“I have found there is a wonderful harmony in the complementary truths of science and faith. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. God can be found in the cathedral or in the laboratory. By investigating God’s majestic and awesome creation, science can actually be a means of worship,” says Francis Collins

Background

If we agree, and we should, that all knowledge, wisdom, understanding and insights come from God, as the God’s Word, the Bible, categorically states regarding the source of these virtues, then we shall not continue wrongly believing that these are virtues of human origin.  Says the Book of Proverbs, 1:7, “To have knowledge you must first have reverence for the LORD”. In Proverbs 2:3-7 we are told: “Yes, beg for knowledge, plead for insight. Look for it as hard as you would for silver, or some hidden treasure. If you do you will know what it means to fear the Lord and you will succeed in learning about God. It is the LORD who gives wisdom; from him come knowledge and understanding”. In Proverbs, 2:9-11 we are told: “If you listen to me, you will know what is right, just and fair. You will know what you should do. You will become wise, and your knowledge will give you pleasure. Your insight and understanding will protect you and prevent you from doing wrong”.

Almost universally humanity has rejected this wise counsel and has instead used science, religion and politics to disconnect our species from God. In many instances we have rejected God altogether. The ultimate result is that we have continually been ignorant of what is right, just and fair. This ignorance explains the false knowledge false truths, false wisdoms, false insights that have dominated our science, religions and politics for a very long time.  The British empiricists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notably John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume, held that all knowledge should be derived from ideas implanted in the mind by way of sense perception. The positivists had a somewhat broader and less psychologically orientated view of what facts amount to, but shared the view of the empiricists that knowledge should be derived from the facts of experience. Thus, God and Empiricism were made strange bed fellows. Falsehoods in thinking and reasoning became integral to science and society.

Science as Knowledge

One science falsehood is that science is science when it is knowledge derived from facts of human experience. There is no doubt that Science is highly esteemed. Apparently, it is a widely held belief that there is something special about science and its methods. The naming of some claim or line of reasoning or piece of research “scientific” is done in a way that is intended to imply some kind of merit or special kind of reliability. But what, if anything, is so special about science? What is this “scientific method” that allegedly leads to especially meritorious or reliable results? (Chalmers, 2013). Three components of the stand on the facts assumed to be the basis of science in the common view can be distinguished. They are:(a) Facts are directly given to careful, unprejudiced observers via the senses. (b) Facts are prior to and independent of theory. (c) Facts constitute a firm and reliable foundation for scientific knowledge “Scientific knowledge has a special status in part because it is founded on a secure basis, solid facts. In this article it should become clear that science so derived is subordinate to the science of the first scientist, God.

While science is a powerful and reliable method for gaining knowledge about the natural world, it does not encompass all forms of knowledge. For example, ethical, aesthetic, and metaphysical knowledge are areas where science may not be the only source of understanding. Thus, science has limits for there are things it cannot do. (i) It cannot make moral judgements; ii) It cannot make aesthetic judgements; iii) It does not tell us how to use scientific knowledge; and iv) It does not draw conclusions about supernatural conclusions. Yet all these are important in universal knowledge. domains such as ethics, aesthetics, and religion fundamentally influence human societies and how those societies interact with science. topics like aesthetics, morality, and theology are actively studied by philosophers, historians, and other scholars. However, questions that arise within these domains generally cannot be resolved by science, although they can be informed by science (https://undsci.berkeley.edu/understanding-science-101/what-is-science/science-has-limits-a-few-things-that-science-does-not-do/)

Matthew Ward Agius (2023) in Cosmos of December 4 2023 has addressed the question of how the abuse and falsehoods [of science] erode the public square of science. Joelle Renstrom (2023) addresses how the science enterprise itself fuels a culture of disinformation. He observes that:

• A flaw at the centre of the scientific enterprise is that it is all to easy to make outsize claims that sidestep the peer review process
• What the World Health Organisation (WHO) called disinformation pandemic (infodemic) in relation to Covid 19 can pollute the science enterprise
• Often misinformation and disinformation start with the scientists themselves
• Quantity rather than quality of publications has become a basis of incentive and this frequently compromises quality of science
• Scientific articles contain more jargon that substance, which encourages misinterpretation, political spin and declining public trust in the scientific process
• Addressing scientific misinformation requires top-down changes to promote accuracy and accessibility, starting with the scientists themselves and the scientific publishing process itself
• With scientific journals having digital counterparts, the number of published articles has risen supersonically and most academic institutions have preferred the digital approach to publication to help promote publication culture among their researchers driven by the Publish or Perish dictum
• Scientific journals and scientists are competing for clicks by readers just like the mainstream publications
• The articles that are downloaded, read and shared the most receive a “High Impact Factor” or Altimetric Attention Score
• People are likely to read and share articles with short, positively worded or invoking titles
• The demand for headline-worthy publications has led to mushrooming in quantity of research studies that cannot be replicated.
• Researchers are increasingly citing nonreplicable studies more often than replicable ones, perhaps because they tend to be more sensational and thus get more clicks.

No wonder the quality of research output is increasingly getting compromised. The greatest challenge is science for political and corporate ends. Our society is now governed by multifarious falsehoods. which are antagonistic to and serve to confuse humanity away from the truth. Most of the falsehoods relate to the relationships between the sciences (natural science, social science, arts or humanities), science and religion, science and politics and religion and politics. The falsehoods reflect man’s historical tendency to remove the centrality of God from his system of things of affairs. The system of things or affairs may be knowledge, truth, science, religion or politics. However, we may also say that the falsehoods arise from Man’s tendency to impose ignorance upon himself regarding God and the extent to which his influence penetrated or penetrates all systems – natural and unnatural – specifically humanity and our affairs.  Actors in religion and politics have exacted the worst cleavage between knowledge and truth, faith and knowledge, science and religion, religion and politics, usually for selfish interests,

I will take science to be one, and the phrase diametrically opposed to mean antagonistic or completely different, religion to mean spirituality or faith.  The topic of my little thesis assumes that although the aim of knowledge is truth, there is imposed disconnection between knowledge and truth, knowledge and science, science and religion, science and spirituality, science and politics and religion and politics, which should not be the case.

