Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
are unlike any other animal, difference by descent always leaves open the
recognition that we are related to apes. To accentuate our ape connections
is certainly scientifically meaningful, but it is also an interpretive choice,
and one, I might add, that loses sight of the fact that the same premise of
evolutionary descent also entails dissociation—that we are apes no longer.
In the evolutionary arguments of Comte and Saint-Simon we find
an analogous ambiguity but also a rhetorical opportunity. These writers
appealed to an evolutionary dissociation when they asserted that modern
science alone had realized the fullness of knowledge that ancestral reli-
gious forms had only falsely claimed to possess. But an association between
positivism and theism abides here as well. Even if one regarded science as
religion's replacement, this evolutionary framework also implies a more sub-
stantial connection. So does the religiosity that persists in the language of
these two positivist thinkers indicate the endurance of religious content
or just the supposition that religion had been a kind of false science? My
answer to this question, of course, is that it indicates both of these things.
But a more important point has to do with the very ambiguity that enables
us to raise this question. So long as it remains possible to think that this
can be all one thing or the other, science but not religion, there also remains
the possibility that a genuinely religious viewpoint could be advanced unno-
ticed in the guise of science.
This interpretation of positivist religiosity seems to reflect Leah Cecca-
relli's observation that polysemy—that is, the presence within some messages
of “determinate but nonsingular denotational meaning”—may reflect an
underlying unity that becomes apparent once the “hermeneutical depths”
of a message are explored.
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Messages appearing to be
contradictory
when
viewed superficially become recognizably
complementary
once considered
at some deeper level. In the case of positivism, this would mean that the
apparent contradiction between its epistemological skepticism and its mani-
fest religiosity disappears once we recognize that its historical aspect draws
these realms of meaning together. Saint-Simon and Comte could easily deny
that any traditional truth claims were being advanced when they appropri-
ated religious language, but would this strip away the traditional meaning
that inhered within it? What suggests that they did not escape from these
undercurrents is the abiding premise of historical purpose that always lurks
within the idea of progress. The unwillingness of these writers to expunge
such historical meaning from their writings, even though they propose no
scientific basis for this notion, indicates that their prediction that religious
meanings were destined to give way to merely naturalistic ones was in fact
