Rereading Ayatollah Misbah Yazdi's Theory of Religious Science ‎by Presenting a Hierarchical Explanation of Religious Science

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 PhD Student, Department of Theology and Philosophy of Religion, Imam Khomeini ‎Education and Research Institute, Qom, Iran (Corresponding Author). ‎

2 Associate Professor, Department of Theology and Philosophy of Religion, Imam Khomeini ‎Education and Research Institute, Qom, Iran.‎

10.22081/jti.2026.74791.1123

Abstract

The issue of religious science is one of the most important epistemological discussions in contemporary Islamic thought, and Ayatollah Misbah Yazdi is among the thinkers who have presented a coherent view regarding its possibility and essence. In some prevailing interpretations of this view, religious science has been sought mainly in the realm of normative sciences, and descriptive and natural sciences have been deemed outside this domain due to their empirical nature. By analytically rereading the works of Ayatollah Misbah Yazdi, the present article attempts to provide a different reading of his view. Based on this rereading, the religiousness of science in his thought is not merely in the sense of the direct presence of religious teachings in the content of scientific propositions, but can also be realized at the level of the metaphysical and epistemological foundations of science. To elucidate this claim, using a descriptive-analytical method, the article shows that in his intellectual system, one can distinguish between two levels of scientific analysis: the level of the descriptive content of sciences and the level of their foundations and explanatory frameworks. Accordingly, although empirical propositions are neutral at the descriptive level in terms of being religious or non-religious, natural sciences can at the level of foundations rest upon divine presuppositions and in this sense fall under the category of religious science.

Keywords

References

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