All these ideas and practices penetrate each other, are interdependent and interconnected with God at their centre. We are acting the ignorant when we deliberately, persistently, consistently, continually and perennially extricate God from them. Doing so explains all the human miseries in terms of conflicts, wars, poverty, human rights abuses, dishonesty, robberies, killings, biological erosions, ecological erosions, social erosions, environmental erosions, spiritual erosions, moral erosions, ethical erosions, cultural erosions, wildlife erosions, ecosystems destruction human dispossessions and displacements, intellectual erosions, superstition, errant science, misguided science to conquer the sun ostensibly to control climate change, artificial intelligence, et cetera. Ultimately the real connection between God and humanity is eroded.

Religion as Knowledge

Religion is a legitimate component of a history of knowledge, and can indeed be viewed as knowledge. Religions produce doctrine, theories, room for action, models for interaction and practice, for self-fashioning etc., all part of the interwoven production and circulation of knowledge in a given historical context (Kajsa Brilkman and Anna Nilsson Hammar, 2019). Far from being mutually exclusive, religion and knowledge are intertwined”

Politics as Knowledge

Politics has been defined as ‘Who gets What, When, Where, How and Why? It may be exclusionary, inclusionary, or visionary depending on how politically developed or illiterate one is in terms of political knowledge or capacity to manipulate the political environment, people or communities to serve one’s greed or selfishness. One writer wrote that Politics has existed as long as humans have faced scarcity, have had different beliefs and preferences, and have had to resolve these differences while allocating scarce resources. It will continue to exist so long as these human conditions persist—that is, forever. Politics is fundamental to the human condition. It is where political leadership and governance of a country occurs, and most problems in a country are due to wrong choices, ignorance greed and selfishness or the leaders or governors or their failure to use their political knowledge, experience or practice in service of the people, communities or country in favour of own political and economic interests or foreigners.

In countries like Uganda civic education through political education has been politically abolished. Simultaneously the political leadership is against the social sciences and the humanities because that is where their faulty choices and failures are likely to be contradicted, tested and publicly voiced. They are forcing everyone to take the natural sciences seriously because that is where political silence is likely to manifest itself. However, in countries like the US civic education is back on the agenda of political science and education. Despite huge increases in the formal educational attainment of the US population during the past 50 years, the levels of political knowledge have remained very low because the political system has emphasized corporatism and money. Today’s college graduates know no more about politics than did high school graduates in 1950. Ugandans are replicating political ignorance due to falling political knowledge especially since 1986. The political leadership and governance emphasize silence, obedience and worship politics. Intellectual debates, which used to help raise consciousness especially among the young have been almost erased. Money is being used as a tool of stupefaction of the masses through schemes such as UPE. USE, Myooga, Operation Wealth Creation Parish Development Model and Bonna Bagaggawale  

Recent research indicates that levels of political knowledge affect the acceptance of democratic principles, attitudes toward specific issues, and political participation. There is evidence that political participation is in part a positional good and is shaped by relative as well as absolute levels of educational attainment. Contrary to findings from 30 years ago, recent research suggests that traditional classroom-based civic education can significantly raise political knowledge. Service learning a combination of community-based civic experience and systematic classroom reflection on that experience is a promising innovation, but programme evaluations have yielded mixed results. Longstanding fears that private schools will not shape democratic citizens are not supported by the evidence, at least in the USA. In Uganda, all this may not be true because of Presidentialism, whereby the President is at the centre of everything emphasis being on his political fortunes in a sea of poverty and ignorance.

Whatever the case, science, religion and politics are the three most important factors fragmenting knowledge and delinking knowledge from truth, yet they are all integral to the Knowledge-truth continuum in the past and present and unless we intervene with knowledge and new approaches to knowledge generation and transfer, we shall continue to pretend that we are knowledge workers, knowledge purveyors and knowledge conservators. All humanity must be part of a programme to defragment knowledge and reintegrate knowledge with truth as one as God, the first scientist wanted it to be and still wants it to be.

Thesis Statement

The Thesis Statement of this article is that “Knowledge, Truth, Science, Faith and Politics are interconnected and intermingle in one spectrum of human knowing of God, his Creation and his Word (The Bible).

This article is no more no less than a record of contemporary trends in thinking on the unity of knowledge (as the truth, science as knowledge, religion as knowledge and politics as knowledge). It points to the need for humanity to consciously work to de-fragment and reconnect knowledge back into one towards a divinely governed Observable Universe and/or world.

Unity of the Totality of Knowledge

Emmet (1946) declared that the Unity of knowledge is supposed to be the especial interest and concern of philosophers. Early ancient philosophers pursued knowledge as one. Thales, who is often considered the first Western philosopher, the Stoics, Skeptics and ancient Greek philosophers opened the doors to a particular way of thinking that provided the roots for the Western intellectual tradition. This intellectual tradition was rooted in the unity of knowledge. However, following the Aristotelian knowledge fragmentation process that saw disciplines arising, disunity of knowledge has been the rule rather than the exception. Aristotle arranged the “sciences” into three divisions: the theoretical sciences (metaphysics, mathematics, and physics); the practical sciences (e.g., ethics and politics); and the productive sciences (poetry and rhetoric) – that is, he divided the sciences according to their purposes. Theoretical sciences are concerned with knowledge alone and for its own sake, practical sciences are for doing, and productive sciences are for making. Despite these divisions, Aristotle’s image of the sciences was one of unified hierarchy. They constituted a system. However, as one writer put it, “We are no longer trying to construct “a system;” we are not looking for “the foundations” of a single structure; we have abandoned the belief in completeness and in our capacity to make everything cohere”.

While there are now many philosophers and writers who emphasize the disunity of science (e.g., Dupre, 1993), there is an increasing number of philosophers emphasizing the unity of science knowledge such Edward O. Wilson (1998) who prefers the word consilience to coherence.  Consilience aagreement or harmony among two or more disparate scholarly disciplines regarding concepts or underlying principles. Consilience occurs when inductive explanations of two or more different kinds of phenomena are discovered separately, but unexpectedly lead scientists to the same underlying causes. The Dictionary definition of coherence is “the quality of forming a unified whole” or the quality of being logical and consistent”.

