan and Enzo Pace, Religious Pluralism: Framing Religious Diversity in the Contemporary World (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2014), 50.

  18. 18.

    See, for example, Martin Mahner and Mario Bunge, Foundations of Biophilosophy (Berlin-Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 1997), 100.

  19. 19.

    William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (NY: Penguin Books, 1985), 31.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., 3.

  21. 21.

    Quoted in André Comte-Sponville, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (NY: Viking, 2007), 3.

  22. 22.

    By stressing the social dimension of religion, Durkheim aims to in a sense regularize religion, to de-emphasize its difference with the secular—the sacred in Durkheim’s view touching all aspects of social life. (I owe this understanding of Durkheim’s view to an anonymous reviewer.)

  23. 23.

    Comte-Sponville, Atheist Spirituality, 13.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., 19.

  25. 25.

    W. A. Craigie and Henry Bradley, A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, ed. Sir James A. H. Murray, vol. VIII Q, R, S-SH (London: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1914), 410, definition 5, https://bit.ly/2uKQqtR.

  26. 26.

    John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 3.

  27. 27.

    This phrase is a device frequently used by Nicholas Rescher in his Philosophical Reasoning: A Study in the Methodology of Philosophizing (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 2.

  28. 28.

    Mario Bunge, Exploring the World (vol. 5 of his Treatise on Basic Philosophy, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1983), 90–91.

  29. 29.

    Mario Bunge, Understanding the World (vol. 6 of his Treatise on Basic Philosophy, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1983), 231.

  30. 30.

    Bunge, Understanding the World, 232.

  31. 31.

    Indeed also ordinary scientific methods—considering that many religiously inclined scientists have looked upon their scientific endeavors as ways of exploring what they view as the wonders of God’s creation.

  32. 32.

    Walter Kaufmann, in his Critique of Religion and Philosophy (NJ, Garden City: Princeton University Press, 1978, 101 and 103), proposes a somewhat different three-dimensional definition, addressing “practice, feeling, and belief.” These three dimensions are “voluntaristic,” “affectivistic,” and “intellectualistic.”

  33. 33.

    Some of the world’s most amazing religious performances are the circular dances performed by Muslim Sufi “whirling dervishes.” Here, “the movement of the soul in its approach to God is sometimes, though rarely, described as heavenly dance.” Such dance “symbolized the state of mystical union as ‘a dance with God.’” Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 183 and 182.

  34. 34.

    For one account of such contribution see Shems Friedlander, The Whirling Dervishes: Being an Account of the Sufi Order Known as the Mevlevis and Its Founder the Poet and Mystic Mevlana Jalalu’ddin Rumi (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992).

  35. 35.

    Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 8.

  36. 36.

    John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 24.

  37. 37.

    Andre Comte-Sponville, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, trans. Nancy Huston (New York, NY: Viking, 2007), 125.

  38. 38.

    Particular religions, or doctrines in one religion, that anticipate the imminent disastrous end of the world and the hopelessness of the human predicament do not have psychological benefit in the ordinary sense as a goal—for example, their psychological goal may be fear, but with this leading to some action of supposed benefit to an afterlife. Such doctrines are not considered further in this book.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., 26.

  40. 40.

    Feuerbach, The Essence of Religion, 66.

  41. 41.

    Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 174.

  42. 42.

    In this regard, Bruce Trigger (1937–2006) says, “Temples were the dwelling places of deities or places where contact could take place on a regular basis between the supernatural and designated representatives of human communities rather than places for congregational worship” and “Public rituals involving large numbers of celebrants drawn from all classes were performed at various times of the year in plazas adjacent to the central temples of each city, as well as at temples and shrines elsewhere in the city and in the surrounding countryside.” In Bruce G. Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 565 and 509.

  43. 43.

    Comte-Sponville, Atheist Spirituality, 12.

  44. 44.

    “Enthusiastically pro-Nazi, the movement sought to demonstrate its support for Hitler by organizing itself after the model of the Nazi party, placing a swastika on the alter next to the cross, giving the Nazi salute at its rallies, and celebrating Hitler as sent by God.” In Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 3.

  45. 45.

    Comte-Sponville, Atheist Spirituality, 18.

