Religion and Science Watch

As you know, I have a keen interest in the ongoing science and religion debate going on. From time to time I like to report on interesting thoughts, articles, or books which I have come across. The last several years have seen a burst of articles and books on science, especially taken from the angle that evolutionary biology, psychology, and even neurotheology, we have cracked the human need for religion and can now safely dispose of religious faith as a relic from our prehistoric past that may have at one time been adaptive, but now is no longer useful, and certainly not true.

Op-Ed columnist David Brooks had an interesting article in the April 15, 2007 issue of the New York Times with the title, "The Age of Darwin." He was going through an old museum dedicated to human progress clearly based on the grand narrative of humankind's march from primitive to a highly developed culture. Noting that postmoderns now vociferously deny any kind of grand narratives, stories that make sense of the world, whether Christian, Muslim, Marxist, Freudian, etc.

In an interesting twist, though, he notes that while it is not explicitly presented as such, the grand narrative that really holds sway today is that of Darwin. As he notes, you can hardly pick up a magazine that does not have an article on the latest bio/neuro findings which explain why we feel or think the way we do. He writes, "According to this view, human beings, like all other creatures, are machines for passing along genetic code. We are driven primarily by a desire to perpetuate ourselves and our species...evolutionary society is built low to the ground. God may exist and may have set the process in motion, but he's not active. Evolution doesn't really lead to anything outside itself."

I encourage you to pay attention to how and where this grand narrative appears in what you encounter through TV, newspapers, magazines, blogs, the internet, conversation, etc.