“Thou Shall Not Freeze-Frame,” or, How Not to Misunderstand the Science and Religion Debate

Bibliographic Data

ID20081816
AuthorsBruno Latour (0000-0003-4557-174X, Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, corresponding author)
Year2005
Pages27-48
Publication date2005-05-19
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueScience, religion, and the human experience (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University PressNew York (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/0195175328.003.0003
OpenAlexW2486940036
ISBN9780195175325
LanguageEN
Citations received32
References cited1

This essay aims to subvert typical assumptions about science and religion as a necessary preface to rethinking their relationship. Latour likens religion to love as a performative (vs. merely referential) manner of speech that brings immediacy, not the distant God as is generally assumed. He similarly flips science on the head of general assumptions, arguing that it is concerned not with the immediate stuff of life, but with largely invisible worlds (the supposed domain of religion). He then addresses representation in science and religion, suggesting how science is not the simplistic matter of corresponding words to world, but an unending process of cascading chains of transformation by which matter becomes form. Latour also critiques the traditional notion of religious images as pointing toward the invisible and not being sacred in themselves. Rather, he argues that religious images work to distort and confuse general notions of direct apprehension of the distant and invisible, thus placing re-emphasis on the immediate, a (literal) re-presentation. In both cases, Latour argues for a dynamic notion of truth, cautioning against “freeze-framing” truth as a static world of scientific reference or a static incarnation of the sacred in historical time

Aesthetics · Apprehension · Epistemology · Immediacy · Performative utterance · Political science · Politics · Sociology · History · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

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