  46. 46.

    “Thou shalt have no other gods before me […] Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments” (Deuteronomy 5:7–10).

  47. 47.

    “People who attend religious services weekly or more are happier (43% very happy) than those who attend monthly or less (31%); or seldom or never (26%). This correlation between happiness and frequency of church attendance has been a consistent finding in the General Social Surveys taken over the years.” In “Are We Happy Yet?” (Pew Research Center: A Social Trends Report, February 13, 2006, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2006/02/13/are-we-happy-yet/), 6.

  48. 48.

    For example, Bunge is opposed to charity. Although Bunge gives a nod to “the admirable large-scale work done by some foundations,” he believes that those who can work should work and should be paid a living wage for their efforts. Those who cannot work should receive social assistance, which he distinguishes from charity. The motto is “Neither alms nor rents nor spoils.” See Mario Bunge, Political Philosophy: Fact, Fiction, and Vision (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction, 2009), 95, 352.

  49. 49.

    When claims of benefit from various aspects of religion obtain empirical corroboration, they tend to get popularized—for example: “Religion can combat bad behavior as well as promote well-being. Twenty years ago Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist, found that black youths who attend church were more likely to attend school and less likely to commit crimes or use drugs. Since then a host of further studies, including the bipartisan 1991 National Commission on Children, have concluded that religious participation is associated with lower rates of crime and drug use.” In John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2010), 147.

  50. 50.

    Josiah Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy: A Critique of the Bases of Conduct and of Faith (Boston: New Mifflin and co., 1897), 4.

  51. 51.

    James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 35.

  52. 52.

    James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 16.

  53. 53.

    Feuerbach, The Essence of Religion, 42.

  54. 54.

    This verse is part of a larger Koranic chapter. In it, believers fight tyrants or oppressors who ignore justice and—the matter at hand here—the natural course of things. Eventually they face godly punishment for their sins: the heavens and earth, as godly agents, punish them with catastrophes, without any regrets (Qur’an 44:29). One of the best translations of the Qur’an is Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2015).

  55. 55.

    There are a variety of views on the status of myth in human culture, and therefore of its meaning. French structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung interpreted human mythology as a deep structure of cross-cultural narratives representing archetypes of the universal human psyche or mind. A detailed presentation is in Gilbert Durand, The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary (Brisbane: Boombana Publications, 1999), 416–417. If myth is taken in its literal sense, then it is merely an allegorical story reformulating a grand cosmological or historical event, without factual exactness—see the myth entry in Mario Bunge’s Philosophical Dictionary (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2003), 189. For a synthesis of these respectively speculative and critical lines of thinking, see Michael Shermer, How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God (Holt Paperbacks; 2nd edition, 2003), 151.

  56. 56.

    Feuerbach, The Essence of Religion, 45.

  57. 57.

    Benedictus de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise. Trans: Samuel Shirley and Seymour Feldman (Hackett Publishing, 2001), 3.

  58. 58.

    Michael R. Matthews, Feng Shui: Teaching About Science and Pseudoscience. Springer, 2019.

  59. 59.

    I thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter and for bringing to my attention some of the recent literature on secularism.

  60. 60.

    Steve Bruce, Secular Beats Spiritual: The Westernization of the Easternization of the West (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017), 15.

  61. 61.

    Bruce, 16.

  62. 62.

    José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 15.

  63. 63.

    David Martin, Religion and Power: No Logos without Mythos (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), 11. Emphasis in the original.

  64. 64.

    David Martin, Secularisation, Pentecostalism and Violence: Receptions, Rediscoveries and Rebuttals in the Sociology of Religion (New York, NY: Taylor & Francis, 2017), 38. Emphasis is mine.

  65. 65.

    Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 268.

  66. 66.

    Ibid., 54.

  67. 67.

    Ibid., 2.

  68. 68.

    Ibid., 2.

  69. 69.

    Ibid., 3.

  70. 70.

    Ibid., 55.

  71. 71.

    As opposed to newly discovered, such as the Dead Sea scrolls.

  72. 72.

