Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
this is key to understanding evolutionism as a rhetorical resource. If God
commanded his creatures to undertake science, science would have an abso-
lute value. Even better would be a religious worldview in which nature,
the very subject matter of science, had taken God's place. This is precisely
what evolutionism proposes to do. By suggesting that evolution has absolute
meaning as nature's generative principle, evolutionism makes the natural
world its God, and science, as nature's priesthood, the only activity capable
of interpreting the mind of this deity. Thus it provides an ideal symbolic
superstructure for scientific patronage.
In theoretical terms, this claim rests upon the understanding of religion
that I invoked at the outset, the description of religion as a
nomos
-
cosmos
identification that Peter Berger derives from the sociological insights of
Émile Durkheim.
33
Durkheim theorized that religion gives “birth to all that
is essential in society because the idea of society is the soul of religion.”
34
The corporate self that we refer to in speaking of society, though lacking
the same properties of realness as any corporeal individual, gains objectivity
by being identified with some more stable and transcendent reality, such as
the life of God or the unfolding of nature, to which a people can affix the
transitory state of their group existence:
Religion is in a word the system of symbols by means of which society
becomes conscious of itself; it is the characteristic way of thinking of col-
lective existence. There then is a great group of states of mind which
would not have originated if individual states of consciousness had not
been combined, and which result from this union and are superadded to
those which derive from individual natures.
35
In a similar vein, Clifford Geertz describes religious symbolism as the “fus-
ing” of “ethos and world view” that enables social groups to affirm the
objectivity and authority of their moral identity.
36
Religion ratifies a group's
ethos, “the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic
style and mood . . . the underlying attitude toward themselves and their
world that life reflects,” by situating it in their “most comprehensive ideas of
order,” their ontology and cosmology.
37
The recognition that societies are the tenuous and fragile products of
some merely subjective consensus accentuates religion's importance. With-
out some such extra-human basis, the manifestly constructed character
of social order would become apparent and would threaten its dissolu-
tion. Religion compensates for this threat (more or less spontaneously)
by projecting social identity upon some seemingly more permanent or
