The Possibility and Impossibility of the Epistemology of the Religious Phenomenon

Abstract

This research studies the relationship between religion and religious belief from the perspective of contemporary social sciences in order to understand the nature of new scientific productions on the religious field. It deals with scientific models for the study of religious beliefs from an epistemological point of view. It also focuses mainly on the value and necessity of renewing the dialogue between the social sciences as a reaction against the marketization and commodification of religion as a field of strategic enablers devoid of doctrinal effectiveness and scientific productivity and against focusing on the religious phenomenon to understand the new global religious pattern. It concluded that the research of the possibility of an epistemology of the religious phenomenon or not is associated with the accumulations of knowledge achieved by the social sciences in their approach to the religious phenomenon in the universal context. It requires the researcher to adopt a reflexive and critical approach that makes questioning methodological and epistemic starting points an indispensable necessity for linking the social sciences with the transformations of the religious field.