Unity of the Sciences

When we say the sciences we mean Natural Science, The Arts or the Humanities and Social Science. However, the structure and function of a university is such that knowledge in a monocultural academic environment organizes knowledge in three almost non-interacting academic territories: the Arts or Humanities, Social Science and Natural Science. Of the three only Natural Science is recognized structurally and functionally as science. In each academic territory are numerous non-interacting disciplines of knowledge, also called academic tribes. In each discipline education is pursued hierarchically in terms of teaching and learning. This has been the case since Aristotle created disciplines in the era of post-Socratic philosophical manifestation of knowledge creation and transfer.

Francis Bacon was the most forthright in pushing the idea of unity of the sciences, and hence of knowledge and truth. The first of Bacon’s writings was on the nature of science and the scientific method. It was entitled “The Advancement of Learning” He also had a view of the unity of knowledge, both scientific and non-scientific. Interestingly he did not extricate God from the totality of knowledge. He craved for universal knowledge and universal truth and the freedom to gain wisdom out of the unification of all sciences and leaning. From his intellectual discourse we do not only deduce the ideas that science is one, knowledge is one and the truth is one, but also that science and non-science are interconnected and that both are integral to learning. He criticized the ancient Greek professors of wisdom as pretenders who gave the impression that they were impressionists of teaching a universal knowledge when the opposite was the case. His academic interests traversed the academic territories.

Bacon was many things in one: lawyer, statesman, essayist, historian, intellectual reformer, philosopher, and champion of modern science. 

One thing was a great limiting factor to the unity of the sciences, and hence of knowledge and truth: Religion. In Baconian times, religion drew a thick line between itself and science. What this meant was that the divine and the natural were separated by religious practice, which at the time was Catholicism. This meant that all those knowledges that were not natural would belong to the humanities (Arts) and Social Science, and all those which would not fit in the two sciences would be belong to natural science. Consequently, natural scientists believed logic belonged to them and metaphysics, ethics and politics belonged to the others. Education began to sow the lie that science, faith and politics were diametrically opposed; that although science, faith and politics belonged to man the knowledge, truth and faiths they embodied were separate.

McRae (1957) reminds us that the craze for systematically organizing knowledge in form of Dictionaries and Encyclopedias started long ago in the 17th and 18^th centuries. He also tells us that that period was also the time when the Unity of the Sciences acquired a special significance in relation to te ideals of the Enlightenment in Europe. The Unity of the Sciences opened up the possibility of the universality of all knowledge as one.

The Brains behind the reform of knowledge through reuniting knowledge were Francis Bacon and Descartes, especially in the 17^th Century. They saw the unity of the sciences as an essential aspect in knowledge reform. Therefore, when I start my topic with “Reintegrating “knowledge and truth”, I am not the first to get concerned with the splitting of knowledge and truth. My concern is that despite the pioneering effort by Francis Bacon and Descartes to reunite the sciences or knowledge, and hence pursue the truth as one truth, human intellectual and academic effort since then has been focused more on splitting than uniting the sciences and hence the truth. Disciplines have proliferated and the knowledge system or culture of multidisciplinarity has prospered at the expense of knowledge systems and cultures that seek to implement the vision of Bacon, Descartes and later, Leibniz, who, like the other two, contributed greatly to the philosophy of the idea of the unity of the sciences: Interdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and extradisciplinarity. 

Totality of Knowledge without Science Knowledge Integration

Way back in 1961, Alexander Professor Brody wrote two articles relevant to the human crusade to reintegrate the sciences: Towards the Totality of Knowledge” and “On the Totality of Knowledge”. In the article “On the Totality of Knowledge, he wrote thus:

“The search for a more harmonious balance between the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities is not, of course, new. But the Second World War and its aftermath gave it greater urgency……the Western World became increasingly conscious of questions involving moral values, social integration and preservation of its traditions. There has been a re-emphasis on the social sciences, on the humanities and on the humanistic approach to science…The problem is how to apply knowledge and particularly specialized knowledge without doing violence to moral and social values. Otherwise there is the danger of divorcing technical knowledge from the aims of social welfare….There is a growing concern that science, technology and specialization adversely affect social cohesion and stability”.

Unfortunately, in Uganda in particular and Africa in general, there is no such rethinking, 62 years after Brody’s “On the Totality of Knowledge” was published. In Uganda, for example, universities are retrenching the rigid boundaries between the sciences and between the disciplines within them. In the meantime, President Tibuhaburwa Museveni is using money and political pressure on the universities to emphasize the natural science at the exclusion of the other sciences. Even practically, the national budget and political thinking and action is in favour of the natural sciences.  What is happening has not yet been recognized as a major source of social disintegration and instability. Instead, money bonanzas are being used to disintegrate society further. A few individuals are being given money at the expense of whole communities, guided by the falsehood of trickledown socioeconomic fertilization arising from the supposed riches of the few individuals.

There is no doubt that the totality of knowledge has increased through knowledge adding, not knowledge integration, via the numerous disciplines in the three academic territories. However, it is doubtful that the totality of human wisdom has simultaneously increased. W e are still building small wisdoms in small knowledges.

Recently I read a book “Forms of Truth and the Unity of Knowledge” edited by Vittorio Hösle (2014). It addresses a philosophical subject – the nature of truth and knowledge – but, as Hosle says, treats the subject in a way that draws on insights beyond the usual confines of modern philosophy. This ambitious collection includes contributions from established scholars in philosophy, theology, mathematics, chemistry, biology, psychology, literary criticism, history, and architecture. It represents an attempt to integrate the insights of these disciplines and to help them probe their own basic presuppositions and methods.

I am now reading  the book “The Wisdom of Our Ancestors: Conservative Humanism and Western Tradition” by Graham James McAleer and Alexander S. Rosenthal-Pubul (2023). These authors begin with an overview of the conservative thought world, situating their proposal relative to two major poles: liberalism and nationalism. They move on to show that conservatism must fundamentally take the form of a defense of humanism, the “master idea of our civilization.” The ensuing chapters articulate various aspects of conservative humanism, including its metaphysical, institutional, legal, philosophical, and economic dimensions. Largely rooted in the Anglo-Continental conservative tradition, the work offers fresh perspectives for North American conservatism. As I read a question keeps on arising in mind: After so much cultural and spiritual penetration and erosion of the African bio-cultural-spiritual landscape of Africa by Western colonialism and neocolonialism, can we speak of an African conservatism”?

