Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
developed as a technical philosophical rationale, it was also being drawn
into the orbit of cultural meanings and values associated with Protestant
hermeneutics. What this meant in practical rhetorical terms was that the
one always implied the other. In a culture that hallowed as singularly virtu-
ous a fact-based reading of the Bible, attention to the “facts” of nature would
have similar sacred meaning. The same dialectic persists now in the same
hallowing of “fact” that is so persistent in evolutionism. Fact continues to
have technical associations with an epistemology that is the presumed basis
of science's distinctive achievements, but it is also the valorizing principle of
a historical narrative in which science is set above all other ways of know-
ing as nature's hero. This accounts for the oddity of statements such as
Carl Sagan's assertion in
Cosmos
that “evolution is a fact, not a theory.”
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A
general statement about the truth value of evolution that was more attuned
to professional scientific standards would not put it this way: to deny the
theoretical importance of evolution is to lobotomize it as science, to devalue
it as mere data collection. But while Sagan's statement is false to science, it
is true to its Baconian cultural legacy. To suggest that those who embrace
evolutionary science are true to “fact” is to make them actors in a narrative
of progress that has traditionally measured virtue in an analogous way.
If scientific empiricism is thus
homologous
with the Protestant doc-
trine of
sola scriptura
and with all of that slogan's attendant implications,
we should also expect that contemporary notions of science would reflect
other features of the Reformation worldview. One feature that will figure
prominently in this treatment is the Protestants' gravitation toward a mil-
lenarian outlook on history. The reformers needed to forge a break with
the past if they were to sustain the idea that their movement represented
the living branch of the Christian church. But in trying to achieve this they
confronted an obvious problem: if Christ himself had assured his follow-
ers that even the gates of hell would not prevail against his church, how
could Protestants now reject it as the harlot of Babylon? They overcame
this dissonance by insisting that the Reformation represented a new and
final revelation. In other words, they accentuated what R. G. Collingwood
called the “periodized” feature of the Christian historical consciousness, its
theologically based assumption that new revelations launch new epochs and
that from the standpoint of such new ages, all previous history needs to be
understood differently.
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The reformers applied this principle in supposing
that their break with Catholicism marked the onset of the millennium, the
culminating stage of divine history already anticipated in Scripture. This
