Total Truth: A book I wouldn’t have read
I asked my conservative friend Lea for a reading list when we started this year’s Dinner at the Square season: Faith, Politics & Neighbors. She handed me a copy of Nancy Pearcy’s Total Truth and commented that she knew I’d just l-o-v-e the title.
I did, at times, find it a challenging read for my just left-of-center faith leanings. But I also found parts of it true and important.
Pearcy notes a quote by Cornell evolutionary biologist William Provine:
Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear … There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either.
According to Pearcy, evolution fails a major test: No one can live by it.
Think for a moment about what might become of us if we completely replaced a religious mythos with an evolutionary one: No ethics derived from faith, no reason to defer gratification, no higher call to altruism, only an implied imperative to be the fittest which survives. It’s not hard to understand the fear is that the result of this philosophy could ultimately be an unraveling of civil society.
Left, right, center… we’d all consider this bad. It’s not hard to understand why conservatives think the stakes are high.
Pearcy asserts:
As Christians we must make it clear that we are not offering a subjective, private faith that is immune to rational scrutiny, we are making cognitive claims about objective knowledge that can be defended in the public arena… If they offer “universal Darwinism,” then we had better offer “universal Design,” showing that design theory gives scientific support for an all-encompassing Christian worldview.
On common ground: Is there a distinction we can make between logos and mythos, between fact and truth? Can we teach science and morality, knowing the difference? Might we be weakening rather than strengthening the broad social power of faith if we insist that it stand up to the scientific method and be fact in order to be true?
Add comment December 30th, 2008