Towards Knowledge Integration and Reintegration: The Role of Faith

 Not long ago, I read online “Expressions of Contemporary Trends: towards an Integrated Knowledge” in Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti and A. Strumia’s (2002) in Unity of Knowledge in the Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science. I have personally written widely on new knowledge production and knowledge integration towards the reshaping of higher education curricula, to produce graduates who can engage in critical thinking and critical analysis, engage in genuine interaction academically and intellectually in integrated teams, and who are professionally future-ready. Many of these articles will be published under the auspices of Vaal University of Technology Faculty of Management Sciences in South Africa under the close supervision of Dr Anthony Isabirye. One of these “From Knowledge Acquisition to Creativity Cultivation: Transforming Higher Education for Innovation and Critical Thinking” in in the Press.

Tyson Paul (2017), the author of the Book “De-Fragmenting Modernity: Reintegrating Knowledge with Wisdom, Belief with Truth, and Reality with Being” and the director of an interdisciplinary center focusing on science, religion, and society at an Australian University, states thus: “We live in a strangely fragmented lifeworld. On the one hand, abstract constructions of our own imagination – such as money, “mere” facts, and mathematical models – are treated by us as important objective facts. On the other hand, our understanding of the concrete realities of meaning and value in which our daily lives are actually embedded – love, significance, purpose, wonder – are treated as arbitrary and optional subjective beliefs. This is because, to us, only quantitative and instrumentally useful things are considered to be accessible to the domain of knowledge. Our lifeworld is designed to dis-integrate knowledge from belief, facts from meanings, immanence from transcendence, quality from quantity, and “mere” reality from the mystery of being”. His book explores two questions: Why should we, and how can we, reintegrate being, knowing, and believing?” By extension we can ask, “How can we reintegrate knowledge with truth”? More specifically, we should ask:  How can we reintegrate science, faith and politics – the three areas of knowledge and practice that directly affect our being, knowing, thinking and interactions in our real world”?

Reviewing Tyson’s book, Knut Alfsvag, Professor of Systematic Theology at VID Specialized University, Stavanger, Norway, and author of the Book “What No Mind Has Conceived” says this:  “Modern science, focusing on facts and power, is neither coherent nor existentially adequate. Instead of this crumbling edifice, the author of this book erects a new one – which actually is the old one – founded on the wonder of existence and the appreciation of finding ourselves in a world that makes sense. The solution he offers is not only intellectually satisfying; it is even essential for solving the scientific, political, and moral challenges of our time.” 

In another review of Tyson’s Book, Phill Mullin (2020) observes that Tyson sharply criticizes the patterns of thought predominant in modernity and proposes a recovery of an ontological perspective. Says Mullin (2020), “[Tyson’s] book argues for a programme of ontological recovery rather than epistemological reform. It raises interesting questions and provides a sweeping moral and sociopolitical critique of modernity that contrasts with Polanyi’s more modest diagnosis of the modern crisis. Although Polanyi’s work is twice mentioned in passing, Tyson does not seem to have seriously engaged science as Polanyi constructively construes it in terms of persons with tacit powers, communities, a hierarchical ontology, and emergence. But it would be interesting to hear his response to a deep reading of Karl Polanyi”. He adds that Tyson’s clarion call is to “re-think knowledge and belief in such a manner that it could be integral with a meaningful ontology of reality. Tyson himself argues that it is necessary to ground knowing in (prior) meaning (resident in the cosmos), rather than vice-versa, and that such a move will recover truth and make clear that faith and belief are not merely subjective whims. His constructive proposal is thus a reformed conceptual framework in which knowing, ontology, and believing are deeply linked to each other. But what is ontology?

Ontology, at its simplest, is the study of existence. But it is much more than that. Ontology is also the study of how we determine if things exist or not, as well as the classification of existence. It attempts to take things that are abstract and establish that they are, in fact, real. Otherwise a dictionary definition of ontology is that it is the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being. In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being. It investigates what types of entities exist, how they are grouped into categories, and how they are related to one another on the most fundamental level. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, identity, time, and space. Philosophy is a good guide to thinking and reasoning. Otherwise, tthinking and reasoning, long the academic province of philosophy, have emerged over the past century as core topics of empirical investigation and theoretical analysis in the modern fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience. Philosophical reasoning then, at its root, is about engaging in discourse – one that asks the participants to argue a point, a thought, an issue, with logic.

In another Book of his, “Faith’s Knowledge” Paul Tyson seeks to address questions such as Can we know truth even though certain proof is unattainable? Can we be known by Truth? Is there a relationship between belief and truth, and if so, what is the nature of that relationship? Do we need to have faith in reason and in real meaning to be able to reason towards truth? He argues that all knowledge that aims at truth is always the knowledge of faith. If this is the case, then against our modernist cultural assumptions about knowledge, truth cannot be had by proof as orthodox science demands.  Yet, if this is true, then mere information and simply objective facts do not exist. Knowledge is always embedded in belief, and knowledge and belief are always expressed in relationships, histories, narratives, shared meanings, and power. Hence, a theological sociology of knowledge emerges out of these explorations in thinking about knowledge as a function of faith (Tyson, 2017). However, in his Book “Science, Faith and Society”, Michael Polanyi (1964) aims to show that “science must be understood as a community of inquirers held together by a common faith”; science, he argues, is not the use of “scientific method” but rather consists in a discipline imposed by scientists on themselves in the interests of discovering an objective, impersonal truth. That such truth exists and can be found is part of the scientists’ faith. Polanyi maintains that both authoritarianism and scepticism, attacking this faith, are attacking science itself.

The Interdisciplinarity of Karl Polanyi

Karl Polanyi, was the writer of the Book “The Great Transformation”, which is today regarded as a classic sociological thought, very much apart the major social science traditions and the great classical thinkers in the field such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim. a paradigm or tradition cannot be located in the other disciplines that were central to Polanyi’s work – history, economics, and sociology. He was a genuinely interdisciplinarian scholar and the father of the New Economic Sociology. While his ideas have influenced subgroups within each of these disciplines, there has been no recognizable attempt to carry out a Polanyian research programme in any of them, and for a long period there was almost no secondary literature on Polanyi. A central argument in Karl Polanyi’s work was that capitalism was prone to instability because of its idolisation of unregulated market forces, where land, labour, and money become commodities whose value is determined by the market. The notion was that somehow the market, like nature, should be left to its own devices without the hand of government disturbing a natural and thus efficient course of evolution. Polanyi’s work suggests we should strive to have a market that is subservient to society, and that failure to transform will lead to increasingly reactive countermovements (Ryder, 2023).

