Habermas, Jürgen. “Pre-political Foundations of the Democratic Constitutional State?” Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion. Ed. Florian Schuller. Trans. Brian McNeil. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006. 50-51.
For the citizen who is “unmusical” in religious matters, this entails the demand—which is not in the least trivial—that he identify self-critically the relationship between faith and knowledge, on the basis of what all the world knows. This is because the expectation that there will be continuing disagreement between faith and knowledge deserves to be called “rational” only when secular knowledge, too, grants that religious convictions have an epistemological status that is not purely and simply irrational. And this is why, in the public political arena, naturalistic world views, which owe their genesis to a speculative assimilation of scientific information and are relevant to the ethical self-understanding of the citizens, do not in the least enjoy a prima facie advantage over competing world views or religious understandings.
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