Paul Tillich, Rita Felski, and the Impossible Necessity of Believing in Science

Abstract

ABSTRACT The following article addresses a recent tendency in popular discourse to unite “science” and “belief.” Following a discussion of the theologian Paul Tillich’s distinction between belief and faith, I claim that what “belief in science” actually means is something rather more like “faith in science”—an attitude which must finally, by making science into an ultimate concern, be detrimental to both terms. Rather than abandoning the injunction to believe, though, I propose the adoption of an attitude that is simultaneously critical and absorbed, an attitude akin to the “postcritque” of the literary critic Rita Felski.