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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Religions Are Usually Fine with Science7/28/2007 13:06:51My second report from "Science and Religion: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives," a Templeton Foundation-funded conference at Lancaster University in northern England. Day two. Fascinating and that devious kind of pleasure that these conferences can be. I also heard a lot of people talking behind each other's backs, and did some myself. One of the last talks this afternoon was by Ronald Numbers, author of the definitive tome The Creationists about American creationism. Turns out he's this big dynamic guy who is a pleasure to listen to. So through the last few days I've been doing nothing but listening to all these people talk about all the ways that "religion" and "science" rub each other the wrong way. Evolution, stem cells, cosmology, and the rest. Even though everybody opposes the "conflict" framework as a simple meta-narrative, nobody can quite stop talking about conflicts. But Numbers finished his talk with a really important point. Nobody here is talking about chemistry (at all). Or cell structures. Even DNA. Not to mention the extraterrestrial planets that are being discovered all the time, which seemingly through into question whatever claims of uniqueness one might have about Earth. And it goes way beyond: virtually every new religious movement that has come about in the last fifty years has rested its authority on some measure of (pseudo)science. The language of science works as a kind of holy writ, while retired scientists draw from the "awe" of religion to establish the human meaning, the salvation, of a scientific worldview. This point, that the relationship between religions and sciences is complex and intertwined, has been well made. Actually, this conference is being held in honor of John Brooke, inventor of the "complexity thesis" of science and religion. But it is hard to know what can be done with complexity. Everybody keeps being drawn back to the conflicts. It seems like cognitive hard-wiring, or something. For this reason, actually, I have previously argued that the whole conflict may be decisively framed by a specifically masculine way of thinking about the purity of subjects and the world as warfare. Indeed, this conference is far and away dominated by older men. Lastly, during a boring talk that dealt with Howard Van Till's distinction between metaphysical (what the world really is like) and methodological (how you operate in specific tasks) naturalism (as opposed to supernaturalism) in science, I figured out another way to frame that old idea of aesthetic theology I've thrown around a number of times in my articles here. Aesthetic theology, mine at least, holds to metaphysical naturalism, that is, the willingness to believe that the world is made up of itself and explainable in terms of itself. Meanwhile, however, it claims methodological supernaturalism in the task of living. That is to say, recognizing the limits and tendencies of human embodied life, it is willing to draw upon ideas of supernatural forces, myths, and the rest in order to interact with the world. This is a very nerdy formulation, but it might help for some people. |
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