Charles Taylor is one of today's great philosophers, and one that I am personally attached to ever since the appearance in 1975 of his great work on Hegel. My doctoral dissertation was based on the insights of that seminal interpretation, which I still think to be the most plausible account of the the thought of the German metaphysical speculator. The theistic background of Taylor's philosophy is also well-known, and to me especially suggestive and challenging.

Be that as it may, the views that he expressed a few days ago at a Cambridge philosophical conference concerning the relation between science and religion (if these views were reported correctly, for I have not yet read the actual transcript of the proceedings) do call for some comment. He was trying it seems to draw essential parallels between the two fields by pointing to the decisive function of "intuition" in both. And he brought in Kuhn's account of science in terms of "paradigm shifts" in order to argue that ultimately science itself is a matter of "faith".

With all due respect, this is just far fetched. "Intuition" in science, i.e. the sudden conception of a possible hypothesis organizing a given set of data, belongs to the context of discovery and not to the context of explanation. The hypotheses "conjured" in this way presuppose to begin with a thorough familiarity with current theory which has been antecedently tested by experiment and assented to by the scientists working in the field, and secondly it is itself meant to be subjected to these experimental tests so that it might appeal to the scientific community. The mere conjuring by itself does not provide it with any theoretic warrant whatsoever. From this point of view, science is by definition intersubjective (if one is loath to use the currently maligned term objective), which means a public enterprise that aims to establish an encompassing "paradigm" in which all current research takes place. Normal science is unitary in this way, and the anomalies that turn up and which may eventually lead to the overthrow of the theoretical consensus are the results of ordinary experimental methods. Besides there is a huge question whether the "overthrowing" we are talking about involves the complete disabling of the antecedent theoretical framework and its replacement by a new one "incommensurable" with it, or whether the superseded science is somehow incorporated into the new and more far-reaching explanatory perspective. If one considers as paradigmatic the transition from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican cosmological vision, then she/he would be inclined towards the first interpretation. If on the contrary, the supersession of Newtonianism by Einsteinian relativity is privileged, the latter view on paradigm shift might be preferred.

The additional point to be stressed in connection with Kuhn is that he always strenuously insisted that his philosophy of science was not relativistic, because science itself was not relativistic. He may have not been able to argue this with complete success (for whatever it's worth, I personally believe that relativism does creep into his account). But the important consideration is that he did not want to be, or to be considered to be, a relativist. This aversion to relativism is to my mind an essential characteristic of the scientific temper (despite recent well-known attempts to break out of this commitment) -and precisely the point on which the most stringent and uncompromising separation between science and religion must be based.

For religion is, and we must insist that it is relativistic, in its very concept and definition. There is and can never be any unitary framework of religious faith obligatory upon all practitioners in this particular field. There cannot be, and ought not to be either, any systematic procedure of falsifying, disestablishing or overthrowing a given religious paradigm -unless one is bent upon a war of cultures. This relativistic nature of religion we must defend resolutely against religious absolutists of all stripes, who consider of course their version of faith as the only true one. Fortunately (we must hope that)reasonable and decent religious people themselves (again, of all stripes) are opposed to the absolutism of the extremist fringe of their particular religion.

For, after all, religion cannot be understood to be dealing in truth, since with respect to the matters of special interest to it no rational or empirical mode of investigation of any sort is in principle allowed. Its "truths" are just mystical intuitions, of the kind that can never be subjected to any rational test whatsoever -and hence absolutely distinct from "intuition" as it functions in the heuristics of scientific research. These mystical visions may indeed have extreme emotional significance to some individuals or groups, who because of this psychologically comforting function of their faith are moved to attach the name of truths to them. This is an idea that dominated W. James' account of religious experience. But if we are not willing to accede to an epistemology which (as in James) assigns truth value (or "cash value" as he felicitously phrased it) to a proposition merely because it is emotionally soothing and satisfying to someone, then we should reject the subjective, psychological effect on the believer as a proper "empirical test" of the theoretic adequacy of any religious hypothesis. People can and do believe in anything and everything for the purpose of finding their way in the world. But this in no way speaks to the truth content of these fancies. In his Cambridge remarks as I understand them Taylor seemed to be making some such claim: since religious belief is somehow supported by the inner experience of its holders then it qualifies as a form of truth, and in this manner it is epistemologically indistinguishable from scientific theory. I sincerely hope I have misunderstood. But any such utterance, even in an oblique and heavily hedged form, would be a philosophical monstrosity.

The kind of experience that a scientific hypothesis is based upon is qualitatively distinct from psychological dispositions and feelings, of its proponent or any other individual. It is established by public experimental procedures that allow access to it to all concerned and is then accepted (or rejected) on the basis of external, intersubjectively available criteria and outcomes. Religious "truth", on the contrary,is absolutely inner and non-accessible to intrusive strangers, articulated in terms of private meanings and even a private language, the ineffable expressivism of mystic transport. This is tantamount to saying that it is fundamentally inexpressible, and anybody trying to render it in terms of scientific rationalism or empiricism is doing violence to its very nature.

The immense value of religious faith resides precisely in the fact that it safeguards the inviolability of an inner sanctum, a province of the interior self which is the the most precious possession of a human being precisely in the present day and age. But of course Taylor has written the definitive account of that inalienable and irreducible interiority.

For the rest, if we take the issue from the other end, the reduction of science to a variety of religious faith is the cherished enterprise of post-modernist obscurantism, this wrong-headed enterprise of destroying meaning and meaningfulness in existence altogether, this bathetic insistence on the wild power of the irrational to which it is proposed we must succumb. Taylor certainly is not a philosopher of this stripe.