Positivism and the science of religion
pp. 74-102
in: , Twentieth-century Western philosophy of religion 1900–2000, Berlin, Springer, 2000Abstract
It is difficult to over estimate the impact of science and the empirical method on the study of philosophy and religion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One need only mention the names of Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill and Charles Darwin to get some sense of the growing trend away from the ideal world to the empirical world. The image of the empirical world was also changing. The static universe of the eighteenth century, which had been widely challenged, received a death blow in 1859 with the publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species. The sense of development or evolution, when combined with the growth of the sciences and the rejection of metaphysical inquiry, produced thinkers who looked more to science than religion or speculative philosophy to solve human problems. Some of the leading thinkers during this period were not philosophers in the usual sense of the word. They were physiologists, biologists and social scientists. Some were narrowly positivistic and some were less so.