Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
science wholeheartedly. “If we survive, our time will be famous for two rea-
sons: that at this dangerous moment of technological adolescence we man-
aged to avoid self-destruction; and because this is the epoch in which we
began our journey to the stars.”
66
The future now turns upon the embrace
of science because history, ever since the revelation of evolution, has been
conflated with the passage of natural time.
A familiar analysis of this pattern can be found in Richard Weaver's
well-known observation that the “god term” of “science” has become a syn-
onym for “progress.” A god term is an “expression about which all other
expressions are ranked as subordinate and serving dominations and pow-
ers,” a term that “imparts to the others their lesser degree of force, and
fixes the scale by which degrees of comparison are understood.”
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Weaver
recognizes that the term “progress” now stands atop such a verbal hierarchy
because it has stepped in to play the part formerly enacted by the theo-
logically charged notion of “providence.” I would refine this somewhat by
adding that “progress,” more specifically, has descended from “providence”
in its millenarian aspect. Providence, as generally conceived in Western
theological traditions, does not necessarily privilege the future as modern
notions of progress so clearly do. It might just as easily prefer things of the
past, were they judged to accord with God's divine orchestration of history.
But as a secular substitute for this religious conception of history, progress
reflects a specifically Protestant turn toward the future that, as we will see
in the next chapter, is rooted in certain theological pressures that coincided
with the Reformation. Because the reformers needed to cast off the author-
ity of the Catholic tradition, they were strongly disposed to contend that
revelation was coming into sharper focus in the present and that it would
achieve even greater clarity in the future. The millenarian expectations of
the Bible provided a necessary sanction for this belief, and it is this perspec-
tive on providence that seems to anticipate the scientistic notions of evolu-
tionary progress that I will deal with here.
Because “progress” descends from “providence,” it also continues
to reflect the personal attributes of the latter, a sense of willfulness and
benevolence embedded in the fabric of history. Weaver recognized that this
was why the alternative god term of “science” is so often “hypostatized” in
phrases like “science says.” Another similar abstraction that is personified
in this way is “history,” and this is precisely for the same reason—because
both terms descend from the more traditional notion that the passage of
time is the revelation of a transcendent design. What made the god term
“science” slightly subordinate to “progress” in Weaver's mind was the greater
