In China, practice-oriented views of science can be traced back to antiquity. In ancient times, the Chinese people independently created and developed application-oriented sciences, but they ignored basic science. In modern times, China learned and introduced Western science and technology as a practical instrument to protect the nation and make it prosperous and powerful. Through technology and production, science has been playing an immediate and major role in the development of socialism since 1949. Since 1978, the Chinese government has always emphasized that science and technology are the primary productive forces. From ancient times to the present, the practice-oriented views of science are grounded in politics. Science has been the handmaiden of politics since the Qin Dynasty. However, this state of affairs hinders the development of basic science, a science that is not oriented toward immediate application. It also hinders open-minded, critical reflection on the downsides or limits of science, which could draw on broader (moral, spiritual, or religious) values.

The Chinese practice-oriented views of science and their political grounds

Metaphysics has no place in the science-religion discourses (or dialogues) if understood as an a priori universal content of the nature and causes of all things. From an overview of the positive and negative dimensions and challenges of the contemporary science-religion discourses within each conversation partner itself and between the two, it is argued that metaphysical reflection represents a contextual-linguistic event that ‘takes place’ only after the contextual giveness is taken up within a very concrete historical-linguistic frame of reference for sense making. In a metaphoric sense, it is conclusively compared with the movements of atoms of which we can only state afterwards where the atoms have been. In this sense, McGrath’s remark that ‘(m)etaphysics is not the precondition of any engagement with the world, but its inferred consequence’ is supported. The ‘was’ of metaphysical thinking represents the emergent product of the concrete and specific lifeworlds in which they have ‘taken place’, that is, ‘eventuated’. The ‘was’ of metaphysical reflection is the most powerful (a posteriori) event of credofication (i.e. understanding life in terms of convictions of faith) for human beings in living, making sense of and participating empathically in the question ‘why there is something rather than nothing?’.

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The place of metaphysics in the science-religion debate

Reimagining daoist alchemy, decolonizing transhumanism: the fantasy of immortality cultivation in twenty‐first century china

Among the many phenomena reported from physical mediumship, apport phenomena—i.e. the inexplicable appearance of solid objects—rank among the most curious occurrences. In the present paper, we describe a selection of seeming apport phenomena that were observed around a German medium, Herbert Baumann (1911–1998). Baumann was a close friend of the first author, who thus had the opportunity to receive more than one hundred examples of what he considers to be genuine apports, both during séances and in everyday private life. A peculiarity of numerous seemingly apported precious and semi-precious gems was their being pervaded with a net of tiny cracks that would often render these stones so unstable that they fell apart after being apported. We present considerations regarding these cracks, describe attempts to replicate them, and conclude with a short section about explanatory approaches for ap-

Apport phenomena of medium Herbert Baumann (1911-1998): Report on personal experiences

Far away and at home: multiple interactions of religion and science

From 1979 to 1999, a heated dispute over the science or pseudoscience of extraordinary power or extrasensory perception (ESP) took place in China. During these two decades, many so-called “grandmasters” of ESP and Qigong emerged, and millions of people across the country studied with them; this was known as “Qigong Fever” or “ESP Fever.” The supporters of ESP argued that ESP existed, people could cultivate ESP through specific Qigong training, and ESP was a science; whereas the opponents of ESP denied all of these. Both sides of the dispute had many supporters. With the onset of Qigong Fever in China, some Qigong and ESP masters developed their Qigong organizations into Chinese-style religions. Qigong Fever ended when the religions were banned by the Chinese government. The rise of Qigong Fever demonstrated that basic questions about the boundaries between science and pseudoscience were not easy to answer. Different theoretical and practical consequences resulted from different answers to these questions.

Zheng Fu

Papers

The craziness for extra‐sensory perception: qigong fever and the science–pseudoscience debate in china