Durkheim’s Perspective on the Intersection of Religion and Science

The idea that religion and science are locked in eternal conflict is deeply embedded in popular culture – think of Galileo’s trial or the ongoing debates over evolution. But Émile Durkheim, one of sociology’s founding figures, rejected this framing entirely. For Durkheim, religion and science are not enemies. They are, at a deeper level, two expressions of the same human impulse: to classify the world, make sense of it, and bind society together. Understanding his argument reveals something fundamental about how human knowledge itself developed.

Durkheim’s view of religion as a classification system 🔗

Most people think of religion primarily in terms of belief in God or the supernatural. Durkheim deliberately set this definition aside. In his landmark 1912 work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, he defined religion as a system centered on the division of the world into two opposed categories: the sacred and the profane. The sacred encompasses things set apart, worthy of reverence, and treated with special care – a holy site, a ritual object, a collective ceremony. The profane is the domain of ordinary, everyday life. All known religious beliefs, Durkheim observed, share this characteristic: they presuppose a classification of all things into these two opposed groups.

This classification is not arbitrary. It reflects the collective representations of a society – the shared beliefs, values, and symbols that members of a group hold in common. Collective representations manifest in religion, laws, moral codes, myths, and symbols that guide social life and ensure the continuity of societal structure. They are, crucially, not the product of individual minds. They arise from collective life and exert a compelling force on individuals, shaping how they perceive and categorize reality. Religion, for Durkheim, is the original vehicle through which these collective representations are expressed and transmitted.

The totem as a window into collective thought 🔗

To ground this argument, Durkheim turned to what he considered the simplest observable form of religion: totemism among Aboriginal Australians. Each clan organized itself around a totem – an animal or plant that served as a sacred symbol. Durkheim concluded that the animal or plant each clan worshipped as a sacred power was in fact that society itself, symbolically represented. By worshipping the totem, clan members were, in effect, worshipping their own collective existence. The totem gave people a concrete, tangible symbol through which the abstract concept of “society” could be grasped and revered.

This finding had major implications. If the sacred is ultimately a representation of society, then the classifications produced by religion – what is holy, what is forbidden, what belongs to which category – are really the society organizing its own understanding of the world. Religion is not superstition; it is society’s first attempt at a coherent system of knowledge.

Religion as the origin of scientific thought 🔗

This is where Durkheim’s argument becomes most striking. He did not merely describe religion as a historical curiosity. He argued that it was the origin of rational and scientific thought itself. It was through religion that the very first cosmologies, or classificatory systems of the universe, came into being, in the form of religious myth – religion was the first place where humans could attempt to rationally explain and understand the world around them.

The basic categories through which humans think – time, space, number, cause, class – were not, in Durkheim’s view, innate features of the individual mind (as the philosopher Kant had argued). Nor were they simply derived from individual sensory experience (as empiricists claimed). Durkheim argued that our primary categories for understanding the world have their origins in religion – it is religion, he wrote, that gave rise to most if not all other social constructs, including the larger society.

The category of time, for instance, is structured around social rhythms: calendars developed to track collective rituals and gatherings. The category of space reflects how a community organizes and divides its territory. These are not purely individual constructs – they are social ones, born from collective life, and collective life was first organized through religion. As Durkheim argued, if philosophy and science in general developed out of religious thinking, it is because religion itself began as a way of knowing and thinking about the world.

Continuity, not conflict, between religion and science 🔗

The popular narrative of religion and science as perpetually at war – reinforced by episodes like the Galileo affair or debates over evolutionary theory – is, from a Durkheimian standpoint, a misreading of history. While modern science might claim to have no kinship with religion and in fact claim to be opposed to religion, it is in effect through religion that the conceptual and logical thought necessary for scientific thinking originated and was first elaborated.

Science, in Durkheim’s framework, is not religion’s opponent – it is its intellectual heir. Both are systems of classification. Religion organizes the world into the sacred and the profane; science organizes it into theories, laws, principles, and empirical categories. Both attempt to impose order on a complex world. Both reflect the collective values and needs of the societies that produce them. Durkheim suggests that science arises from religion and can coexist with it, though they may at times express contradiction and disunity in society, highlighting their intertwined nature.

This does not mean the two are identical. Science uses empirical methods, logic, and systematic observation. Religion operates through ritual, symbol, and collective feeling. But the underlying social function – making the world intelligible, reinforcing a shared framework of understanding – is the same. Durkheim argued that religious classifications, particularly from totemic religions, facilitated a foundational framework for understanding social reality, enabling humanity’s intellectual evolution and providing essential cognitive frameworks for concepts utilized in science.

