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and I believe that this insight has special pertinence to the science-evolution
symbolism I explore. Religion, as the sociologist Peter Berger summarizes its
main symbolic pattern, always involves some identity between the creations
of culture, the human
nomos
, and some reality or
cosmos
lying outside the
human world. Because society is a necessity for human well-being but is also
subject to dissolution once we recognize its fragility as a human creation,
religious symbolism is needed to solidify its reality by making
nomos
and
cosmos
“appear to be co-extensive.”
5
Religion is thus the most vital and sus-
taining component of cultural creativity. Because it provides vital linkages
between society and some external and inviolable reality, it also provides
a culture with its most potent reason for being. My analysis expands upon
this insight by supposing that this general sociological principle also applies
to the culture of science. Science is a word derived from
scientia
, the Latin
word for knowledge, and in our time it has come to mean something like
the systematic pursuit and organization of knowledge. But here I want to
think of it as a word that also denotes a particular kind of society—a profes-
sional community devoted to such systematized inquiry. As such, science
may be different in many respects from the social groups that sociologists
and anthropologists have traditionally thought of when developing theories
of religion, but what reason have we for supposing that scientific culture
would be immune to similar pressures, to pressures of existence that would
invite such
nomos-cosmos
identities?
e
volutionaRy
m
ythology
If the science-evolution version of this
nomos
-
cosmos
identity belongs to the
same category of symbolization that defines religious traditions, we would
also expect this to manifest in that narrative or mythic mode that is the
most characteristic vehicle of faith. It is thus when the scientific imagination
runs free in science fiction that we most clearly witness its expressions. In
October of 1963, just a few weeks before John Kennedy's assassination, an
episode of the popular ABC television show
The Outer Limits
aired under
the title “The Sixth Finger.”
6
This tale is set in Wales, where a scientist
works in the isolation of his country manor on an experimental device,
a kind of genetic time machine capable of accelerating human evolution.
Professor Mathers has already used this machine to advance a chimpan-
zee to the point where it can perform basic clerical tasks, but he wants to
try this experiment on a human subject. Gwyllm Griffiths, a local coal
miner played by David McCallum, volunteers to be genetically altered. In
