Van Huyssteen J.W. (editor) Encyclopedia of Science and Religion

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

TWO BOOKS

— 907—

Decline and survival

Although the metaphor of the book of nature per-

sisted vigorously into the nineteenth century, vari-

ous movements began to undermine its cogency.

The Enlightenment critiques of David Hume

(1711–1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) un-

dermined the project of natural theology in broad

strokes, and the Deist movement challenged the

uniqueness of the Christian revelation. Thomas

Paine (1737–1809) asked defiantly, “Do we want to

know what God is? Search not the book called the

Scripture, which any human hand might make, but

the Scripture, called the creation” (The Age of Rea-

son, 1794).

Other trends exercised equally damaging ef-

fects. The revolutions in geology and biology

eroded longstanding traditions of a young Earth

and an immutable creation, and wore away the

bedrock beneath a coherent “book of nature” tem-

porally coextensive with the “book of scripture.”

Charles Babbage (1791–1871) advanced a view in

his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1838) that seems to

verge almost on asserting the superfluity of scrip-

tural revelation in light of the book of nature. Par-

allel to the “historicization” of geology and biology,

the development of an historical critical approach

to study of the scripture affected the “two books”

theme no less, challenging profoundly rooted tra-

dition about the Bible constituting an integral and

timeless record of the Word of God.

Despite the developments outlined above, the

metaphor continued to thrive during the nineteenth

century among both conservative anti-Darwinians

and more liberal thinkers who enthusiastically

adopted the principles and discoveries of contem-

porary science. A decade after the publication of

Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, Herbert Morris

(1818–1897) argued that scripture and nature rep-

resent respectively the verbal and the pictorial as-

pects of divine wisdom, correlating the “inspired

record of creation” with contemporary science (Sci-

ence and the Bible, 1871). Paul Chadbourne

(1823–1883) regarded nature as an unchangeable

record, written in the language of the sciences of

which geology comprised the most clearly compre-

hended volume (Nature and the Bible from the

Same Author, 1870). Geologist Joseph Le Conte

(1823–1901) declared that “the whole object of sci-

ence is to construct the theology of the divine rev-

elation in nature.” Although quite clear about the

limits of science as a commentary on the book of

scripture, he held that “of these two books, nature

is the elder born, and in some sense, at least, may

be considered the more comprehensive and per-

fect” (Religion and Science, 1902).

The innovations in hermeneutics and science

pushed the more religiously conservative wings of

society in a precritical direction of maintaining ver-

bal inerrancy and defending the ancient under-

standing of Earth history. The metaphor of the

“book of nature” would gain weight as one of the

cornerstones of their position, thriving in evangel-

ical and fundamentalist-creationist circles right

through the end of the twentieth century.

However, in both liberal and neo-orthodox

theology the metaphor of “God’s two books” en-

tered into steady decline after 1900. Parallel to the

development of historical geology and biblical crit-

icism was the erosion of confidence that one can

easily interpret natural processes teleologically, as

William Paley (1743–1805) had once argued. The

discovery of extinction in the fossil record chal-

lenged the ancient assumption of the immutability

of species, rendering it increasingly difficult to

read the “book of nature” as self-evidently reveal-

ing the divine plan, or at least a plan worthy of ad-

miration. Additionally, the metamorphosis of “nat-

ural philosophy” and “natural history” into the

variety of sciences as they are known today un-

dercut both terms in the metaphor of “God’s two

books.” As each new scientific discipline devel-

oped its own sphere of study, the “nature” under-

lying the “book of nature” lost its metaphorical co-

herence, and the replacement of science as

commentary on authoritative texts by the empirical

investigation of the natural world essentially re-

moved the “book” from the “book of nature.” Fi-

nally, the gradual recognition over the last two

centuries that the human community embraces a

plurality of religious faiths has had the effect of rel-

ativizing the Bible as a source of revelation. The

“two books” metaphor truly functions only if the

claim can be defended that the Bible is the book of

scripture.

The complex theme of the “book of nature”

has enjoyed a long and convoluted history. For

nearly two millennia the metaphor variously

framed, constituted, negated, or otherwise reflected

the relationship between the two human institu-

tions now referred to as science and religion. If it

appears to be a less convincing rhetorical device in

LetterT.qxd 3/18/03 1:07 PM Page 907

TWO BOOKS

— 908—

postmodernity, understanding the lifecycle of the

metaphor can reveal a great deal about the conver-

sation between religion and science.

Bibliography

Blumenberg, Hans. Die Lesbarkeit der Welt. Frankfurt am

Main, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1981.

Bono, James J. The Word of God and the Languages of

Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science

and Medicine. Madison: University of Wisconsin

Press, 1995.

Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin

Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Pan-

theon, 1953.

Harrison, Peter. The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of

Modern Science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 1998.

Howell, Kenneth. God’s Two Books: Copernican Cosmol-

ogy and Biblical Interpretation in Early Modern Sci-

ence. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame

Press, 2002.

Manuel, Frank E. The Religion of Isaac Newton. Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1974.

Pedersen, Olaf. The Book of Nature. Vatican City: Vatican

Observatory Press, 1992.

Sabundus, Raimudus. Theologia Naturalis Seu Liber Creat-

urarum (1852). Stuttgart, Germany: Bad Cannstatt,

1966.

