That is also very much true. I was having trouble coming up with a succinct way to encompass all the problems that are broadly related to this topic, but I could refer back to Pannikar (obviously my favorite theologian
) who sums up a lot of this stuff as changing
mythos or world view. Where mythos is defined as the background set of beliefs and forms of thinking which are unquestioned, and which form the space in which we seek answers, and that shape the form we expect answers to take.
Christianity (and pretty much all traditional religion in one form or another) is bound up culturally with world views which contain elements that are no longer believable for many. Christians are faced with a choice either to hold dogmatically to those views (YEC, for example) or to understand their religions differently. In essence, the challenge is to form a new view of the world. And of course there is a very common way of thinking in Christianity which disavows any posssibility of such a change. That "God is the same yesterday, today, and forever", and that the Bible is inerrant, etc. But I think that view is also ignorant of history, because Christianity has been dramatically shaped by cultural forces outside of itself. Hellenism, Neo-platonism, Scholaticism, the Enlightenment, and etc.
At the same time, if we're talking about the "ambit" of religion I do think there is a danger of creating an abstract distinction (between "religion" and other aspects of human existence or culture) that is a bit unnatural. By which I mean something like: Yes, in times past people have also used religious modes of thought to give the kinds of explanations for phenomena which we understand now to be better answered via science. "The God of the Gaps". There may be any number of reasons why people look towards religion in those spheres, but I don't think it's to the detriment to religion to realize that those specific kinds of questions may be better answered without appeals to traditional authority or revelation.
In a lot of ways I think it is a needed purification. It doesn't make the "religious" dimension of life smaller, but it qualifies it. In my mind this is a good thing, and rather than viewing it as a zero sum game in which science grows and religion shrinks, I think there is a holism to it. There are principles of science which also make good spiritual sense, and vice versa. For example, I read
this Steven Pinker essay last year and I was struck by something from it:
Quote:
In this conception, science is of a piece with philosophy, reason, and Enlightenment humanism. It is distinguished by an explicit commitment to two ideals, and it is these that scientism seeks to export to the rest of intellectual life.
The first is that the world is intelligible... The second ideal is that the acquisition of knowledge is hard.
I'm omitting a lot but what leaps out at me is that both of these are also very much classic principles in religious thinking. I'm not endorsing presuppositional apologetics but I think it's true that the rise of monotheism as a world view informed the idea that reality is intelligible, and that idea informed the development of science. That the acquisition of knowledge is hard is an appeal to epistemic humility, which is very much also a spiritual precept, albeit in differing ways. So for example I would say dogmatically clinging to a pre-Copernican cosmology was as much a religious error as a scientific one, and for many of the same reasons. The same could be said for YEC. This is also why I think an emphasis on apophatism in theology is a good thing, as an antidote to the tendency to absolutize opinions that should not be absolutized. Which is where I started out complaining that "Which God?" wasn't in my opinion the best objection to theism