Science vs. Religion E-Book

Steve Fuller

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 303

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

For centuries, science and religion have been portrayed as diametrically opposed. In this provocative new book, Steve Fuller examines the apparent clash between science and religion by focusing on the heated debates about evolution and intelligent design theory. In so doing, he claims that science vs. religion is in fact a false dichotomy. For Fuller, supposedly intellectual disputes, such as those between creationist and evolutionist accounts of life, often disguise other institutionally driven conflicts, such as the struggle between State and Church to be the source of legitimate authority in society. Nowadays many conservative anti-science groups support intelligent design theory, but Fuller argues that the theory's theological roots are much more radical, based on the idea that humans were created to fathom the divine plan, perhaps even complete it. He goes on to examine the unique political circumstances in the United States that make the emergence of intelligent design theory so controversial, yet so persistent. Finally, he considers the long-term prognosis, arguing that the future remains very much undecided as society reopens the question of what it means to be human. This book will appeal to all readers intrigued by the debates about creationism, intelligent design and evolution, especially those looking for an intellectually exciting confrontation with the politics and promise of intelligent design theory.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Introduction

1 Historical Bases for the Problem

1. Science: Western Religion by Secular Means

2. Science vs Religion or State vs Church?

3. Converting the Divine Spark into the Scientific Pulse

4. The Two Faces of Design in Creation and Evolution

2 Ideological Dimensions of the Problem

1. The Changing Ideological Temper of Our Times

2. The Problematic Status of Humanity in Intelligent Design

3. Conclusion: Science as the Ultimate Means of Human Transcendence

3 Complexity as a Conceptual Battleground

1. The Problem of Defining Complexity

2. Kuhn and the Complexity of Science

3. Darwin and the Complexity of Nature

4. The Normative Dimensions of Complexity

5. Conclusion: Computerized Evolution as Intelligently Designed Complexity

4 America as a Legal Battleground

1. Expertise on the Nature of Science

2. Supernaturalism as Figment and Fact in the Naturalistic Imagination

3. Philosophical Resistance to Scientific Naturalism

4. America’s Unique Legal and Political Culture

5. Conclusion: The Threat Posed by Intelligent Design

5 Life after Darwinism

1. Darwinism as Rhetorical Achievement

2. The Artificiality of Darwinism’s Dominance

3. Life Spared of Darwin: The Case of Sociology

4. Conclusion: Alternative Scenarios for Life after Darwin

Conclusion: The Larger Lessons

Bibliography

Index

Copyright © Steve Fuller 2007

The right of Steve Fuller to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2007 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-07456-4121-8

ISBN-13: 978-07456-4122-5 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-07456-5455-3 (Multi-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-07456-5456-0 (Single-user ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk

1

Historical Bases for the Problem

1. Science: Western Religion by Secular Means

2. Science vs Religion or State vs Church?

3. Converting the Divine Spark into the Scientific Pulse

4. The Two Faces of Design in Creation and Evolution

1. Science: Western Religion by Secular Means

Science and religion are not mutually exclusive categories. There is no evidence that belief in a deity, even a supernatural one, inhibits one’s ability to study the natural world systematically. If anything, history provides evidence for the contrary thesis – that there is a synergy between the two. This is not to say that science and religion are identical. They are obviously institutionalized differently. Religion tends to permeate more of people’s lives than science, so that people typically know more about the religion they believe than the science they trust. In any case, the conduciveness of a scientific theory to religious belief does not necessarily make it less scientific – nor does the conduciveness of a religious doctrine to scientific treatment necessarily make it less religious. Indeed, easy intercourse between science and religion ensures that science remains meaningful and religion avoids fantasy. The US pragmatist philosopher William James understood this point better than most.

When “Science” and “Religion” are capitalized as irreconcilable cultural forces, a specific sociological problem is referenced: secular privilege for sacred knowledge. In that respect, the supposed intellectual conflict between science and religion has really transpired as a political struggle between state and church. Outside this institutional setting, science and religion are difficult to contrast because the two concepts function in such markedly different ways. In particular, “science” is a positively marked and “religion” a negatively marked term. In other words, a look at the full range of things that count respectively as “science” and “religion” reveals that sciences are defined by what they are, whereas religions are defined by what they are not.

“Science” refers to the most authoritative form of knowledge over some domain of reality or the method used to obtain such knowledge. Thus disciplines struggle, often amongst themselves, to enjoy the title of science (Fuller 1997; Fuller and Collier 2004: ch. 4). In contrast, “religion” is a residual term that philologists and ethnologists started to use technically in the mid-19th century for complex systems of belief and, especially, ritual (the Latin root of “religion”) that have not depended on the modern nation-state (Masuzawa 2005). To be sure, religions are often justified by appeal to a mythical history, in contrast with the explicit “social contract” by which Europeanized states have been founded and legitimated (Fuller 2006b: 134–6). But it does not follow that religions share any fixed, let alone “supernatural,” attitudes toward reality, however abstractly one might wish to specify these. For example, world-religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, along with most tribal religions, however faulty their understanding of nature, do not require that its existence be underwritten by a supernatural, let alone personal, deity.