    A philosophical treatment of Christian hermeneutics is found in the first chapter of Jean Grondin’s Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). For a scholarly work on Islamic interpretive schools, see David R. Vishanoff, The Formation of Islamic Hermeneutics: How Sunni Legal Theorists Imagined a Revealed Law (New Haven, Connecticut: American Oriental Society, 2011).

  73. 73.

    Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What is Scripture?: A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 237. Emphasis in the original.

  74. 74.

    Karen Armstrong, The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts (New York, NY: Knopf, 2019), 454.

  75. 75.

    Armstrong, 466. Emphasis is mine.

  76. 76.

    Some Jewish intellectuals accept even the most radical foundational divergence of all: they “don’t believe in God—thus, they are atheistic—but still consider themselves to be Jewish.” In Comte-Sponville, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, 33.

  77. 77.

    “Not only can the plain facts of his [Jesus’] life be supposed to make historical sense only when seen within first-century Jewish society. More importantly, we can hope to understand how his disciples came to see him as Son of God and Messiah only if, like them, we try to interpret his life and work in the framework of Jewish history and Jewish views of history.” In Peter J. Tomson, “Jesus and His Judaism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jesus, ed. Markus Bockmuehl (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 25.

  78. 78.

    The translation is mine, from al-Mawsū‘ah al-‘Ālamiyyah lil-Shi‘r al-‘Arabī, Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, Poem: 4610. Available at http://www.adab.com/modules.php?name=Sh3er&doWhat=shqas&qid=4610&r=&rc=0

  79. 79.

    The first line is my translation. The rest is from Muḥyī’ddin Ibn al-Arabī, The Tarjuman al-Ashwaq: A Collection of Mystical Odes. tr. Reynold A. Nicholson (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1911), 68.

  80. 80.

    There are numerous smaller strands, such as Beta Israel (the group’s own name, formerly referred to by others as “Falasha,” a term now recognized to be an Amharic pejorative), Karaite, Malabari, and Yemenite.

  81. 81.

    Comte-Sponville, Atheist Spirituality, 40.

  82. 82.

    [Uncredited]. “Catholic bishops back limited relaxation of celibacy rule.” BBC News, October 27, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-50197296.

  83. 83.

    James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 6.

  84. 84.

    In Islam, this can be seen in electing a political-religious leader for the nation, Abu Bakr (632–634 CE), after the death of the Prophet; inscribing of the oral Koran in one volume; and in the times of the second successor, ‘Umar (r. 634 CE–644 CE), the banning of the practice of mut‘ah, temporary marriage. In Abdelmadjid Charfi, Islam: Between Divine Message and History, trans. David Bond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 17, 50, and 75.

  85. 85.

    Dewey, A Common Faith, 6.

  86. 86.

    Feuerbach, The Essence of Religion, 43.

  87. 87.

    Tarif Khalidi, An Anthology of Arabic Literature: From the Classical to the Modern (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 10.

  88. 88.

    Dewey, A Common Faith, 26.

  89. 89.

    Comte-Sponville, Atheist Spirituality, 49.

  90. 90.

    Brand Blanshard, Reason and Belief: Based on Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews and Noble Lectures at Harvard (London: Allen & Unwin, 1974), 555. Emphasis is mine.

  91. 91.

    Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (NY: Free Press, 1961), 268.

  92. 92.

    At this point, an anonymous reviewer objected that a secular philosopher is no neutral observer who just looks at the “evidence” but is instead deeply embedded in various contexts: political, social, religious, economic, and more. Clearly, over the ages and still today, secular philosophers have lived and worked in diverse contexts: capitalist and communist, liberal and fascist, democratic and authoritarian, monocultural and multicultural, religious and atheist, and more. Yet they are all secular philosophers. Out of all their divergences, there must then be some common quality or qualities that make them all identifiable as secular. The subsequent characterization of secularism is the proposed solution to this puzzle.

  93. 93.

    Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown (NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), 892.

  94. 94.

    Comte-Sponville, Atheist Spirituality, 18.

  95. 95.

