ABSTRACT
Calvin and Hobbes, a boy and his tiger, are walking through a forest. ‘Do you believe in evolution?’ Calvin asks. ‘No,’ the tiger replies. ‘So you don’t believe humans descended from apes?’ the boy continues. To which the tiger responds: ‘I don’t see the difference,’ and beats a hasty retreat from the angry boy. The boy asks about the explanation of human origins; the tiger responds with an offence to human dignity. As in this comic strip by Bill Watterson, so too in debates about evolution in the real world: multiple issues are intertwined. In a lecture at a college in Iowa I presented the grand narrative of modern
science, from the Big Bang until Now, and argued for the possibility of a religious appreciation of these insights (Drees 2002a). In the Q&A period a woman asked: ‘So, you believe there has been a Second Fall?’ At first, I didn’t understand the question. She took death to be the consequence of the sin of Adam and Eve, while I had spoken of natural death as arising with the evolution of multi-cellular life, long before there were humans – which for her implied that there had been a Fall before the Fall of the first humans. Whereas the framework of my lecture had been science, her framework was a particular religious one. Miscommunication arises easily in ‘religion and science’. Debates are often non-debates, as issues and criteria are framed differently by the various participants. A good example of the extensive literature on ‘religion and science’ is The
Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science (Clayton and Simpson 2006), a thousand pages with fifty-five good chapters on religion and science. Even this extensive survey, including essays by many of the best authors, has some biases. It is mostly Anglo-Saxon with respect to the authors, and also with respect to the treatment of topics. The chapter on sociology and religion ends with remarks about the American constitution. The evolution/creation controversy is discussed in the American context as if issues are the same elsewhere. The authors focus on content, scientific and theological, at the expense of context. Theology, ethics and science have universal ambitions; their truth claims and norms seek to be valid for people of all walks of life and all cultures. While their ambitions are lofty, religion and science are human; contexts and assumptions shape the questions asked, the criteria used, the content proposed.
