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Costea MUNTEANU
Academia de Studii Economice din Bucureşti
Many of the nowadays scientists think that religion can never come to terms with science. In sharp contrast with this widespread opinion, our paper argues that, historically, scientific reasoning and religious belief joined hands in their effort to investigate and understand reality. In fact, the present-day divorce between science and religion is nothing else than the final outcome of a gradual, long-term, and deliberately assumed process of science secularization. However, especially during the latest two decades, we are all the same confronted with the advance of a new concern that some of the nowadays scientists have, the one of reviewing the sphere of problems specific to the domains of investigation they are involved in, with the face to the themes that are usually addressed by the theological thought. The paper describes this recent development as being captured by an emerging new field of investigation within the modern scientific epistemology: the dialogue between Science and Religion. It is also suggested that the dialogue follows two divergent directions of analysis, namely the scolastic approach and the personalistic approach, respectively. In the final part of our paper, an application of the personalistic approach to the particular case of behavioural economics is proposed.

ŒCONOMICA no. 1/2009
Keywords: scientific epistemology, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, social catholic theology, patristic theology, free-market economics, economic personalism, epistemological transfiguration, spiritualized economics
JEL: Z12, A12
Raţiune şi credinţă în cercetarea ştiinţifică. Cazul ştiinţei economice (I)