Personal Knowledge and Tacit Knowledge in Science Knowledge

I have to mention Michael Polanyi, the young brother of Karl Polanyi. He made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. His scientific interests were extremely diverse, including work in chemical kinetics, x-ray diffraction, and the adsorption of gases at solid surfaces. He is also well known for his potential adsorption theory, which was disputed for quite some time. In 1921, he laid the mathematical foundation of fibre diffraction analysis. He argued that positivism is a false account of knowing. He argues that knowledge, scientific and otherwise could not be developed without a personal commitment. His thinking about how we develop knowledge is fascinating reading.

The publication of Michel Polanyi’s Book “Personal Knowledge” in 1958 shook the science world, as Michael Polanyi took aim at the long-standing ideals of rigid empiricism and rule-bound logic. Today, Personal Knowledge remains one of the most significant philosophies of science books of the twentieth century, bringing the crucial concepts of “tacit knowledge” and “personal knowledge” to the forefront of inquiry.  Polanyi attests that our personal experiences and ways of sharing knowledge have a profound effect on scientific discovery. He argues against the idea of the wholly dispassionate researcher, pointing out that even in the strictest of sciences, knowing is still an art, and that personal commitment and passion are logically necessary parts of research. In our technological age where fact is split from value and science from humanity, Polanyi’s work continues to advocate for the innate curiosity and scientific leaps of faith that drive our most dazzling ingenuity. Polanyi’s view of knowledge creation is just as relevant to intellectual endeavours today as when it first made waves more than fifty years ago (Jo Nye, 2015). In a series of articles, re-published in The

Contempt of Freedom (1940) and The Logic of Liberty (1951),

Personal Judgements in Science

Michael Polanyi claimed that co-operation amongst scientists is analogous to the way agents co-ordinate themselves within a free market. Just as consumers in a free market determine the value of products, science is a spontaneous order that arises as a consequence of open debate amongst specialists. Science (contrary to the claims of Bukharin) flourishes when scientists have the liberty to pursue truth as an end in itself: [S]cientists, freely making their own choice of problems and pursuing them in the light of their own personal judgment, are in fact co-operating as members of a closely knit organization. Such self-co-ordination of independent initiatives leads to a joint result which is unpremeditated by any of those who bring it about. Any attempt to organize the group … under a single authority would eliminate their independent initiatives, and thus reduce their joint effectiveness to that of the single person directing them from the centre. It would, in effect, paralyse their co-operation. In his book Science, Faith and Society (1946), Polanyi set out his opposition to a positivist account of science, noting that among other things it ignores the role personal commitments play in the practice of science.

In his book “Personal Knowledge”, Michael Polanyi claims that all knowledge claims, (including those that derive from rules) rely on personal judgments. He denies that a scientific method can yield truth mechanically. All knowing, no matter how formalised, relies upon commitments. Polanyi argued that the assumptions that underlie critical philosophy are not only false, they undermine the commitments that motivate our highest achievements. He advocates a fiduciary post-critical approach, in which we recognise that “we believe more than we can know, and know more than we can say”.

According to Michael Polanyi, a great scientist, not only identifies patterns, but also significant questions likely to lead to a successful resolution. Innovators risk their reputation by committing to a hypothesis. Polanyi cites the example of Copernicus, who declared that the Earth revolves around the Sun. He claims that Copernicus arrived at the Earth’s true relation to the Sun not as a consequence of following a method, but via “the greater intellectual satisfaction he derived from the celestial panorama as seen from the Sun instead of the Earth.”^[12] His writings on the practice of science influenced Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend.

In his Book “Life’s irreducible structure” (1968), Michael Polanyi argues that the information contained in the DNA molecule is not reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry. Although a DNA molecule cannot exist without physical properties, these properties are constrained by higher-level ordering principles.  In another of his Books “Transcendence and Self-transcendence” (1970), Michael Polanyi criticises the mechanistic world view that modern science was inherited from Galileo Galilei.

McRae (1957) reminds us that the craze for systematically organizing knowledge in form of Dictionaries and Encyclopedias started long ago in the 17th and 18^th centuries. He also tells us that that period was also the time when the Unity of the Sciences acquired a special significance in relation to te ideals of the Enlightenment in Europe. The Unity of the Sciences opened up the possibility of the universality of all knowledge as one.

When we talk of the sciences, we mean the territories of knowledge in which knowledge has traditionally been organized at our university campuses ever since Aristotle popularized the splitting of knowledge into small knowledges popularly known as disciplines or tribes of knowledge. The Territories are Natural science, social science and the Humanities or Arts. The Brains behind the reform of knowledge through reuniting knowledge were Francis Bacon and Descartes, especially in the 17^th Century. They saw the unity of the sciences as an essential aspect in knowledge reform.

Therefore, when I start my topic with Reintegrating “knowledge and truth”, I am not the first to get concerned with the splitting of knowledge and truth. My concern is that despite the pioneering effort by Franscis Bacon and Descartes to reunite the sciences or knowledge, and hence pursue the truth as one truth, human intellectual and academic effort since then has been focused more on splitting than uniting the sciences and hence the truth. Disciplines have proliferated and the knowledge system or culture of multidisciplinarity has prospered at the expense of knowledge systems and cultures that seek to implement the vision of Bacon, Descartes and later Leibniz who, like the other two, contributed greatly to the philosophy of the idea of the unity of the sciences: Interdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and extradisciplinarity. 

One writer wrote “Truth is nothing to fear, so there is no reason for a Christian to fear good science. Learning more about the way God constructed our universe helps all of mankind appreciate the wonder of creation. Expanding our knowledge helps us to combat disease, ignorance, and misunderstanding. However, there is danger when scientists hold their faith in human logic above faith in our Creator. These persons are no different from anyone devoted to a religion; they have chosen faith in man and will find facts to defend that faith”.

