Simon Locke - Constructing the Beginning: Discourses of Creation Science

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Genesis 1:3

In the final scenes of the 1974 science fiction film Dark Star, a malfunctioning, artificially intelligent bomb explodes, destroying the spaceship carrying it. Prior to this, the ships crew had attempted to persuade the bomb not to explode, by teaching it phenomenology. This involved getting the bomb to question the validity of the command to explode, by asking it to examine its knowledge of the source of the command. Reflecting on this, the bomb shut down, caught in an apparently irresolvable paradoxthat the status of the command to explode depends upon sources that appear to be external, but which might not in fact be so, as the only evidence for their externality comes from the detection of signals that are actually internal events. Finally, the bomb arrives at the ultimate point of solipsism; concluding it is the only entity in existence, it assigns itself God-like status and explodes in what it takes to be a Big Bang-like act of creation. As it does so, it says: Let there be light!

Dark Star is a witty film. It has been described (Ash, 1977) as a parody of the 1968 highly successful film 2001: A Space Odyssey, but more accurate is Clute & Nicholls (1995) broad view of it as a sophisticated mixture of black comedy and genuine science fiction (p. 300). The film twists many of the established conventions of science fiction and punctures more optimistic visions of scientific and technological advance, through a focus on human frailty. Added to this is the play made with the relationship between science and religion, summed up in this last act of explosive madness. Crucial to this is the bombs adoption of the language of God as given in the Bible.

In this, the film does two things that comprise the main concerns of this book. First, it provides an example of a more general feature of modem culture: the exploration of the boundary between the scientific and the nonscientific. Science fiction is an especially fertile zone of such exploration, but it is by no means the only one and, beyond this opening illustration, figures no further in this particular book.

Second, the play of this scene draws upon a textual reference, which, it can be assumed, is readily recognizable to a wide audience. The quotation, Let there be light, together with the range of possible connotations its biblical source might engender, must be sufficiently widely recognized as part of the commonsense knowledge of modernity for the pun to be meaningful to a potential audience of movie-goers. As such, it can be described as commonplace (Billig, 1987) in our culture.

This, I want to argue, is important because it indicates that religion (Christianity, especially) lives on in modem culture, not necessarily or solely as an institutionalized belief or ritualized practical ethic, but as a resource, a repository of signification, of meaningful signs, narratives, themes and, most importantly for the present purpose, of arguments and the dilemmas they are often centered around.

The film, then, can be understood as playing with a philosophical dilemma over the nature of the knowledge of existence, which it takes to be a problem understandable to competent members of the viewing audience (the public at large) and which it resolves by drawing upon theological resources, again assumed to be understandable (but not necessarily believed or accepted) by competent members. Further, this usage is intentionally humorous, assuming that competent members will recognize as absurdly witty the idea that an intelligent machine might come to see itself as God. The film exploits a range of cultural resources drawn from the repositories of modem science and traditional religion and uses them to construct a scenario in which the boundary between the two isliterally and metaphoricallyexploded.

Oddly enough, that is also exactly what creation scientists do.

Creation science presents a major puzzle to contemporary sociology. Creation scientists are (mainly) Protestant fundamentalists who reject the theory of evolution in favor of the account of origins set out in the book of Genesis in the Bible. What makes them so puzzling is their claim that this rests on scientific grounds. They claim to be, not just fervent Christian believers, who accept Gods Word as truth, but scientifically informed .

Creationism is a puzzle, because it seems to fly in the face of the usual model of modernity adopted by sociologists. In this model, modernity is a scientific society, which is to say, a society in which science plays a central role, not just productively and organizationally, but as a system of knowledge and a basis for the modem outlook on life. The spread of science is not just through the industrial system of production, but also through the cultural order, having profound effects on the consciousness of the modem as much as upon material well being. In essence, scienceand the conjunction of reason and materialism that it embodiesprogressively displaces traditional beliefs, eclipsing religious, superstitious, and irrational world-views and knowledge claims (Wilson, 1966). I refer to this model of the unfolding developmental logic of science in modernity as the rationalization hypothesis.

Given this hypothesis, then, what is to be made of creationism? To sharpen the problem, according to common observation, creationism has enjoyed growing interest and public support since the 1960s (Barker, 1979, 1985; Lessl, 1988; Nelkin, 1982, 1992a, 1992b; Numbers, 1987; Toumey, 1994). Much of this is in the United States, and elsewhere, creationism has seen growing support (Numbers, 1987). Even in Britain, where creationism is, at most, a minor public presence, there nonetheless persists what is probably the oldest, continuous existing group of creationists in the world, the Creation Science Movement (CSM), founded as the Evolutionary Protest Movement (EPM) in 1932 (Turner, 1982). So, in just that period of history when science achieved the height of its institutionalized authority, when Big Science (Price, 1984) arrived, there has also appeared a movement concerned to restore the credibility of traditional belief.

This puzzle is further complicated for those who perceive a deep contrast between the religious and the scientific, especially in terms of the mode of thought that each entails. This, again, is characteristic of the rationalization hypothesis, which proposes a sharp separation between the mental outlooks or orientations engendered by traditional and scientific worldviewsas seen, for example, in Webers (1948) description of intellectualist rationalization given previously.

Rationalization has been central to the kinds of explanations of creationism advanced to date within sociology. This book is an attempt to present an alternative view based on a different perspective, that of discourse analysis (conventionally abbreviated as DA). It is also an attempt to explain why such an alternative is needed, as well as to defend the strengths of DA in application to the general field of study of the public understanding of science.

The argument, basically, is as follows. Recent research in the public understanding of science has served to highlight a significant methodological concern, which also carries important theoretical implications for sociological conceptions of the role and position of science in modernity. In fact, these theoretical issues already follow from the development within sociology of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), but they have largely gone unacknowledged. The growing interest in the public understanding of science, however, now lends them a sharper focus (Gross, 1994; Irwin & Wynne, 1996a; Woolgar, 1996; Yearley, 1994).

The methodological difference centers around two senses derived from the word understanding, to mean either acceptance or interpretation. One position holds that we should view the public understanding of science as a matter of the level of public acceptance of the knowledge claims made by members of the orthodox scientific community; the other is that we should view it as a matter of the publics interpretations of science and the knowledge claims made by scientists. These two positions carry theoretical implications for sociological conceptions of the role and position of science in modernity. Traditional sociological conceptions of an unfolding logic of science share with the acceptance view certain core assumptionsor representationsof science and the public. SSK, on the other hand, has more in common with the interpretation viewand, within this, the specific focus of interest of DA is on the ways in which science is presented and used within particular social contexts. This leads to a concern with rhetoric.