Matters are further complicated by the fact that science itself is a historically religious concept. Science may express globalization in its most distinctly Western inflection, but what marks this process as “Western” lies in its specific religious roots. In what follows I use the phrase “Western religious traditions,” by which I mean Judaism, Christianity and Islam – the self-avowed successive moments in the spiritual quest of the biblical Abraham (Fuller 2006b: ch. 11). These so-called Religions of the Book trace the origin and character of reality to a single deity in whose “image and likeness” human beings were created, specifically in order to fathom the divine plan. Of course, virtually every culture has fostered a holistic understanding of reality, but typically reality is not portrayed as having been “created” by a deity with whom humans have a unique relationship that implies our privileged cognitive access and practical control of this reality – including perhaps a final convergence with the deity itself. This is the source of such popular images of physicists as “getting into the mind of God” and geneticists “playing God.” Without the global ascendancy of this general world-view, it would be hard to explain science’s motivation, ambition, pervasiveness, and persistence – especially when seen against the major dislocations and devastations that science has increasingly made possible.

Three general models have been proposed since the 19th century to explain the globalization of science, all involving some implicit attitude toward Western religious traditions:

1. This model is associated with the great philosophers of history of the early 19th century, Auguste Comte and G. W. F. Hegel, but also developed by the first professional historians of science in the early 20th century, Paul Tannery and George Sarton. It presumes that science is a unique development of Western consciousness, It amounts to a secular version of the Christian salvation story.

2. Championed by figures as disparate as Karl Marx and Thomas Kuhn, this model views the development of science as a potentially repeatable process proceeding through set stages, which at least to some extent is autonomous from ambient cultural influences. The phenomenon of “defensive modernization,” whereby a historically non-Western country like Japan strongly institutionalizes science and technology without incorporating the West’s political and ideological systems, fits here (Fuller 1997: ch. 6). The universality of science is the knowledge which remains through iterations of cross-cultural translation, which typically involves the removal of science’s original religious packaging.

3. This model concedes the most to the contributions of non-Western cultures, in particular concerning their access to knowledge (especially in the humanities and natural history) that would not be the normal part of Western experience, and that also may be specifically obscured by Western scientific categories. Western religious residues are often blamed for these blindspots. Yet, even here, non-Western forms of knowledge appear as merely complementing, not contradicting Western science, while lacking the West’s global aspirations.

In contrast, non-Western cosmologies tend to portray humans as essentially embedded in nature, such that the deity is either coextensive with nature (i.e. pantheism) or transcends nature in a radically superhuman fashion that remains forever mysterious. These cultures have featured highly developed forms of learning and technique, which in the case of India and China often rivaled the West’s until the late 18th century (Frank 1998). However, such knowledge has a domain- or problem-specific character or, as in the case of logic and mathematics, they are treated as pure discipline or technique (Collins 1998: chs 4–7). Little, if any, effort is devoted to reconciling disparate and contradictory bodies of knowledge in an overarching set of principles that might reasonably simulate a deity’s blueprint. Thus, whereas India and China had their own versions of a “Renaissance man” like Leonardo da Vinci, who excelled at many different things, they never produced a single-minded “scientific revolutionary” like Newton. This was not through lack of talent but lack of motive.

This absence of science, even from very advanced non-Western cultures, should not be so surprising. Indeed, Westerners have recovered some of this sensibility in the postmodern condition, with its multiple configurations of “technoscience” that deny the very possibility of a unified systematic understanding of reality. The fact that the diffuse client-driven biomedical sciences have eclipsed the centrally state-funded discipline of physics as the paradigm of scientific activity is emblematic of this transition (Fuller 2006b: ch. 12). It suggests that we need to step back and ask why should one aspire to a theory that unifies all things so as to enable the artificial reproduction and transformation of the natural order? Why not simply aspire to a theory that allows one to blend into nature with the least suffering to oneself and one’s cohabitants?

The West’s answer has been a belief that the natural order is the product of a single intelligence from which our own intelligence descends. This belief has produced, as the great 20th-century technological visionary Lewis Mumford (1934) put it, a “monotechnic” imaginary (cf. Noble 1997, for the dystopic version). Writing 150 years earlier, in the wake of the Newtonian world-system, Immanuel Kant went so far as to defend the belief as a necessary precondition for objective knowledge. And, while the Protestant Reformation inspired Newton to fathom the mind of God for himself without the mediation of priestly authority, it would be a mistake to identify this belief exclusively with Christianity. A crucial prior stage was the systematization and translation of ancient Greco-Roman learning into Arabic by Muslim scholars, starting in 9th-century Baghdad. For the first time in history, literary residues were organized not simply as cultural artifacts but a living legacy that spoke to universal human concerns. In this respect, the Muslim scholars conferred on the works of Plato, Aristotle, and so on, much of the same significance they had attributed to the sacred Jewish and Christian texts that were taken to have anticipated the Qur’an.