Some questions to ponder

As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2017) guides, the topic of unity in the sciences can be explored through the following questions:

• Is there one privileged, most basic or fundamental concept or kind of thing, and if not, how are the different concepts or kinds of things in the universe related?
• Can the various natural sciences (e.g., physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology) be unified into a single overarching theory, and can theories within a single science (e.g., general relativity and quantum theory in physics, or models of evolution and development in biology) be unified?
• Are theories or models the relevant connected units?
• What other connected or connecting units are there?
• Does the unification of these parts of science involve only matters of fact or are matters of value involved as well?
• What about matters of method, material, institutional, ethical and other aspects of intellectual cooperation? Moreover, what kinds of unity, not just units, in the sciences are there?
• And is the relation of unification one of reduction, translation, explanation, logical inference, collaboration or something else?
• What roles can unification play in scientific practices, their development, application and evaluation?

Comte’s philosophy of Science

It is appropriate to look at sociologist Comte’s philosophy of science and the problem in the unity of knowledge in his philosophy. His attempt to answer the problematique of the unity of knowledge has attracted a lot of arguments from intellectual workers. His system of positive philosophy, his hierarchy of the sciences, his conception of sociology, and his positive religion of Humanity have been focal points of the thoughts of thinkers.  After rejecting the main solutions offered by modern rationalism, Comte provides a subjective unity for the sciences by establishing Humanity as the principle of organization for all knowledge (Prendergast,1979). The need for unity is a historical fact and, as such, unresolved. It is also a symbol of science, and its myth. Science is a finely defined and articulated system of symbols; but the ultimate symbol, that of unity, can have no referent. Rather, one might say it stands for the totality of the knowable and the unknowable. A confusing situation for the scientific mind, but one it cannot escape. For the conflict at the heart of rationalism is the source of its strength, as long as it lasts (Prendergast,1979). Once the faith is lost, something else has to be found. Under the relentless pressure of social change, with the growing operationalism of physical theory and the metaphysical devastations attendant on Darwinism, the myth of unity could no longer hold. It had to be replaced by unification. But with that the status of science is changed and also that of the scientist. The mirror of nature that reason had endeavored to build up through the ages is shattered, and we look for the first time straight out into an unknown world (Once the faith is lost, something else has to be found. Under the relentless pressure of social change, with the growing operationalism of physical theory and the metaphysical devastations attendant on Darwinism, the myth of unity could no longer hold. It had to be replaced by unification. But with that the status of science is changed and also that of the scientist. The mirror of nature that reason had endeavored to build up through the ages is shattered, and we look for the first time straight out into an unknown world (Once the faith is lost, something else has to be found. Under the relentless pressure of social change, with the growing operationalism of physical theory and the metaphysical devastations attendant on Darwinism, the myth of unity could no longer hold. It had to be replaced by unification. But with that the status of science is changed and also that of the scientist. The mirror of nature that reason had endeavored to build up through the ages is shattered, and we look for the first time straight out into an unknown world (Prendergast, 1979).

The world’s religions represent a diversity of faiths in relation to the mysteries of our universe, which in fact penetrates us. Faith and science are not diametrically opposed. Science’s capacity to see the unseeable, hear the imperceptible, and touch the outer edges of our solar system, enables humanity to better engage God’s creational wisdom. Contrary to popular belief, this makes science a strong ally of the faith. Science shows what the Bible can only describe. It adds colour, sound and texture to God’s cosmic revelation. Without science how could we ever understand the immense complexity and beauty of what God has made? (Sloten, 2019). Many famous scientists throughout history were able to integrate their faith and science They saw science as a gift. They believed in a God who wrote two books – creation and the Bible. They knew that if a conflict arose between these two books, someone was likely misreading one of the books. (Sloten, 2019).

Omid Safi (2016) then adds: “Spiritual leaders and followers have a complicated task in being involved in politics. Yes, we know that God calls us to do justice, and to love mercy, and, as Micah tells us, to walk humbly with our God. Yes, that walking humbly with God calls us to always, always be on guard against thinking that we have a monopoly on truth and a trademark after righteousness. The ultimate concern of those who care about the spirit, about the mystery of being human, is not with a single presidential election, but with building the beloved community. The goal of politics is nothing less than building the beloved community through a dirty, messy, and imperfect process”. Roger Pullin’s (2014) book “Free Thought, Faith, and Science: Finding Unity Through Seeking Truth” isa very thorough but also personal review and exploration of the relationships between science, rational thinking, faith, spirituality and religion. Interesting for anyone thinking about how to reconcile personal faith or spirituality with scientific theory and discovery. A must-read for scientists with questions about “believing” or moral dilemmas, and for “believers” who struggle with the role of science in this world. The author shows that there is no contradiction between faith and science, and, while sharing his own personal experience, leaves plenty of space for the reader to develop his/her own free thought

The idea of a common trunk of wisdom

All the big names of the modern times found themselves engaged in the search for a common trunk of wisdom, each of them nourishing the intimate conviction that they possessed the philosophical core which would satisfy the learned men’s newly found appetite for indefinitely extending knowledge. In doing this, all of these masters [of science] needed to confront the philosophical tradition that they received, reworking and merging together the old structures of science through this epistemological prism of the search for the unity of knowledge (Vlad Alexandrescu, 2009).

Some God-fearing Scientists who valued Faith

Let me name a few of those God-fearing scientists who integrated science with faith: Galileo Galilei(1564 – 1642), Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882), Maria Mitchell (1818 – 1889), Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955), Rosalind Franklin (1920 – 1958), William Thomson Kelvin (1824-1907), William Harvey (1578-1657), Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976),Robert A. Millikan (1868-1953), Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543), Michael Faraday (1791-1867), Max Planck (1858-1947), Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) John Eccles (1903 – 1997) Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), Guglielmo Marconi (1874 –1937), Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961), Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)  and Arthur Compton (1892-1962. You Cn individually or as a team undertake to research on these scientists to establish how each of them threaded his or her science with faith.