    Just like the Near Eastern prophets, Socrates is reported to have heard supernatural voices, and to not fear death, for believing the gods would protect him. Would such allegiances to the supernatural disqualify him from being secular? This is a good occasion to remind the reader that an identification of secularism with atheism or the like is never adopted here. It has already been argued that the innovative founders of the Abrahamic religions—Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad—should be included in the secular realm precisely for their creative practice of foundational change, in order to achieve psychological, cognitive, and social goals. By Plato’s account, Socrates’ journey along the philosophical path was one ever engaged in overturning prevailing certainties. By that measure, he counts as secular. For a fascinating account, see John Herman Randall, Plato: Dramatist of the Life of Reason (New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1970).

  96. 96.

    Dewey, A Common Faith, 26.

  97. 97.

    Ibid., 26.

  98. 98.

    Ibid., 25.

  99. 99.

    For further information, see William Barrett’s Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (NY: Anchor Books, 1990).

  100. 100.

    Mario Bunge, Emergence and Convergence: Qualitative Novelty and the Unity of Knowledge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 286.

  101. 101.

    Mario Bunge, Chasing Reality: Strife over Realism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006) 19, 31, 75, and 211.

  102. 102.

    Bunge, Exploring the World, 90–91; Understanding the World, 197–206.

  103. 103.

    Richard K. Merton, The Sociology of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).

  104. 104.

    One might expect the scientific method to be, precisely, the only method used in science, but there are others, in particular statistical or epidemiological methods. An explanation of the difference is provided in a somewhat technical article by Paul W. Holland, “Statistics and Causal Inference,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, no. 81 (1986), 945–960.

  105. 105.

    Mario Bunge, Finding Philosophy in Social Science (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 322–23.

  106. 106.

    The goals of Science itself are generally taken to be purely cognitive, as distinct from Technology, whose goals are practical. Briefly, science uses the scientific method, typically combined with technological means, to achieve the cognitive goal of understanding the world; while technology uses scientific and technical knowledge to achieve practical goals. Along the way, scientists may develop new technologies while technologists may develop new science. The characterization proposed here can be seen as asserting that the worldview of Technology is scientific. See also Mario Bunge, Epistemology and Methodology III: Philosophy of Science and Technology, Part II: Life Science, Social Science and Technology (vol. 7, part II of his Treatise on Basic Philosophy, Dordrecht: Reidel), 198.

  107. 107.

    This is in contrast with the view of Mario Bunge, who sees the fundamental characteristic of religion as being “a system of unstable beliefs in the existence of one or more supernatural beings and the accompanying practices, mainly worship and sacrifice.” In Mario Bunge, Philosophical Dictionary (Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus, 2003), 249.

  108. 108.

    Comte-Sponville, Atheist Spirituality, 9.

  109. 109.

    A strong case for this argument is made in Ian G. Barbour’s Religion and Science (New York: Harper One, 1997).

  110. 110.

    Newton, the iconic founder of modern physics, says, for example: “the true God is living, intelligent, and powerful; from the other perfections, that he is supreme, or supremely perfect. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient, that is, he endures from eternity to eternity, and he is present from infinity to infinity; he rules all things, and he knows all things that happen or can happen.” In Sir Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, A New Translation, trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 941.

  111. 111.

    Bunge, Philosophical Dictionary, 205.

  112. 112.

    Bunge, 205.

  113. 113.

    For example, the desire to find the direction of Mecca for prayer, and to calculate the timings of holy days, spurred key developments in trigonometry (‘ilm al-muthallathāt) and the science of the calendar. Although much trigonometry goes back to ancient times, Islamic mathematics substantially extended and modernized it. See, for example, George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2011), 186.

  114. 114.

    James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 31–32.

  115. 115.

    Martin Mahner and Mario Bunge, “Is Religious Education Compatible with Science Education?” In Science and Education, 101–123, 1996.

  116. 116.

    Mario Bunge, “In Praise of Intolerance to Charlatanism in Academia,” In P. R. Gross, N. Levitt, and M. W. Lewis, eds., The Flight from Science and Reason (NY: New York Academy of Science), 96.

  117. 117.

    Comte-Sponville, Atheist Spirituality, 18.

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Obiedat, A.Z. (2022). Religious, Secular, Scientific. In: Modernity and the Ideals of Arab-Islamic and Western-Scientific Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94265-6_3

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