Religion and Transcendence

Deleuze and Guattari say that philosophy is the creation of concepts on a plane of immanence.  They see philosophy as on a distinct and equal playing field from science and art, but I see the philosophical process as more basic and reject the notion of absolute immanence.  The point that Dr. J made in class about the transcendence of other people was a good one.  An interaction with some sort of transcendence is an everyday thing.  I set up a relationship between science, philosophy, and religion, making a place for transcendence.  In my meta-paper, I suggest that philosophy is the human attempt to understand the world through reason.  But one cannot live on reason alone.  Reason can show us the world, but it cannot get inside of it.  As a child, I was fascinated by opening and closing the refrigerator door.  I would open the door and the light would come on.  I would close the door and the light would turn off.  I always tried to catch a glimpse of the darkened inside of the refrigerator when I closed the door, but I never could, because the door was in the way, and my angle of vision could never get beyond it.  Even if the light went out, it wouldn’t be the same as seeing the inside of the refrigerator with the door closed, clear plastic and cold and darkness.  Science is the same.  It can take things apart, but it can never get inside of them.  We can analyze the brain, but we can never be another person.  We must take the leap of faith to climb the mountain of transcendence.  This is what religion does.  Religion transcends the rational bumping up against things and gets inside of them.  It seeks a direct communication with fundamental reality.  We trust that we know now what lies behind the door.  Science lies alongside philosophy, but religion subsumes it.