Horizon

Science and the Pope

I've been enjoying the argument that Ralph Luker and Horizon's own Alan Allport have been having in the comments over at Cliopatria. I'm rooting for Ralph on this one, though I imagine Alan Hogue is screaming "Pull a prelapsarian equipoise!" from the stands.

Here at Horizon, we've all gotten a bit tired of our usual squabbles over historical parallels between the present and the 1930s. In the interest of spicing things up a bit, let me raise the lightening rod with my own take on the Pope's Regensburg address: Benedict is laying the groudwork for a Catholic exploration of Intelligent Design.

Skip down past the inflammatory book report to to the second half of the lecture. Benedict is describing the centuries-long narrowing of the application of Reason. He traces developments within theology that correspond to that narrowing, from the Reformer's rejection of dogmatic theology to Adolph von Harnack's attempt to de-Hellenize Christianity. These correspond to the reduction of the appropriate subjects of reason to those things subject to the Scientific Method, while non-technical disciplines play catch-up: The human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity. This "reduction of the radius of ... reason" has negative consequences:

[I]f science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by "science", so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective.... This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.

In a sense, this is a call familiar to Americans who have followed the Intelligent Design debate. Personally, I spent a lot of my spare time in high school arguing with creationists who thought divine revelation should be injected into our Biology texts. In fact, I was subjected to more than a few teachers who injected it into science class anyway. But if you look more closely, criticism of "the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable" is not the same as criticising that limitation within science.

This distinction between reason and science — which should perhaps be obvious — has been absent from the American debate.

Posted by Ben Brumfield at September 18, 2006 07:02 PM