by William Carroll
The traditional pillars of religion that support a view of God as transcendent Creator remain unshaken by the discoveries of modern science.
In a culture that sees science as the pinnacle of human knowledge, there continues to be lively discussion about the place of religious belief. Some believers think that their faith is threatened by science. Evolutionary biology, for example, appears to offer all-encompassing explanations of the origin and nature of living things. Thus, some believers who feel their world under assault argue that evolution is only a theory and at least equal time ought to be given, especially in education, to alternative accounts of life, including those based on biblical texts. On the other side, there are many who see religion, historically and essentially, as a barrier to an enlightened view of nature and human nature. Such people enter public discourse to show the incompatibility between evolution and religion.
In this vein, a recent New York Times article argues that the “pillars of religion” are challenged by evolutionary biology. David Barash, an evolutionary biologist and psychologist at the University of Washington, describes a disclaimer he gives at the beginning of his animal behavior class. The fundamental point he seeks to make, since many in his class harbor some form of religious belief, is that his students “need to know why science and religion cannot be reconciled.”
It is often easy to conclude that there are only two possible positions in this debate. We hear two extremes: either diminish or reject the conclusions of evolution in the defense of religion, or diminish or reject religion in defense of science. Religious participants in this type of debate often appeal to a sacred text (the Bible or the Qu’ran) as a kind of counterweight to the authority of science. Those who take the opposite extreme frame their analysis in terms of a historical narrative that sees modern science as having emerged by fighting against the forces of biblical literalism and ecclesiastical obstructionism. Historians, philosophers, and theologians know better than to describe the relationship between science and religion in the stark terms of warfare. Nevertheless, the image of fundamental conflict persists.
Are Facts and Values at War?
There are, of course, several other ways to examine the relationship between evolution and religion. Barash mentions, only to reject, a famous attempt to offer a “third way,” found in the work of the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. Gould coined the abbreviation “NOMA,” or “non-overlapping magisteria,” to describe his view that science and religion are two completely separate realms of discourse that, when properly followed, do not lead to any conflict. In Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, Gould wrote:
NOMA is a simple, humane, rational, and altogether conventional argument for mutual respect, based on non-overlapping subject matter, between two components of wisdom in a full human life: our drive to understand the factual character of life (the magisterium of science), and our need to define meaning in our lives and a moral basis for our actions (the magisterium of religion).
In other words, science is concerned with the domain of facts; religion with the domain of meaning and value. This is a distinction still embraced in many circles. It has a seductive appeal in that it seems to honor different realms of wisdom by keeping them isolated from one another.
But Gould offers too simplistic a distinction between a world of fact and a world of value. Barash notes that the two magisteria are more overlapping than Gould thought. According to Barash, “as evolutionary science has progressed, the available space for religious faith has narrowed.” Perhaps more to the point, religion does make factual claims about nature, and science is not a value-free enterprise. Biology, philosophy, and theology do share some common objects (e.g., human nature), but each proceeds using different premises and methods.
Does evolutionary biology, for example, really tell us that there is no human soul? Or does it only tell us that there is no empirical warrant for affirming the soul’s existence? It would be a further judgment, and a philosophical judgment at that, to limit the real to what is empirically observable.
The Argument from Complex Design
Barash argues that evolutionary science “has demolished two previously potent pillars of religious faith.” These are: (1) an argument from the complexity of nature to the need for a supernatural creator and (2) what he calls the “illusion of centrality,” that human beings are qualitatively different from other animals. He does not seem to recognize that, however potent these pillars have been for some believers, the first is not a feature of the traditional understanding of God as Creator, and the second involves a suspect philosophical judgment that science must reject any special status for human beings.
As Barash points out, William Paley’s nineteenth-century argument from complex design to a supernatural designer fails under the weight of Darwinian evolution. Barash writes:
Since Darwin . . . we have come to understand that an entirely natural and undirected process, namely random variation plus natural selection, contains all that is needed to generate extraordinary levels of non-randomness. Living things are indeed wonderfully complex, but altogether within the range of a statistically powerful, entirely mechanical phenomenon.
Leaving aside the philosophical problems concerning what we mean by randomness and complexity, and whatever a statistically powerful mechanical phenomenon might be, the key word in this paragraph is “all.” Does evolutionary biology, or do the natural sciences taken together, provide an exhaustive account of the changing world of complex organisms? It may well be that the natural sciences only concern themselves with those features of reality subject to empirical observation. Yet to conclude that there is nothing more that needs to be explained, nothing more that needs to enter into a full picture of the world, is to make a philosophical claim, not a claim itself based on empirical observation.
Furthermore, Paley’s argument from design is a poor representative of traditional Christian approaches from nature to the Creator, even if that argument was and is accepted in some religious circles. Paley’s view, just like Barash’s criticism, suffers from the mistake of thinking of God as a kind of master craftsman. Both locate God’s causality and causes in nature on the same level, with God’s simply being more powerful. For Barash, God’s causal power is diminished, and ultimately eliminated, as the natural sciences explain more and more about the world.
- Confusions about Causality ...
- The Distinctiveness of Human Beings ...
- The Problem of Evil ...
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