Religion: Important or Insignificant?.
Religion is a very vital and meaningful thing in most people's lives. Each person believes in a type of religion to guide their lives or doesn't believe in it at all. This is an important ethical issue to Americans and world citizens that involves questions of duty, consequences, and moral reconstruction and was highly recognized by many famous philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, John Dewey, Karl Marx, and Augustine.
Dewey begins by claiming that doubt or insecurity creates the quest for certainty. Before there was modern science, religion had an answer to all questions about the world and any doubt was resolved by religious explanations. "Unity of thought and practice extended down to every detail of the management of life; effectiveness of its operation did not depend upon thought. It was guaranteed by the most powerful and reliable of all social institutions."(Pg. 291) This "powerful authority" was religion and it was very useful in sustaining a stable social system in times when security was hard to come by. Religion's function was to provide certainty, but the development of science began eating away at away this single reality. Dewey defined religion as the higher realm, "consisting of the powers which determine human destiny in all important affairs"(Pg. 290). The other significant field of exploration was man's own skill or matter-of-fact insight. Based on the same concept as mathematics, the idea of having a purely logical and rational knowledge became very important. Many people began to believe that this "rational ideal" was exercised in science. Science tended to have "explained" many things that led to a questioning of the importance of religion in people's daily lives. Science uses an experimental procedure in order to draw conclusions about a given situation. The use of the experimental method in order to determine things was changing the way one had looked at the world.