Stages of Thought: The Co-Evolution of Religious Thought and Science

Description

This book provides a unique exploration of the relationship between religious and scientific thought. Arguing that these two modes of thought are complementary, Barnes delineates the successive stages of the co-evolution of religious and scientific thought in the West, from the preliterate culture of antiquity up to the present day.


PREFACE
M[ore than 20 years ago, when I first began to explore the
ideas described here about long-term cultural cognitive development,
half of the sources listed in the bibliography had not yet been
written. So the research for this book was partly a process of reviewing
older materials, but it was equally an ongoing process of keeping up with
new materials. For a while, as postmodern relativism gained popularity,
the scholarly currents were flowing against any attempts to identify
large-scale cross-cultural similarities. "Thick descriptions" of individual
cultures, one at a time, was the ideal. Nonetheless, even in these studies
of individual cultures, it seemed to me that I could find similarities in the
cognitive styles among otherwise quite different cultures. Fortunately for
my peace of mind, books identifying cross-cultural patterns have been
on the increase. I have drawn upon many of them in both the Introduction
and Chapter I.
Nonetheless, these years of research have given me a consciousness
of my limitations for the task of this book, which is to describe human
cognitive behavior across cultures and through human history. That is
a lot for one person to cover. It is possible only by relying on numerous
secondary sources, which in turn creates the risk of unwittingly accepting
biased or distorted interpretations. I have tried to compensate for that
risk by sampling many relevant primary sources, reading Mohist texts,
the principal Upanishads, Bernard Silvester's cosmology, Newton's
Scholia, and so on. But this is only sampling, and most in translation,
another potential source of error. So I suspect that many a scholar will
find it easy to point out errors and omissions in that scholar's area of
expertise.
What I can best hope for from the scholarly experts in fields not my
own is a willingness to try out the thesis offered here about cultural
cognitive developments; to treat it as an interesting hypothesis worth
exploring, to consider the evidence that makes the hypothesis at least
plausible. Whatever survives such consideration might contribute significantly
to our awareness of what is common to the human family, what
we share in spite of our many differences, what kinds of development
might be available to human societies everywhere, if those forms of development
seem more advantageous than not.

CONTENTS
Introduction 3
1 Culture and Cognition 15
2 Addressing the Critics 34
3 Cognitive Styles in Primitive Cultures 53
4 Archaic Thought, Preliterate and Literate 78
5 The Axial Age and the Classical Style of Thought 93
6 Philosophy, Religion, and Science in Western Antiquity 112
7 The Decline and Recovery of Classical Rationality in the West 132
8 Early Modern Models of Reality in Science and Religion 152
9 The Method of Modern Empirical Science 175
10 Religious Responses to Modern Science 200
Notes 233
Bibliography 298
Index 323

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