Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in an Age of Science, and: Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think (review)

Michael Ruse is a philosopher of science at Florida State University and a spirited and prolific advocate of Darwin's theory of evolution. He has dozens of books on the subject, many of them devoted to the tense relations between evolution and Christian faith. Along with others involved in these negotiations, such as theologian Langdon Gilkey, Ruse testified against creationism in court in Little Rock in 1981. He has written extensively on the scientific bankruptcy of "Intelligent Design." With language that might make a sailor blush, he has also excoriated Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, among others, for their intemperate (and ignorant) attacks on Christian faith in the name of evolution. Ruse does not himself follow any religion. He is a self-professed skeptic. Yet neither does he think that atheism can be proven. In particular, he rejects the position that the modern theory of evolution renders religious belief wholly untenable. Indeed, in several books (this one included), Ruse maps out a position equally opposed to creationists and to the militantly anti-theistic standard bearers of the New Atheism. He is thus an interesting counterpart to Christian theologians who do the same from the side of Christian faith (among many others: John Haught, Philip Clayton, Nancey Murphy, Celia Deane-Drummond).

In this book, Ruse lays out the epistemological prerequisites of holding his via media, and gives a measured defense of his four crucial tenets of Christian faith: belief in the existence of a creator-God; subscription to a divinely sanctioned code of behavior on which we will be judged; belief in the existence of the 'soul,' which marks every human being as created in the image and likeness of God; and belief that this soul is immortal, and thus capable of enjoying life everlasting in heaven. He draws his key epistemological premise from science's use of metaphor, both specific metaphors (indicated by the noun-components in such key scientific concepts as electric field, genetic code, continental drift, and natural selection), and more fundamental, epistemically determinative metaphors, which Ruse names "root metaphors" (24). Root metaphors are useful, even necessary, to the degree that they organize other metaphors and highlight certain features of the natural world to make fruitful inquiry possible. But, they occlude or elide other features. As a consequence, root metaphors enrich and enhance certain questions, while preventing others from arising. If other questions do emerge, these metaphors make them appear trivial or meaningless. Thus, much depends on the root metaphor in science, particularly given the esteem in which science is held in the wider culture, an esteem in which Ruse revels.

He provides a lightning tour of the history of science in the first four chapters of the book to argue the historical displacement of one root metaphor by another. The rise of modern science, in his reading, is coterminous with the replacement of the metaphor of the cosmos as an organism with the metaphor of a machine. Particularly since the former metaphor (the world as organism) is more congenial to teleological inquiry, this shift has a lot to do with the infertile soil in which religion in general, and theism in particular, has to take root and grow in modernity. This displacement began with the inorganic world (physics, chemistry, geology—chapter two), and expanded to include the living world (biology—chapter three) and the sentient and conscious world, including human culture (neurobiology, cognitive science, evolutionary psychology—chapter four). The hegemony of this root metaphor constitutes our scientific age, in the name of which a variety of scientists now declare the end of religious belief (1-3). Even those who take up Christianity's cause in this scientific age often defend a Christianity so stripped of core beliefs (and the practices...