and overall well-being of their adherents

and overall well-being of their adherents. In addition, the sciences would help them refine their grasp of the empirical world about which they are, like humans in general, constantly making judgments, predictions, and characterizations. In my vision, the attitude of scientists toward religion would be first of all phenomenological; they would first attempt to describe and understand religious beliefs, ethics, and rituals in their full historical context. But their interest in explaining some of the conditions that give rise to religious phenomena would not be inhibited by either religion or the wider society. There are several different approaches to phenomenology. The perspective that I recommend follows the “critical hermeneutic phenomenology” of Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur advocates beginning the study of religion with a phenomenology — a careful description — of the person’s or community’s words, symbols, metaphors, and narratives used to communicate the meaning of a religious experience or practice. This view assumes that we cannot describe experience directly but rather that experience is always mediated by symbols and metaphors. But Ricoeur’s phenomenology does not stop with a description of these meanings. It builds in a secondary place for science and explanation. It seeks through science to give explanatory accounts of the affects and motivations that humans bring to these words, symbols, and metaphors. If scientists followed Ricoeur’s model, they would understand the importance of beginning with description, be hesitant to skip lightly over initial phenomenological meanings, appreciate yet grasp the limits of explanation, and be reluctant to plunge into speculations, such as those of the new scientific Page |32 atheism, about the ultimate truth or falsity of religious phenomena.” On the other hand, the religions themselves can contribute to the sciences. They can do this by offering hypotheses about how social and religious ideas, behaviors, and rituals can shape experience, even neural processes, often for the good but sometimes not. The religions can offer a more generous epistemology and ontology than science is inclined to find useful for the tight explanatory interests of the laboratory or scientific survey. This too might generate new hypotheses for scientific investigation. These would be some of the ground rules for how a dialogue between science and religion might stimulate a revived religious humanism. Religious Humanisms of the Past To speak of a revival suggests that there have been many expressions of religious humanism in the past when some form of science, philosophy, and religion creatively interacted. I will limit myself to speaking primarily about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. A synthesis between Greek philosophical psychology and Christianity can be found in the use of Stoic theories of desire by the apostle Paul, * the presence of Aristotle’s family ethic — with its implicit psycho-biology - in the household codes of Ephesians and I Colossians, * and the gospel of John’s identification of Jesus with the Platonic and Stoic idea of the pre-existent “Word.” A more intentional religious humanism can be found in Augustine’s use of the neo-Platonic Plotinus, especially in the philosophical psychology of remembrance developed in his Confessions.° But the most dramatic example of a religious HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021278