Science’s dependence on collective authority 🔗

Durkheim pushed this argument even further. Even the authority of science, he noted, is ultimately social in character. A scientific theory has influence only if society grants it credibility. As Durkheim observed, if a people did not have faith in science, all the scientific demonstrations in the world would be without any influence whatsoever over their minds. The acceptance of scientific findings depends on collective trust – a phenomenon that functions much like the collective belief that sustains religious institutions. This is a sobering observation, and one that helps explain why scientific consensus on issues like climate change or vaccines can be rejected when it conflicts with deeply held communal values.

What this means for collective representations 🔗

Both religion and science are, for Durkheim, expressions of collective representations – the shared cognitive and moral frameworks through which societies make sense of their world. These representations are shared among members of a society rather than being the product of individual minds. They are also coercive, exerting a normative influence that guides behavior and thought, often implicitly. Religion was the primary vehicle for these representations in earlier societies. In modern societies, science has increasingly taken on that role – but it has done so by inheriting religion’s fundamental social function, not by replacing it with something entirely new.

This also explains why Durkheim viewed religion as persistent even in an increasingly secular world. He believed that something eternal exists in religion which is destined to survive all the particular symbols in which religious thought has successively enveloped itself. Even as specific religious forms change or lose influence, the need for collective representations – shared symbols, rituals, and classifications that bind people together – does not disappear. It simply finds new expression, whether in civic ceremonies, scientific institutions, or other forms of collective life.

Criticisms and limitations 🔗

Durkheim’s argument is powerful, but it has been challenged on several fronts. His use of ethnographic data about Aboriginal Australians has been criticized for relying on sources that were collected by traders and priests, raising concerns about their reliability and objectivity. His contemporary Arnold van Gennep, an expert on ritual and belief, argued that Durkheim’s characterizations of so-called primitive peoples were fundamentally mistaken.

Scholars working in the Marxist tradition argue that Durkheim’s emphasis on social cohesion obscures the role of religion in legitimizing inequality and class power – a critique that applies equally to his treatment of science as a neutral social institution. Feminist sociologists point out that both religious and scientific institutions have historically reinforced patriarchal structures, something Durkheim’s functionalist lens largely ignored.

More broadly, Durkheim’s claim that religion and science exist in continuity can seem to understate the very real tensions between them – particularly in contemporary debates over evolution, bioethics, and cosmology. Acknowledging these tensions does not invalidate his core insight, but it does suggest that the relationship between the two is more dynamic and contested than a simple story of continuity implies.

Why Durkheim’s argument still matters 🔗

Durkheim’s perspective on religion and science remains one of the most original contributions to the sociology of religion. By framing both religion and science as socially rooted systems of classification – each shaped by the collective representations of its time – he shifted attention away from questions of truth or falsity and toward the social functions these systems serve. This has lasting relevance. It helps explain why science, despite its methodological rigor, does not automatically override deeply held religious beliefs. It clarifies why religious institutions persist in societies that are increasingly scientifically literate. And it offers a sociological framework for understanding how human beings, as inherently social creatures, have always needed shared systems of meaning to navigate the world – whether those systems are organized around the sacred or the empirical.

What do you think? If both religion and science ultimately serve the social function of helping societies classify and make sense of the world, does that change how you see their relationship today? And given Durkheim’s argument that even scientific authority rests on collective trust, what does it tell us about moments when communities reject scientific consensus?

References

1. https://durkheim.uchicago.edu/Summaries/forms.html
2. https://easysociology.com/general-sociology/understanding-collective-representations-in-sociology/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elementary_Forms_of_the_Religious_Life
4. https://iep.utm.edu/emile-durkheim/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Durkheim
6. https://open.oregonstate.education/sociologicaltheory/chapter/elementary-forms-of-religious-life/
7. https://www.wisdomlib.org/science/journal/archives-of-social-sciences-of-religions/d/doc1448010.html
8. https://www.academia.edu/6223644/Unearthing_Durkheim_s_buried_thesis_religions_and_scientific_classifications
9. https://ethanhein.substack.com/p/emile-durkheim-elementary-forms-of-the-religious-life
10. https://revisesociology.com/2018/06/18/functionalist-perspective-religion-durkheim/
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_religion