Voltaire this ain’t

Abstract

I think the only literary genre more frivolous than theologians writing about science (Teilhard de Chardin 1959) is scientists writing about theology (Miller 1999; Dennett 2006; Collins 2006; Roughgarden 2006). This latter group has now devolved into two camps: some scientists find it reasonable to seek spiritual meaning in the natural world, inheriting the centuries-old ambitions of John Ray and William Paley. The less pious also write about it, although with different goals. While the devout are trying to reconcile their beliefs about the non-material universe to the domain of science, the less devout are trying to convince them that they are idiots, a somewhat less respectable ambition, even if just as likely to be unsuccessful. Richard Dawkins, recently retired Oxford professor of the Public Understanding of Science and one of the leading voices of contemporary Darwinism, aggressively links science, and particularly evolutionary science, to his evangelical atheism. The result is a best-selling screed and an eloquent testimony to the poverty and problems of modern science education. I will discuss the book in terms of several critical paradoxes it raised for me. Science, as a set of tools for producing reliable knowledge of the natural world, is a product of seventeenth-century European minds. Its most fundamental assumption is that despite critical points of contact, there is some sort of basic division between Nature and Supernature, the former being governed by matter and law, and the latter by spirit and miracle. The uniqueness of that underlying assumption?that the natural and supernatural realms are basically distinct and separable from one