The Economics, Science and Religion Project aims to develop an anthropologically sophisticated theoretical account of the relationship between religion and science in the Euro-American, post-Enlightenment context in conversation with historical and philosophical analyses of the academic study of economics. To this end, the project explores contemporary debates among historians and philosophers of economics over whether the construction of economic theories is most properly regarded as a scientific or a religious enterprise. The aim of the project is not to resolve these debates but to leverage them for the sake of constructing a theoretical account of the relationship between science and religion that is attuned to the intertwined religious and scientific dimensions of human inquiry in an era when economic theorizing plays a large role in shaping human interactions, all the way from local patterns of social organization to the global dynamics of national and international politics.
Key personnel: Kirk Wegter-McNelly.
Existing accounts of the religion-and-science relationship—most notably the typology developed by Ian Barbour in the 1980s—tend to construe “religion” and “science” as sharply separated realms battling for cultural supremacy, working for détente, or perhaps striving for reconciliation. Such accounts take…