Immanent Transcendance: Science, Religion, and Metaphysics of Nature
This article challenges the narrative that modern Western societies have grown out of religion. The argument is as follows: 1) the narrative of the separation of the spheres of social reality (science, religion, politics, etc.) is a myth; 2) the different spheres are, as in all societies that have appeared in history, encompassed and united by the same metaphysics; 3) this metaphysics is not of the transcendent type as in monotheisms, but of the immanent type (i.e. it refers not to an afterlife but to the world we live in); 4) the heart of this metaphysics is no longer God, but Nature; and 5) the representations of Nature are omnipresent in modernity. These different observations invite us to proceed to new analyses of religion in modernity, through the study of representations of nature and the abandonment of Christian ontological dualism, which systematically opposes metaphysics to nature, as well as transcendence to immanence.