Steve Fuller - Science vs. Religion

Introduction

This book deals with the philosophical and sociological dimensions of the signature intellectual struggle of the modern era: science vs religion . However, the struggle does not have much intellectual depth when posed in such terms. Of course, the feeling that science and religion pull in opposing directions has been integral to the experience of being modern. As sources of authority in the wider society, science and religion have been often polarized but in ways that do not correspond very clearly to substantive intellectual differences. From the standpoint of the sociology of knowledge, this is not surprising: Abstract arguments of principle call forth rival rhetorics designed to include and exclude certain groups based on views the parties are suspected to hold about matters other than those formally contested.

A good case in point is the now 150-year dispute between evolutionists and creationists for scientific authority especially over the nature of life. At first, this dispute was confined to the anglophone world but now has acquired global dimensions. In the United States, where the conflict has always been most heated, it amounts to high-minded shadowboxing vis--vis deeper political and economic struggles that are most openly expressed on the floor of Congress or in an election campaign. In this context, creationists appear as defenders of traditional moral values that are under threat by evolutionists, whose liberalism promises a more open sense of what is right and wrong. However, as should become clear in these pages, these pervasive stereotypes effectively interfere with the deeper intellectual issues at stake in the dispute.

Not surprisingly, then, readers will wonder where I stand on the substance of evolutioncreation dispute. I believe that the version of creationism nowadays called intelligent design theory (or IDT), which takes inspiration from the Bible but conducts its business in the currency of science, was responsible for the modern scientific world-view that evolution nowadays exemplifies so well. Even those who were led to reject IDT, not least Charles Darwin, began by assuming its vision of nature as a rational unity designed for human comprehension. In contrast, the general evolutionary perspective that Darwin ultimately championed has many cross-cultural precedents but these have tended to discourage systematic scientific inquiry, stressing instead the need to cope with our transient material condition in an ultimately pointless reality (Fuller 2006b: ch. 11). I believe that to lose touch with the creationist backstory to modern science would be to undermine the strongest reason for pursuing science as a transgenerational universalist project that aims to raise humans above the animals.

In short, contrary to what advocates on both sides of this dispute appear to believe, IDT provides a surer path to a progressive attitude to science than modern evolutionary theory. Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection managed to create such a furore in the West but not in the East because his careful organization of the scientific evidence appeared to imply that the pursuit of science itself is ultimately meaningless: the diversity of life would seem to lack the cosmic design that had inspired previous generations of Christians, Jews, and Muslims to study nature systematically. In effect, Darwin undermined what had always been a fundamentally religious motivation for doing science: the ennoblement of humanity, the species created in Gods image.

If you find my position disorienting, keep in mind that nothing I say in these pages speaks against the empirical success of modern evolutionary theory the only question is whether it should be taught as the single paradigm concerning the nature of life.

Whether sciences historic religious motivation especially the idea of a unified and rational conception of reality can be sustained in a culture completely bereft of monotheism remains an open question. Interestingly, while there is a plethora of evolutionary accounts of religion, hardly any exist of science itself. Instead, one is treated to a battery of weak arguments, collectively known as evolutionary epistemology, that are really addressed to the evolution of a more primitive concept, knowledge . Thus, science is portrayed as a very elaborate extension of, say, basic survival skills, animal curiosity, economized effort, innate bias, aesthetic preference, or, for those who like their Darwinism mixed with cultural relativism, learned adaptive advantage. Of course, it would be well within the naturalistic spirit of evolutionary theory to conclude that, from a strictly biological standpoint, there is no selective advantage for humans to pursue science indefinitely. For example, science may be ultimately responsible for too many people consuming too much energy to make for a sustainable ecosystem.

While no one seriously doubts evolutionary theorys tremendous impact on our understanding of natural and social phenomena, there remains a problem to which philosophers have been especially sensitive: how exactly one defines this theory which has had so much impact. The physical sciences offer a clear sense of how theories are constructed and hypotheses specified, tested, corrected, and rejected. This is largely because the history of physics and chemistry provides a track record of at least three centuries in which these philosophically relevant stages have been identified and analyzed. It is not by accident that philosophers of science as recent as Thomas Kuhn (1970) have based their own accounts exclusively on these disciplines.

In contrast, and contrary to how the matter is sometimes portrayed in folk histories of science, evolution became the common theoretical paradigm of the life sciences only once natural history and experimental genetics were unified in carefully crafted textbooks and popular histories as the neo-Darwinian synthesis. This feat, a product of the 1930s and 1940s, was largely the work of two of the most intellectually ambitious and religiously inspired biologists of the 20th century, Theodosius Dobzhansky and Julian Huxley, who figure periodically in the pages of this book. If it appears that the life sciences have been brought closer together in the aftermath of their efforts, that is due at least as much to the concentration of financial backing and political interest as to genuine intellectual breakthroughs in molecular biology (Gilbert 1991; Kay 1993).