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Science and Religion

An Impossible Dialogue

Yves Gingras

Translated by Peter Keating











If there is one truth that history has incontrovertibly settled, it is that religion extends over an ever diminishing area of social life. Originally, it extended to everything; everything social was religious – the two words were synonymous. Then gradually political, economic and scientific functions broke free from the religious function, becoming separate entities and taking on more and more a markedly temporal character.

Emile Durkheim1

Notes