ABSTRACT
In the course of commenting through the means of electronic mail on each others first drafts of the papers included in this volume, we developed a rather intense dialogue on some basic issues that we could not resolve to our satisfaction. Consequently, we offer this jointly authored statement not to argue once again the issues, nor to fashion a quick-fix solution to the issues, but rather to specify what an earnest and open-minded anthropologist and a theologian with the same attributes found to be the most interesting and most difficult nub of their conversation. Perhaps the scheme of Nowell-Smith s definition of morality (which both of us found helpful) focuses the issue most clearly. Nowell-Smith designated three elements of morality: (1) beliefs about the nature of human beings in their world; (2) beliefs about what is good or desirable; (3) rules laying down what ought or ought not to be done. One of the issues on which the two of us pursue variant lines of analysis is where science, specifically sociobiology, fits into this scheme. Irons understands that science provides only step 1 of this scheme, while it constrains, but does not determine, steps 2 and 3. Hefner suggests that reflection upon morality is distinctive in that the beliefs that qualify in step 1 serve intrinsically to shape our understanding of step 2, whether our discipline is science or theology. Hefner believes that this distinctive character of step 1 beliefs in the context of moral reflection means that step 1 beliefs function as concepts of the way things really are, which is the operational weight of a God-concept that is, that concept, conforming to which constitutes the definition of morality (this is the force of Kant s concept of a regulative idea). Irons allows that the interrelationship of steps 1, 2, and 3 is exceedingly intimate and complex, but bridles at the notion that scientific ideas could function as God-concepts. Indeed, he believes that such a suggestion clouds the true function of science. Hefner suggests that to deny the de facto function of certain scientific theories as God-concepts is to miss the profoundest moral implications of sociobiology, including its serious inability to take the measure of moral phenomena. Hefner does not intend this as a dismissal of sociobiology (as some critics seem to dismiss it), but rather as a necessary interpretational move if we are to recognize the profound relevance of sociobiology for religion and morality, as well as the limitations of such investigation. The limitations call, not for rejection of sociobiology, but rather, as Wilson challenges, the absorption and going beyond.
