Situating Evangelical Responses to Evolution

Abstract

Abstract In recent years there has been a remarkable “spatial tum” among students of society and culture. The genealogy of this twist of events is both multifaceted and complex. But among philosophers, social theorists, and historians of science there has been a renewed emphasis on the significance of the local, the specific, the situated. Some philosophers thus argue that what passes as a good reason for believing a claim is different from time to time, and from place to place. Rationality, it turns out, is in large measure situation specific such that what counts as rational is contingent on the context within which people are located. “Good grounds” for holding a certain belief is evidently different for a twelfth-century milkmaid, a Renaissance alchemist, and a twentieth-century astrophysicist. Among social theorists there has also been a recovery of spatiality. The importance of the diverse locales within which social life is played out has assumed considerable significance with such writers as Clifford Geertz, Erving Goffinan, Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said.