Abstract

The issue of hierarchical organization of cognitive practices – revealed by postmodernist critics – still influences on the interaction between science and religion. The formation of new type of coexistence between discourses is important for the problem of correlation between scientific and religious ways of knowing the world. The problem can be considered through the analysis of historical interactions between science and religion in the light of the concept “rationality”. We investigate the question of possible definitions of rationality in different cognitive practices by the comparative and conceptual analysis of the Stepin’s conception of historical change of scientific types of rationality, as well as the ways of relation between science and religion in Haught’s and Barbour’s conceptions. The “classical rationality”, in this analysis, is appeared to be as producing the conflict between science and religion, the “nonclassical rationality” – as founding their independence, and the “post-nonclassical rationality” – as enabling the active interaction between them in different ways. We explain the historical change of types of relation between science and religion from the point of interval-continual approach, which combines the view on continual nature of truth with the idea of truth as revealing exclusively within a certain conceptual and theoretical interval. Thus, the dialectic of rational and non-rational is appeared to be as historical change of types of relation between science and religion. We conclude that the development of the dialectic goes from the hypostatization of epistemological dimension of rationality to the recognition of ontological dimension of rationality. That is why interval-continual approach can be used as еру theoretical basis for a description of possible ways of relationship between science and religion.