Religious belief and the content of the sciences.

Abstract

A N ALTERNATIVE TITLE for this essay might have been Sacred in Secular: my theme concerns manner in which religious preconceptions may shape content of sciences. That they have sometimes done so can seem a startling claim when we are tuned to norms of modern culture. If there is one convention that has dominated culture of modem science, it is surely exclusion of religious sentiment and religious interference from pursuit of an ostensibly objective knowledge. Much of vigor of this exclusionist position derives from social transformations of nineteenth century, when selfconsciously professionalizing scientists raised their profile by campaigning against what they saw as defective standards of clerical amateurs. For Darwin's cousin Francis Galton pursuit of science was simply incompatible with a priestly temperament.' But roots of exclusion go back at least as far as seventeenth century, when fledgling societies made it their official policy to exclude political and theological debate from their affairs. The contrast drawn by Thomas Sprat (1635-1713) between disinterested (and therefore unifying) character of experimental knowledge and divisive world of passions was part of a recurring rhetoric in defense of a culture.2 In his recent book on scientific revolution (1996) Steven Shapin concludes with a paradox emanating from this rhetoric: more a body of knowledge is understood to be objective and disinterested, more valuable it is as a tool in moral and political action. Such knowledge, he adds, could be useful to theology for that very reason. Elaborating paradox, Shapin writes that the most powerful storehouse of value in our modern culture is body of knowledge we consider to have least to do with discourse of moral value. Such a conclusion could easily act as a deterrent to enterprise enshrined in present volume, where each contributor was invited to offer a case study that might reveal constitution, penetration, or permeation of theory by religious precepts. If theology has had an important stake in presumed disinterestedness of knowledge, there