This attitude was conveyed to the European scholastics, once the Arabic translations themselves began to be translated into 12th-century Latin. It set in motion the project of synthesizing disparate bodies of knowledge into a higher-order unity. The project acquired an increasingly scientific cast, once God was portrayed as bound by the principles of his own creation, or “natural law.” This idea, that God’s perfection implies his having created the best of all possible worlds (and hence has no further need to intervene in it), was due to the greatest of the Muslim scholars, through whom the Christians learned of Aristotle in detail, the Spanish jurist Averroes. By the late 13th century, “Averroism” had become a Christian heresy that claimed precedence for the empirical study of nature over theological interpretation. Over the next three centuries, the University of Padua in Italy became a stronghold for Averroists, among whose students was one Galileo Galilei, the person who since the late 19th century has epitomized the tension between science and theology in the Scientific Revolution.

In non-Western cultures, it has been more natural to adopt a position that Westerners associate with the Aristotelian philosophical tradition – namely, that each kind of thing requires its own form of knowledge and that it is mistaken to impose a form of knowledge inappropriate to a thing’s nature. The resulting cosmology implies a patchwork conception of reality, in which, say, mathematics is applied to some kinds of things but not others. That reality appears to consist of things understood in widely disparate ways is simply accepted, perhaps as a sign of our ultimate ignorance with which we should learn to cope, not try to transcend. Skepticism thus becomes a basis for Buddhist equanimity, not Cartesian anxiety. In this respect, Western science stands out for its treatment of nature not as a source of inherent value and cosmic order, but as an obstruction to the manifestation of our most god-like tendencies (cf. Noble 1997). These spiritual qualities were originally aligned with the “supernatural,” but starting with Descartes and other 17th-century “mechanical philosophers” they were increasingly identified with the “artificial,” as in today’s prospect of “artificial intelligence” enhancing and perhaps even superseding human cognition.

To explain the distinctiveness of Western science is not yet to explain its global spread (Blaut 1993). Three factors have been historically prominent. The first concerns the relatively disorganized socio-economic conditions of Christian Europe in the Middle Ages vis-à-vis Islam and the more advanced Asian civilizations (Huff 1993). The second is related to the proselytizing character of especially Islam and Christianity. The third concerns a peculiarity of the organization of Christianity as a community of faith that easily generates heresies. This volatile feature was secularized and institutionalized as what Karl Popper regarded as science’s unique method of “conjectures and refutations.”

Crucial to the first factor is the observation that ancient empires operated according to a “tributarian” political economy, which means that the imperial power extracted revenue from the colonies, which it then either kept for itself or redistributed across the empire (Amin 1991). However, the local modes of production typically went undisturbed, which meant that there was little incentive for scientific and technological innovation. Such a system worked reasonably under conditions of economic and political stability. However, the European Middle Ages were marked by an increasing number of internal and external threats to the stability of the Roman Empire, even as it continued to expand. The power of the Roman bureaucracy yielded to the autonomous fiefdoms that characterized the feudal political economy, whose capacity to maintain peace and prosperity varied significantly across time and place. This patchy environment provided opportunities for local innovation and the free adoption, diffusion, and sometimes improvement of techniques from the more advanced Islamic civilization, as well as India and China. Moreover, whereas a technique like writing was under strict control of the elites of the great Eastern empires, and indeed functioned as a vehicle for maintaining social distance from the masses, such restrictions were impossible to enforce in Christendom, regardless of the desires of the Roman Catholic Church, which was plagued by wars of papal succession. Gutenberg’s commercialization of the printing press in the 15th century was simply the last phase of this development (Febvre 1983).

In short, the “freedom of inquiry” valorized in Western culture that came to be a normative benchmark for science worldwide was historically an unintended consequence of ineffectual governance (Fuller 1997: ch. 5). Perhaps the decisive step in the delegation of power to local authorities was the introduction of the category of universitas, or corporation, in 12th-century Roman law (Huff 1993: ch. 4). The original corporations were churches, monasteries, guilds, and universities. They shared a concern with the maintenance and promotion of skilled practices whose value extends beyond the secular interests of a given group of practitioners. Such entities would be granted autonomy as long as they did not try to undermine the jurisdictions where they were embedded. Thus, science was institutionalized as a legally protected “value-neutral” activity that could be conducted over successive generations without interruption. This process would be reinvented throughout the modern period with the granting of royal and later national charters to self-governing scientific societies. The overall effect was to constitute producers of knowledge as an independent class, whose mode of reproduction became increasingly explicit (via formal curricula and examination) and hence potentially open to all sectors of society, and its products (via writing and technology) more easily diffused to disparate social, economic, and political settings.