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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Faced with what he saw as the danger to society in the ascendancy of natural science and decline in religion and morals, the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim sought the origins of both religion and science in their function in primitive societies as guarantors of social solidarity. In contrast to Frazer, Tylor, and other early anthropologists, he looked for the internal intelligibility of myth and ritual in social terms, rather than regarding them just as failed attempts to state objective truths about the natural world of the same kind as those later arrived at by natural science. One does not have to accept Durkheim's ultimately atheistic identification of God with Society, nor the politically authoritarian consequences which have some-times been held to follow from this identification, to see that Durkheim has raised a set of issues of crucial importance for a discussion of science and the myths and doctrines of religion. For what he has done is to reintroduce a third factor into the perennial and by now rather frustrating dichotomy between science and religion, namely society and the sciences of man. It is some consequences of this approach that I want to explore in this paper.
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