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Immanuel Kant, who had located the wellsprings of faith in a sense of con-
tingency, or dependence, or in the possession of a conscience and “moral
intuitions”—in short, in the feelings associated with the human condi-
tion. Some even affi rmed the existence of a special “religious faculty”—a
“religious consciousness”—that enabled human beings to transcend the
realm of the senses. For those Christians, “religious experience” consti-
tuted “the supreme evidence of the faith.” In contrast to science, which
sprang from intellectual curiosity about the interaction of natural phe-
nomena, religion constituted “a mode of thought, of feeling, and of ac-
tion determined by the consciousness of our relations to God.”^17
Reinforcing the conviction that theology addressed different aspects
of human experience than scientifi c inquiry was the work of the Ger-
man theologian Albrecht Ritschl. Ritschl, who made a sharp distinction
between the realms of nature and spirit, held that while religion and the
natural sciences were epistemologically on the same level, they appealed
to different elements of human experience. Whereas the sciences of na-
ture were “disinterested” cognitive enterprises centered on discovering
facts relating to natural phenomena and formulating theories based on
those facts, religion involved the use of the feelings and the will in ad-
dition to the intellect in making “independent value judgments.” Such
judgments, Ritschl believed, differed “in kind from those of theoretical
science.”^18
At the turn of the twentieth century, Ritschl powerfully infl uenced
Anglo American liberal Protestants. William Adams Brown, a professor
of theology at Union Theological Seminary who embraced the Ritschlian
perspective, contrasted science, which provided us with “better under-
standing of nature,” with religion, which dealt with a realm of values—
“the ideals of truth, justice, beauty, and goodness”—that were grounded
in the personhood of God. Similarly, Gerald Birney Smith, a theologian
at the University of Chicago, suggested that whereas science sought to
interpret the natural world “in terms of exact cause and effect, so as to
be able to control the processes of nature mechanically,” religion dealt
with “spiritual meanings,” which he described as “those aspects of reality
which justify man in his desire to establish relations of trust and love and
moral confi dence between himself and the world- process.”^19
This way of thinking, which had the effect of highlighting the salience
of inner experience in the lives of Christians while minimizing the sig-
nifi cance of doctrinal beliefs, received strong support at the turn of the
twentieth century from the work of practitioners in the emerging fi eld
of the psychology of religion. Using questionnaires and autobiographies
to “carry the well- established methods of science into the analysis and