ABSTRACT
I begin with two short answers to Wayne's final questions. First, “Must the true scientist give up the notion that some power, greater than ourselves, provided the conditions of his or her research and provides, daily, the whole range of possibilities that life itself yields?” No, I don't see any incompatibility with a scientist both believing in this power and rigorously pursuing his or her empirical or theoretical inquiries into some aspect of our world. Two, “Is not the scientist who believes that a given science can solve all of our questions exhibiting rank superstition, over-belief, uberglaube?” Yes. Both of these questions engage a common theme, which is the hubris behind the belief in the self-sufficiency of science. Both are traditional yet postmodern concerns with recognizing the limits of science or, by expansion, the limits of any human enterprise. Both questions, in the terms that Wayne has just developed, are religious. And, for me, both point to an ancient text, Oepidus Tyranus. I have always read that play as a tragedy exploring the pollution that followed inexorably on an overconfidence in a human intelligence to be adequate to the world that we inherit and inhabit. It is Oedipus's overvaluing, however well-intentioned, of human reasoning that lies at the center of that tragedy. He assumes that all problems that we confront are similar in kind to the riddle that the Sphinx poses and that we are the answer to our problem. He assumes, in effect, that all problems are riddles, and it is his inability to distinguish between that which is mysterious and that which is puzzling that creates the difficulties that ultimately undo him. And like so many of Sophocles's great protagonists Oedipus prides himself on his unwillingness to yield, to listen to another. And, as is so often the case in Sophoclean tragedy, the resistance of the protagonist to persuasion raises serious questions for rhetoric. How does one talk to Oedipus? Wayne has offered one possibility. I would like in my response to explore how his answer suggests an important role for rhetoric in the controversies between science and reli-gion, and then I would like to explore one difficulty that his search for a common ground encounters.
