ABSTRACT
In various regions of Africa, and over a long history, we see the intersection of science and religion. African spiritual values and religious practices have links with the ideals and outcomes that we associate with science: the discovery of natural and physical phenomena through observation, conjecture, experimentation, and problem solving. Several distinguished philosophers of science have contributed to a view of science as epistemologically diverse, multi-regional, and multidimensional. Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994), for example, argued against placing science in a straitjacket. Science emerges out of various contexts and manifests itself in various ways, he asserted. Karl Popper (1902–1994) defended the interaction of body and mind in the creation of knowledge and scientific ideas. He argued also that all organisms are problem finders and problem solvers, and that scientific knowledge is as old as life itself and very much a product of multiple interactions. For these scholars, science emerges in the context of humanity’s innate quest for survival within a specific environmental, ecological, and social context. For these and other philosophers the line of demarcation between scientific knowledge and religion is somewhat blurred except for some basic enduring features.
