On Science Vs. Religion: An African-Centered View Explodes Western Myths
On Science Vs. Religion

By Grisso

There is an unfortunate misconception to the effect that religion in general -- traditional African religion in particular -- is in some fundamental sense opposed to science. This is a view that may be sustained only to the extent that one's view of religion is flawed, or one's view of science is wrong, or both.


If spirit is the transcendent reality about who we really are, then it should in principle be possible to learn the laws governing spirit. This learning process must however itself conform to the laws of spirit, so if one takes the approach that would be taken by Western science -- which inevitably would limit itself in its observations only to that which may be reduced to one of the five senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight, and typically at that only to that which may be seen -- it is doubtful that either acknowledgment or sense could be made of spiritual phenomena. Thankfully, our African ancestors were of broader mind. As with people everywhere who live in close proximity to nature, and who attune themselves to its cycles, and to its subtle fluxes of energy, the ancient African came to know a lot about spirit. There is indeed a whole science, in the generic sense deriving from the root word scire = "to know", of spirituality. And the African science of spirituality, in particular, is precursor to all religion and religious systems, as well as to moral and ethical values deriving from a deep understanding of the laws of spirit. It therefore deserves our attention and study. For certain, it is a grave error to dismiss African spirituality as "devil-worship," "fetishism," "witchcraft," "ancestor-worship," "animism," "native superstition," or any of a host of other disparaging descriptions, generally contrasted to the supposed superior enlightenment of Judaeo-Christian-Islamic tenets and faith.

Certain religions have dogma, and assert beliefs based on faith alone. That is not a necessary characteristic of religion, however, properly understood. The etymology of the word "religion" is instructive. Literally it means to "tie back" [to God], from the Latin re (prefix meaning "back", or "again") + ligare (to tie, bind, or yoke). The word "yoga" has the same root meaning. Now, re-yoking oneself to God does not require dogma as a prerequisite. In fact, one could be stranded on a desert island with no knowledge of the pope, or of any organized religion, and do quite well indeed in the religion department, taking the term literally as a re-yoking. The corruption of religion has been so thorough, however, that it is a common and understandable error for most folk to equate religion with hierarchy and dogma, as with all denonimations of the Christian church, Islam, Judaism, etc. True religion, however, is not based either on dogma or received wisdom, at least not necessarily. It is based rather on experience, exactly like science is supposed to be. Reyoking oneself to God is an experience available to all who seek it, and one does not need to be a declared Christian, or Muslim, or anything else, to partake of that experience. When it happens, it is no longer a matter of faith in any received dogma, but a matter of personal knowing.

Likewise, science, as that term is popularly understood in Western culture, is fatally flawed. It shies away from talk of God, yet is on a perpetual search for the Order in the universe that is the work of its Creator. That might possibly have worked except for the fact that the universe, also God, is more than energy/matter; it is also consciousness. And consciousness is not a phenomenon that yields to "scientific" forms of understanding. That would be like trying to reduce sex to a system of describing mathematical equations. No matter how exquisite, the mathematical equations would fail to capture its essence. So too with consciousness. It falls logically within the realm of science, because it is an aspect of the Universe as we know it, but it is quintessentially an aspect of the Universe that falls to religion to explore. It is an indictment of Western Religion -- which shies away from spirit and spiritual phenomena as surely as does Western Science -- that it doesn't even do that very well, substituting mere dogma to make up the lack. It seems a fair conclusion that Western notions of science and religion, both, are lacking. To close the gap in each would be to come to a place where there is no conflict, qua principle, between the two. Science in the true sense ought to encompass all phenomena, not merely those of the energy/matter variety. It ought to encompass the phenomena associated with consciousness as well.

It used to be that way in ancient Kamit, where the priests were the scientists and the scientists were the priests, and their holistic world-view did not permit much of a distinction between the two. It remains so today, that in the African tradition, the African priest is a "a man of science" -- although the converse may no longer strictly hold, given Western accretions -- as it once did in Kamit.

We do not usually remark the cognate relationship between the words theory, and theology. The former belongs to science, and the latter to religion, but as is implied within the root theo- common to both words, both belong in some sense to God. The Kamau were clear on this point, and there is some reason to believe that the Greeks, who learnt both their science and their religion from the Kamau, inherited the words and the concepts, but did not quite grasp the full understanding.

In this connection, I remember participating in a debate held on the internet, on the question to what extent Greece borrowed or stole its ancient learning from Africa. The debate was sponsored by Harper-Collins, publishers of Mary Lefkowitz's (1996) Not out of Africa. (See The Black Athena Debate.) In the discussion, I made reference to the fact that Plato, in the Phaedrus, has Socrates say that he learned that the (Egyptian) god Thoth -- Tehuti -- was the inventor of arithmetic, calculus (my emphasis), geometry and astronomy. This was a quote from Diop's (1981) Civilization or Barbarism, and it occasioned the query what kind of "calculus" was referred to, as it could not, anachronistically, have been the (differential and integral) calculus of Leibniz and Newton. One of the classical scholars in the discussion helped by informing us that the word translated as "calculus," was "logismos," in the original Greek. This prompted me to make the observation that the obvious hypothesis would be that "logismos" might mean "logic," raised to an "-ism", or a formal logic. Hence the "calculus" or "calculation" offered as translation of logismos would seem to refer to logical calculation or reasoning, and since the suffix -ismos has the effect of raising it to a formal sort of logic, it suggests also axiomatic method, or explicit, formal reasoning from premises to conclusion. It is the sort of reasoning with which every student of geometry becomes quite familiar, and we see reference to geometry, also arithmetic and astronomy, in the same sentence that refers also to logismos as having been invented by the Kamau. Surely those who invented geometry must also have had a good grasp of axiomatic method, given the cumulative nature of knowledge, and reasoning, in this field. Yet translators of the original Greek find difficulty calling logismos what it appears clearly to be, instead giving us vague renditions such as "calculus" and "calculation," moreover unqualified. Hence it is not distinguished from calculation of the arithmetic sort, to which reference is made in the same sentence. If I was correct, the quote from Plato was offering evidence, that would credit the Kamau with the invention, not only of arithmetic, astronomy and geometry, which had been the point of the quote, but also, at least inferentially, for axiomatic method, which Western scholars have long held to be the exclusive invention of the Greeks.