Gerard Bodifée 0202

Question: That was the point I wanted to make: the scientific framework cannot find the truth that is expressed in these things.

Bodifée: But now we have a problem on our hands. While our original aim was to achieve some kind of synthesis of human thought – the universal – we are now making divisions ourselves. We are even saying: this is a religious vision which cannot be formulated in scientific terms...

Question: Yes, but this is also a process. Because the good and the beautiful have been reduced to the true, we need to separate them back out again: we have to reverse the reduction in order to understand that the "Good" exists in and of itself, as something that cannot be scientifically analysed, and the same goes for beauty. Only once this has been done can we integrate them.

Bodifée: A sort of pragmatic perspective: so for the moment we are separating everything out, with the expectation that…

Question: To undo the reduction...

Bodifée: Well, I think so too. Despite our goal of achieving all-inclusive synthetic knowledge, I too am in favour of making distinctions for the time being, and saying that science is a limited way of coming to knowledge, and so such knowledge is valid only in a limited domain. In other words: don’t try using the scientific approach to understand religion, or poetry, or literature, or anything else, because in doing so you will maim your subject and you won’t see its truth.

Question: In a sense you have written as much in your books when you stated that religion and science speak two different languages.

Bodifée: Yes, and I must say that I am not such a fan of the - at first sight beautiful - ideal that the two should get along fine because in the end they talk about the same truth; that there is only one truth, and they each talk about it in their own language. I don’t think this is correct. Science does talk about a truth, but it is a limited truth. It is a truth which can be observed by the senses and understood by reason. And by all means, let it do so, because it speaks about this truth with authority. But let us also realise that this truth is a limited domain, that its validity is limited. So then the task remains to incorporate it at a later stage into a greater whole. And at that point, science will have made its contribution. But it cannot, it may not, have authority over the whole.

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