Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
scientistic worldview. For the proponent of scientism, creationism repre-
sents more than just public skepticism about evolutionary science; it also
represents the rejection of the sort of absolute public authority that evolu-
tionism sustains.
Outwardly, the messages displayed on the NCSE website profess to seek
a kind of diplomacy with religionists. They present themselves as religion-
friendly and intending only to demarcate science from theology. The site
boasts of the 12,690 Christian clergy and 473 rabbis who have signed a peti-
tion supporting evolution under the auspices of the “Clergy Letter Project,”
and this certainly would seem to affirm that, for these religionists at least,
the doctrinal traditions of theism are capable of being reconciled with evo-
lutionary science. 43 But if we look more closely at how such religious accom-
modations are interpreted by the NCSE, we get a different meaning; what
it seems to say, in fact, is that the beaches of traditional religious belief are
fast receding before a rising tide of scientific understanding. This appears
to be the direction the NCSE is taking when it enlists the help of its “faith
project director,” the theologian Peter Hess, to explain the bases of a sup-
posed ecclesiastical truce.
Theologians from many traditions hold that science and religion occupy
different spheres of knowledge. Science asks questions such as “What
is it?” “How does it happen?” “By what processes?” In contrast, religion
asks questions such as “What is life's meaning?” “What is my purpose?”
“Is the world of value?” These are complementary rather than conflicting
perspectives. 44
What Hess may have meant to describe here is the traditional distinction
between secondary and primary knowledge that has been used, more or
less since the time of Galileo, to set science off from philosophy and theol-
ogy. Another way to express this idea would be to say that science deals
with questions of material causality but not with metaphysical questions of
being, or, using Kant's language, with phenomena but not noumena . Superfi-
cially, Hess' questions might seem to honor this mode of demarcation, but
this is only because he has presented them as abstract categories. Once we
put more flesh on the kinds of questions he assigns to science, we will dis-
cover that he is actually ceding areas of inquiry to science that are tradition-
ally of religious concern. The question “What is it?” might find a zoological
answer (human beings are primates), but it could just as easily find a meta-
physical or theological one (human beings are children of God). The ques-
tions “How does it happen?” and “By what processes?” may be answered
Search WWH ::




Custom Search