ABSTRACT
Chapter two explores the question of science and religion in contemporary India. Ethnographically, the chapter attempts to show how scientists engaged with the modes of religion, belief, and science, and how they interpreted science and religion, and the ways in which they lived their religious and scientific lives beyond a disenchanted world. The ethnographic data, dedications, and autobiographies discussed in this chapter invite us to think about the limitation of the binary reading of science and religion; and it invites us to discuss science and religion beyond ‘conflict’ and ‘complementarity’. I argue that, for many of these scientists, the relationship between science and religion was neither about the pursuit to prove the existence of God nor the search for compatibility between the two. Rather they considered such inquiries superfluous and wholly unnecessary. For them religion cannot be conceptualized from an ‛objective point of view’ since religion and science occupied different realms. At the same time, they do not separate or posit science and religion in oppositional terms as they think their religious beliefs and practices help them to do better science.
