The problem is not only that secular thought differs from religious thought. The problem is that secular thought often presents itself as neutral while smuggling in its own inherited assumptions as if they were universal.
This is the epistemic gap named in the essay. Western secular models often define the standard of reason, knowledge, and public truth as if they were universal structures of thought. Evidence from outside that frame is then treated as partial, ideological, or spiritually contaminated, while the secular framework itself is treated as method rather than worldview.
That bias is not accidental. It is historical. The modern university, the legal system, the administrative state, and much of the scientific culture built in the west absorbed a specific worldview: the self is sovereign, reason is autonomous from revelation, and public knowledge is kept separate from metaphysical commitments. The result is a form of epistemic domination that often masquerades as objectivity.
When a system is built around western secular assumptions, it does not merely describe reality. It filters what counts as valid knowledge, legitimate evidence, and legitimate moral authority. It can treat the divine as private, the moral as subjective, and the religious as non-rational, even while its own assumptions remain hidden in the background. This is the real epistemic gap: not the existence of disagreement, but the claim that one framework is neutral while another is only culture.
This is why the issue is not simply “religion versus reason.” The real question is whether a framework admits that its starting assumptions are itself a worldview. Once it does, it becomes possible to compare methods honestly rather than pretending the western secular framework is the default standard by which all others are measured.
Source: Edward Said, Orientalism; decolonial epistemology; postcolonial scholarship on the hidden assumptions of secular modernity; and the broader critique of colonial epistemology in the vault’s own Knowledge Framework.