Biblical Evidence of God as the First Scientist

There are many examples in the Word of God, the Bible, to show that God was the first scientist and then all these scientists of faith, and many more I cannot include here for lack of space, followed. Indeed, Gods Word and the scientists of faith confirm that Science and faith are interlinked. Here are a few verses from the Bible to highlight the centrality of God to science and faith: Hebrews, Hebrews 11:3, Isaiah 42:5, Job 26:7, Genesis 1:1, Isaiah 45:12, Romans 1:20, Proverbs 1:7, Revelation 4:11, 1 Thessalonians 5:21, Job 28:25, Isaiah 51:13, Isaiah 40:22, Hebrews 3:4, Isaiah 55:10, 1 Timothy 6:20, Psalm 111:2, Psalm 104:5, Job 38:16, Jeremiah 10:12, Isaiah 40:12, Ecclesiastes 1:13-17, Hebrews 11:6, Deuteronomy 23:12-13, Genesis 1:1-31, 1 Timothy 6:11, Psalm 8:8, Ecclesiastes 1:7, Job 38:35,  Hebrews 11:1, Romans 15:13, Luke 1:37, Colossians 1:17, Colossians 1:16, 1 Corinthians 15:41, Romans 11:33, Romans 2:20, Luke 11:52,  Amos 9:6, Daniel 12:4, Isaiah 40:8,  Isaiah 9:6, Proverbs 14:15, Psalm 19:1, Genesis 2:4, Revelation 11:1-19, Revelation 1:1, John 3:16, Jeremiah 51:15, Isaiah 44:24, Job 38:4-30, Job 28:5, Leviticus 17:11, Leviticus 15:13, Genesis 2:7, Romans 10:17, Romans 10:9, Ecclesiastes 1:6-7, Job 26:7-14, 1 John 5:4, James 2:17,  James 1:6, 2 Corinthians 5:7, Romans 1:17, John 3:36, Mark 16:16, Mark 10:52, Mark 9:23, Matthew 21:22, Jeremiah 33:22, Hebrews 12:2, Hebrews 11:11, Hebrews 11:1-40, Hebrews 3:12, 1 Timothy 6:2, Ephesians 2:8-9, John 20:29, Mark 11:24, Mark 11:23, Zechariah 12:1, Psalm 119:30, Hebrews 3:3, Ephesians 3:16-17, Romans 10:2,  Psalm 8:3, Ecclesiastes 1:6, 2 Samuel 22:1-51, Genesis 22:17, Genesis 3:19, Genesis 1:26, 2 Peter 3:1-18, Psalm 104:9, Job 26:10, Job 9:8, Habakkuk 2:4, John 6:29, John 3:16-17, Ecclesiastes 1:2, Psalm 102:1-28, Genesis 2:1-25, Hebrews 11:1-3,  

The verses cited above summarize and show the integrity and universality of SCIENCE, creation work, knowledge, wisdom, understanding, insights, love, faithfulness, righteousness, eternity, mystery, power, grace and blessings of God. If one is ready to know God and his science, which is complete and behind the science then these verses read together can be a big milestone in reintegrating our science, which acknowledge, with th totality of God’s science. Everything linked with and to God. Integrating our knowledge with God’s knowledge equips us with real knowledge. After all the knowledge, wisdom, understanding and insights we get come from God as his own word says (Proverbs:.

Some Quotes from the Wise

Some quotes from the wise indicate that it is not a futile exercise to reintegrate knowledge and truth. Acquaint yourself with these wisdoms from the wise:

• Albert Einstein said Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is Blind
• Pearl Buck said Science and religion, religion and science, put it as it may, they are the two sides of the same glass, through which we see darkly until they focus together, reveal the truth
• Abdulahi said Religion and science are the two wings upon which man’s intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress. It is not possible to fly with one wing alone! Should a man try to fly with the wing of religion alone he would quickly fall into the quagmire of superstition, whilst on the other hand, with the wing of science alone he would also make no progress, but fall into the despairing slough of materialism”
• Martin Luther King said Science investigates; Religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge; which is power. religion gives man wisdom, which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religions deal mainly with values. The two are not rivals.
• Charles Kingsley said There will be no true freedom without virtue no true science without religion, no true industry without the fear of God and love to your fellow citizens.
• Franscis Collins said one of the greatest tragedies of our time is this impression that has been created that science and religion have to be at war.
• Albert Einstein said I believe in Gd who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of the Universe.
• Temple Crandin said, “Both Science and religion are needed to answer life’s great questions.
• Alan Turing said, “Science is a differential Equation; Religion is a boundary condition

Faith and Politics: Towards Visionary Politics

Last but not least, we need to see how faith and politics are interlinked. Let me start with some contributions of Frank William Stringfellow (1928–1985) who was an American lay theologian, lawyer and social activist, active mostly during the 1960s and 1970s.

According to William Stringfellow, spirituality, represents the ordinary experience of partaking in politics – the activity of the Word of God in judgment over all that belongs to human history. He criticizes religiosity, advocating instead for a biblical holiness that implies wholeness for all creation. He takes a prophetic and sombre view of the present dark ages, characterized as they are, by hypocrisy, profligate consumption, disregard for human life, and dependence on nuclear force. Speaking from a lifetime of experience and reflection,

Stringfellow issues a call to conscience and sanity, a reaffirmation of the incarnation, and belief in the grace of the Word of God who transcends the injustice of the present age and agitates the resilience of those who struggle to expose and rebuke injustice. Spirituality, according to William Stringfellow, represents the ordinary experience of partaking in politics – the activity of the Word of God in judgment over all that belongs to human history. He criticizes religiosity, advocating instead for a biblical holiness that implies wholeness for all creation. He takes a prophetic and sombre view of the present “dark ages,” characterized as they are by hypocrisy, profligate consumption, disregard for human life, and dependence on nuclear force. Speaking from a lifetime of experience and reflection,

A number of quotes from William Stringfellow are of great political and spiritual (faith) interest, at least to me,

