Abstract
The author presents a review article on the book, Brave new world? Theology, ethics and the human genome, edited by Celia Deane-Drummond and published in 2003 by T&T Clark International in London. After a rather elaborate exposition, he appraises the collection of essays in terms of the dialogue between theology and the natural sciences. As an acid test, he assesses the challenge Kant, however, dealt with, namely to combine and to separate the right things. Kant pushed this to extremes and ended up with both solipsism and dualism. This article tackles the challenge differently and concludes that theology is an a posteriori science and that by means of différance, knowledge of the noumenon is indeed possible. The author therefore appreciates the different contributions in the book in this light. Deane-Drummond’s proposal that a virtue ethic should be complemented by certain biblical values is therefore viewed rather sceptically. This remains a transcendental enterprise where epistemology precedes ontology.
Highlights
The author presents a review article on the book, Brave new world? Theology, ethics and the human genome, edited by Celia DeaneDrummond and published in 2003 by T&T Clark International in London
The editor professes in the foreword that she too, and pertinently, wishes to stimulate this dialogue (Deane-Drummond 2003:xxvi). As this debate brings widely divergent epistemologies and the ontologies of different orders in dialogue with one another, I wish to employ as a horizon of understanding, two basic points of departure from Immanuel Kant’s philosophy – two perspectives which in their extreme forms have admittedly been superseded but which in a moderate form still give direction in the debate, even if it is by way of falsification
I believe this combining and separating of matters is what is really involved in the dialectic between theology and the natural sciences
Summary
As point of departure for the exposition and analysis of the sensational collection of essays, Brave new world? Theology, ethics and the human genome, compiled by Celia Deane-Drummond and published at the end of 2003 by T & T Clark International in London, I wish to tackle the issue of the. It is clear that Kant treated the geometry of Euclid and the absolute time and space of Newton as timeless givens, which was not really a priori thinking about facts, but merely camouflaged a posteriori observation (McGrath 2001:32; 2002:270; 2004:159) Stated differently, in his combining of matters he did not go far enough and still merely ended with matters solely of the. For more about the present debate on the relationship between theology and natural science, see for example the criticism which people such as John Cobb (1979:49, 10) and recently Dingemans and Smelik (2005:146-148) levelled at Kant In effect, it means that Kant separated different matters too radically from one another. That is why grace is never opposed to nature, but is an intrinsic part of it.
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