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“The Science of Religion”

Chapter 4 examines Vivekananda’s doctrine of the “science of religion,” which involved both a defense of the scientific credentials of religion and a Vedāntic critique of the scientism that was becoming prevalent during his time. Situating him in his late nineteenth-century historical context, the chapter argues that Vivekananda’s attempt to reground religion in spiritual experience was a cosmopolitan response to the global crisis of religious belief. Vivekananda’s science of religion had both a negative and a positive dimension. Negatively, he criticized various forms of scientism, the tendency to overvalue the natural sciences and to deny the existence of realities that cannot be investigated through these sciences. Positively, Vivekananda defended a “wide empiricism,” the view that while experience is the primary source of knowledge, the category of experience encompasses both the sensory and the supersensuous. While sensory experience is the basis of the natural sciences, supersensuous experience is the basis of the science of religion.