• “The free man does not seek the love of others, nor fear that his love will be rejected, for rejection – as is known from the night Christ was betrayed – does not destroy love, and it does not destroy the one who loves. Don’t be afraid, you are not alone”.
• “The biblical lifestyle is always a witness of resistance to the status quo in politics, economics, and all society. It is a witness of resurrection from death. Paradoxically, those who embark on the biblical witness constantly risk death – through execution, exile, imprisonment, persecution, defamation, or harassment – at the behest of the rulers of this age. Yet those who do not resist the rulers of the present darkness are consigned to a moral death, the death of their humanness. That, of all the ways of dying, is the most ignominious”.
• The practice of the Christian life consists of the discernment of (the seeing and hearing), and the reliance upon (the reckless and uncalculating dependence), and the celebration (the ready and spontaneous enjoyment) of the presence of the Word of God in the common life of the world. Perhaps the moral ambiguity of money is most plainly evidenced in the popular belief that money itself has value and that the worth of other things or of men is somehow measured in monetary terms, rather than the other way around.
• The separation of religion from the practical affairs of society is a convenient doctrine for those who fear that social change would threaten of modify their own political and social self-interest.”
• “In other words, the most notorious, plain, and victorious truth of God is that God participates in our history – even yours and mine. Our history – all our anxieties – have become the scene of His presence and the matter of his care. We are safe. We are free. Wherever we turn we shall discover that God is already there. Therefore, wherever it be, fear not, be thankful, rejoice, and boast of God.”

Omid Safi (2016) does not see any boundary between the Spiritual and the political. To him the Spiritual is political. The spiritual is about the social, the mystical is also about the political. The cosmic in us has to be about both changing the human and changing the world of which we are a part. The healing inside and the healing of the world are wrapped up in one another. Omid Safi asks to highlight the fact that the boundary between faith and politics is almost not there:

• Was Moses not concerned with the political as he led the Hebrews out of bondage?
• Was Amos not concerned with politics when he said, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
• Was Jesus of Nazareth not concerned with social change and transformation as he sat with prostitutes and lepers, keeping the company of the outcast and the downtrodden?
• Was Muhammad of Arabia not concerned with the political as he overthrew the Arab tribal bonds and instead insisted that human beings stood radically equal, as the teeth in a comb?
• Was Thomas Merton not political when he said, “The world is full of great criminals with enormous power, and they are in a death struggle with each other.

To complicate matters the notion of religion that spirituality came to oppose also contradicted what scholars have deemed a “Protestant” theological bias in the formation of the modern category of religion The bias asserts that personal dispositions, rather than outward manifestations, are the essence of religion, but the “organized religion” that spirituality opposes is defined precisely by outward manifestations of structure and power. In this way, spirituality both extends and rejects the contradictory poles of the modern category of religion as both the essence of community and an eminently personal affair.

Spirituality does not simply foreground these shifting poles of religion and not-religion in the modern era, but also highlights contemporary transformations in the category of politics itself. The emphasis on personal experience and self-transformation in “spiritual but not religious” movements points toward a similarly therapeutic register in movements for restorative justice or human rights. No longer confined to the realm of collective contests for state power, contemporary politics often speaks in the psycho-juridical register of spirituality (Brent Crosson, 2019). No longer confined to the realm of collective contests for state power, contemporary politics often speaks in the psycho-juridical register of spirituality ((Brent Crosson, 2019).

Corinne McLaughlin (1994) gives the spiritual tools to create a better world. There are many practical examples in his book “). Spiritual Politics: Changing the World from the Inside Out” of a new evolutionary politics today and innovative public policies. His is a fascinating and involving study of the cosmic, karmic and etheric dimensions of politics, world affairs and current events Those who seek spiritual wisdom and political solution to our myriad, interconnected complex and wicked problems have found it full of empowering suggestions, intriguing stories and uplifting examples of how individuals and groups can make an impact. It is also a thought-provoking assemblage that is enriching and mind-opening to the unity of spirituality and politics. seekers of spiritual wisdom and political solutions.” —Publishers Weekly

SEE LESS

 seekers of spiritual wisdom and political solutions.” —Publishers Weekly

SEE LESS

Ronan Harrington (2016), in his “Why spirituality is the Key to a more visionary politics” argues that progressive renewal lies in a deep recognition that we are not choosing our current lives; that we are trapped, on the outside and within. Renewal will only come when we experience ourselves in a new light. Just as Galileo proved that Earth was not the centre of the universe, there is potential for a shift in perspective within, discovering that the conditioned self is not the whole of who we are. This essentially spiritual awakening gives rise to a set of aspirations that enable a more visionary politics”. This is the new story of spirituality that we are all in the midst of experiencing. An adult developmental journey that leads to greater perspective, more openness to change, and greater self responsibility. These are the foundations of a visionary politics. Spirituality needs to be made political because politics is the means by which we alter the structures that conspire against our development. The outdated working week that saps our engagement can only be dismantled with legislation on shorter working weeks, the embrace of full automation, and universal basic income. The exam factories that turn children off their own development for life can only be transformed by wresting control of education policy. In turn, the appetite for a visionary alternative can only come from people that have seen themselves in a new way, who demand a different life. Hence visionary politics is spiritually guided.

Foucaultian Political Spirituality

Michael Foucault’s Political Spirituality is anti-God.  Bülent Diken’s (2015) “Political Spirituality: The Devils, Possession, and Truth-Telling”. discusses Michael Foucault’s (1979) political spirituality” outside the religious domain, as a profane, modern political gesture that cannot be reduced to theological notions. Finally, it turns to the relationship between political spirituality and political strategy. Earlier, McWhorter Ladelle (2003) noted the connection Foucault draws between this politics of truth and “spirituality.” Foucault uses this phrase “spiritualite politique”. Harcourt (2017) states that Foucault identified and developed a theory of political spirituality. However, this is not useful to a political spirituality of unity between faith, science and politics towards the unity of knowledge and truth. Foucault’s political spirituality removes God from the affairs of humanity.

Summary

There has been a sustained effort through the times by men and women from across academic and intellectual divides to integrate the sciences. However, there has been parallel resistance from those who believe in the culture of the separation of the sciences. Most of the problems of our world are so complex that simple solutions will only complicate them further as the necessary truth is compartmentalized or fragmented, real science and appropriate solutions removed from actions that require unity of science and knowledge to solve our problems. Worse still God and faith are removed from solutions. This article suggests that for progress to be made there must be unity of knowledge and truth, particularly in science, religion and politics for any meaningful and effective solutions to be achieved. Hence science, religion and politics are not diametrically opposed. If we accept this then God must be integral and central to any solution.

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• A Tell report / By Prof Oweyegha-Afunaduula, a former professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences of the Makerere University, Uganda