Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
creation, and thus the elect are the friends of nature. In the narratives of
evolutionism that we will examine in later chapters, we will see that the
revelatory obedience that distinguishes science from other enterprises of
inquiry as nature's elect is its unwavering adherence to the empiricist doc-
trine. Faithfulness to fact now enacts separation—the forsaking of “cher-
ished beliefs,” those polluting idols that arise within human subjectivity.
Separation is the necessary moral condition that enables science to perform
its heroic mediation of the topic of nature.
Such hints of election, of course, draw our attention to the fact that this
scientific exceptionalism could have no scientific basis in evolution. E. O.
Wilson, for instance, who has built his fame as a public scientist upon the
assumption that natural evolution is all-encompassing, seems oblivious to
the fact that he contradicts this premise when he insists that “the human
mind evolved to believe in the gods,” but it “did not evolve to believe in biol-
ogy.” Science alone stands with history because it alone transcends natural
determinism, and Wilson therefore surmises that religion must be thrown
off. The “uncomfortable truth” that only the scientific elect are capable of
facing is that “those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth
will never acquire both in full measure.”
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Such expressions remind us that
evolutionism's basis only appears to be scientific. Rhetorical Darwinism's
supposition that science's historical election comes from its unique power to
transcend material determination reflects its dependency upon a story form
capable of making science the sole inhabitant of an upper world of spiritual
freedom and the one agent of historical destiny capable of willingly separat-
ing itself from a lower one of brute causality.
Bacon's
New Atlantis
also anticipates the broader drama of election that
now sets science against religion. Set within Bacon's own time, however,
this is an extension of the conflict between Protestants and Catholics. In
this drama, science derives special virtue because it participates in the same
act of spiritual separation that the Protestant movement was thought to
enact. Protestants were God's elect because, in their singular devotion to
revelation, they rejected all the worldly impurities that had infected the
Catholic faith, and the new science enacted the natural scientific counter-
part to this. This background drama is brought into Bacon's fable by various
symbols associating his lost European voyagers with Catholicism and their
Bensalemite saviors with Protestantism, and also through its allusions to
the Jonah narrative. We might say that the story's lost European mariners
replay the Mediterranean journey of this rebellious prophet and thereby
align the errors of Catholicism with both the spiritual and material aspects
