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[Zygon, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2007).]
© 2007 by the Joint Publication Board of Zygon. ISSN 0591-2385
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SCIENCE AND WELL-WINNOWED WISDOM:
THE GRAND QUEST
Talk about "religion and science" these days and chances are that
you'll come across what journalists are calling "The New Atheism."
They refer to an avalanche of books, articles, interviews—a media
blitz, by a number of leading scientists and others who are influenced
by science—all to the effect that religion is intellectually confused
and dangerous, with some calls to eradicate religion altogether.
Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science has given little
attention to the furor that has arisen in the wake of this movement
of New Atheism. In his guest editorial in this issue, Gregory Peterson
gives his take on this current discussion. The journal's Statement
of Perspective printed on the last page of backmatter in every issue
asserts Zygon's hypothesis that religious traditions of "long-evolved
wisdom" can be yoked with "scientific discoveries about the world
and human nature" in constructive ways for enhancing human life.
The key is constructive interrelationships—something that
the current New Atheism debate seldom acknowledges. Zygon
does not focus on the conflicts between religion and science so
much as on the constructive possibilities in their relationship.
What we call long-evolved wisdom is not only central to the Zygon proposition;
it also highlights an issue that needs to receive more attention.
The issue is this: When modern science engages traditional religions
and humanistic traditions, a fundamental question arises: How does
our contemporary experience and knowledge relate to the whole of
premodern, prescientific traditions of wisdom?
Restricting ourselves to our history as literate creatures, we
may say that we are in possession of four millennia of experience
exploring and trying to understand our world and our own human nature
and fashioning strategies for survival. Our forebears, even four
thousand years ago, were our equal in quality of mind and seriousness
of intention, and they confronted just as urgent pressures from
their environment as we do. The experience of those four millennia,
together with our entire evolutionary history, has brought us to
where are today. That experience has made us what we are, and it
is embodied in our genotypes and in our behaviors—in what Donald
T. Campbell (1976, 198) called "well-winnowed" traditions of wisdom.
The religious traditions are among the chief carriers of this wisdom.
In our grappling with the legacy of our prescientific traditions
of wisdom, we note several approaches. One is that of the highly
publicized work of the New Atheists, which seems not to acknowledge
that there is a tradition of wisdom in our prescientific experience.
The critique of religion often proceeds as if religion, and for
that matter all prescientific human traditions of thinking and perceiving,
are obsolete and therefore of no constructive value in the contemporary
search for understanding. The New Atheists apparently aim to construct
a worldview apparatus that includes a complex of values and life-support
systems that totally displaces traditional religion. Moreover, they
intend to undertake their construction de novo— from scratch, so
to speak.
Another view holds that there is indeed wisdom in traditional religion
that rested on what Louis Martin (2007) calls "a faulty empirical
foundation." The task is to reconstruct the traditional wisdom on
the base of contemporary scientific knowledge. Indeed, Zygon's
statement of perspective may be interpreted to support this view.
Both of these approaches assume that much of the prescientific
legacy, particularly the religious traditions, is not credible,
specifically their myth and ritual. It is asserted that this legacy
has its "facts" wrong and hence has lost its credibility for us.
The issue here is what to do with myth and ritual. Much prevailing
thought operates on the assumption that myth and ritual are dispensable,
unnecessary accretions that earlier humans constructed because of
the darkness of their prescientific ages.
In light of the millennia-long experiential energy that has forged
myth and ritual, as well as the depth of wisdom that is embodied
there, a strategy of dismissal itself lacks credibility. We would
do well first to ask why myth arose. It may well be rooted in the
fact that we humans are creatures driven by meaning; meaningfulness
is essential for us, and yet the world we live in often defies our
quest for meaning; it isn't amenable to common sense or even more
sophisticated knowledge. The world's possibilities for meaning are
most often hidden or embedded in ambiguity—prompting the designation
Martin employs, "mundus mendax"—a deceiving world, a trickster world.
This aspect of our situation has not been changed or dissipated
by modern knowledge even though it seems to be endemic to modern
sensibilities to believe that that this trickster dimension of the
world will be banished or rendered irrelevant by scientific knowledge.
A great deal of myth has emerged from the effort to probe this mendacious
world and grasp the meaning that eludes us. The wisdom of myth matters
to us today, precisely because it is a repository of the perennial
questions posed in our quest for meaning and human attempts to grasp
answers. In its richness, this wisdom probes conundrums and motivations
that are even now critical for our lives.
Our challenge therefore is not so much how to correct the premodern
faulty empirical foundation, how to set the premodern facts straight,
as it is to understand how to access this earlier wisdom and how
to integrate it with our modern, scientific knowledge. The salient
issue is how to interpret myth. How can we take our place in this
long history of well-winowed wisdom that our species has accumulated
through the millennia? This is the grand quest that is opened up,
ironically and unintentionally, by the New Atheism.
This issue—the last of our forty-second year—opens with five contributions
to our series of guest editorials examining the agenda for religion-and-science
discussions. Fraser Watts, psychology, argues for the primacy of
the human sciences; Edwin Laurenson, attorney, limns the significance
of scientific concepts of human self for our understandings of personal
responsibility; James Haag, theology, calls for more theological
involvement on the cutting edges of scientific research; Don Browning,
religious studies, makes a case for religion-and-science's giving
attention to pressing sociocultural challenges that face us today;
Karl Peters, philosophy and religion, urges more focus on "whatever
it is that diminishes and enhances human well-being, the well-being
of other species, and that of the planet that is our home." Succeeding
issues will continue the discussion of our agenda, including interpretive
articles on this year's array of proposals. Emergence thinking in
science, philosophy, and theology is a major effort to probe the
deep nature of the world and its evolution. Papers from the 2006
Star Island conference of the Institute on Religion in an Age of
Science, on the theme "Emergence: Nature's Mode of Creativity,"
provide a breathtaking glimpse into this theme. Offerings are by
Loyal Rue (philosophy of religion), Bruce Weber (biochemistry),
Ursula Goodenough (cell biology), Jeremy Sherman (evolutionary epistemology)
and Terrence Deacon (biological anthropology), Stuart Kauffman (biology),
Gordon Kaufman (theology), and George Fisher (geology) and Gretchen
Utt (theology).
A group of articles follows: Ecologist Robert Ulanowicz with further
reflections on emergence; Robert Geraci, religious studies, proposing
theological interpretations of robotics and artificial intelligence;
and biologist-theologian Celia Deane-Drummond drawing explicitly
on traditional wisdom to reflect on evolutionary purpose.
James Bradley (biology) and Curt Thompson (theology) respond to
Joel Garreau's Book Radical Evolution, whose title suggests
its author's interpretation of the possibilities of biology in our
time. We close with Christopher Southgate's poem "Taboo." We are
grateful to this remarkable poet whose work has furnished illumination
and grace to the journal throughout the year.
The issues are intrinsically challenging; grasping their larger
significance demands the deepest and most rigorous reflection that
we can muster. That's part of the grand quest that I have described.
—Philip Hefner
REFERENCES
Campbell, Donald T.1976."On the Conflicts between Biological
and Social Evolution and between Psychology and Moral Tradition."
Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 11: 167–208.
Martin, Louis C.2007. "Mundus Mendax." The Global Spiral: A Publication of Metanexus
Institute, 24 August. http://www.metanexus.net/Magazine/Default.aspx?TabId=68&id=
7091&SkinSrc=%5bG%5dSkins%2f_default%2fNo+Skin&ContainerSrc=%5bG%5d
Containers%2f_default%2fNo+Container.
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