PETER M. J. HESS

LetterT.qxd 3/18/03 1:07 PM Page 908

— 909—

UFO

The modern UFO phenomenon began in 1947

with the eyewitness account of pilot Kenneth

Arnold of nine flying disks near Mount Rainier in

Washington. The newspapers called them flying

saucers. UFO is the more technical term, standing

for unidentified flying object. A sighting acquires

this designation only after scientific attempts to

identify it as a star, meteor, balloon, aircraft, or hal-

lucination have failed. UFO refers to what is

unidentified after attempts to identify it.

Types of sightings

As a phenomenon of perception, scholars study

both the perceiver and the perceived, both the UFO

and its witness. Sightings are classified as: (1) day-

light disks; (2) nocturnal lights; (3) radar sightings

or combinations of radar and visual sightings; (4)

close encounters of the first kind, when the witness

is within 500 feet of the object or craft; (5) close en-

counters of the second kind, when physical traces

of the object or craft are left for investigation; and

(6) close encounters of the third kind, when wit-

nesses claim to encounter beings connected to a fly-

ing craft. Investigators give higher credibility to mul-

tiple witness sightings, especially when witnesses

are independent of one another. Such categorizing

is itself part of the UFO phenomenon, reflecting the

scientific attitude investigators take to their work.

Government evaluations of UFOs

Seldom has the academic community taken up the

subject of UFOs for research and analysis. The U.S.

government sponsored various investigative pro-

grams from 1947 through 1969 such as Project Sign

and Project Bluebook; but the government’s inter-

est was primarily national defense. Convinced that

UFOs provided no threat to national security, these

efforts deliberately sought to debunk public claims

to UFO sightings in an attempt to reduce the quan-

tity of reports various governmental agencies

would need to process.

From 1967 to 1969, Edward U. Condon at the

University of Colorado conducted a federally

funded study, Final Report of the Scientific Study of

Unidentified Flying Objects. What became known

as the Condon Report concluded that “nothing has

come from the study of UFOs” that would warrant

“further extensive study.” On this basis, the U.S. Air

Force dropped Project Bluebook and ceased col-

lecting data. J. Allen Hynek, the principal as-

tronomer and scientific debunker for Project Blue-

book, converted, so to speak, and began his own

private research organization, the Center for UFO

Studies at Northwestern University.

Social and cultural aspects

As a social phenomenon, since their first appear-

ance following the Second World War, two ele-

ments have been present in public perception: an

association of UFOs with the possibility of extra-

terrestrial intelligent life, and vociferous criticism of

the U.S. government for allegedly withholding vital

secrets from its citizens and the world. In addition,

UFO research organizations, such as the Mutual

UFO Network (MUFON), have been established,

and new religious movements such as Heaven’s

LetterU.qxd 3/18/03 1:07 PM Page 909

UFO

— 910—

Gate, the UNARIUS Society, the Aetherius Society,

and the Raelians see great significance in UFOs.

The UFO phenomenon is frequently confused

with science fiction, although no relationship exists

between the two, which followed separate paths in

the first decades after the Second World War. Sci-

ence fiction literature and films generally depicted

extraterrestrials as enemies, invaders threatening

earth and against whom earthlings would have to

unite in self-defense. In contrast, within the UFO

community extraterrestrials were viewed as either

benign or, in many cases, as benevolent, as celes-

tial saviors coming to Earth to rescue humanity

from self-destruction. Two notable Hollywood

films portrayed the UFO experience as UFO be-

lievers interpret it: Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth

Stood Still (1951) and Steven Spielberg’s Close En-

counters of the Third Kind (1977).

For the first forty years of the phenomenon the

space visitors were pictured as benign or benevo-

lent. Then in the late 1980s reports were published

of abductions in which the UFO abductors be-

haved much like abusers. Attributed to them were

plots to impregnate earth women with extraterres-

trial sperm to raise a hybrid race that unites heaven

and Earth. After a decade of such reports, subse-

quent interviews of alleged abductees revealed a

shift in interpretation. Abductees who originally re-

ported a sense of violation by their space captors

began to interpret extraterrestrial motives as spiri-

tually beneficial and healing.

As a cultural phenomenon, UFOs have picked

up surface and subtle sublimated meanings. On

the surface, they are strange objects seen in the

sky. Below the surface, UFOs function symboli-

cally to bear religious meaning in a secular culture

imbued by natural science and secular self-under-

standing. Sublimated religious meaning expresses

itself in at least four forms: transcendence, omnis-

cience, perfection, and redemption.

Transcendence. In many archaic religions the

sky was a natural symbol of transcendence, and in

the modern world outer space has replaced the

sky in this role. Sky gods were powerful gods,

wielding thunderbolts and scorching the earth with

a blazing hot sun. With airplanes and weather re-

ports mastering the sky, modern people have lost

the sense of celestial transcendence. The apparent

infinity of outer space, however, revives this lost

spiritual sensibility. Because UFOs are seen in the

sky and associated with outer space, they allegedly

have mastered travel over unfathomable distances.

They come from beyond, a physical beyond that

easily slips over to become a spiritual beyond.

Omniscience. The worldview of modern society

includes evolutionary theory in its self-understand-

ing, and when the question of extraterrestrial life is

raised, evolution is exported to outer space. Al-

though biologists see no scientific basis for prog-

ress in biological evolution on earth, the popular

mind identifies evolution with technological ad-

vance. When projected onto possible beings in

space, they are thought to be more “advanced”

than earthlings. Their technological knowledge is

superior. In UFO religious groups, extraterrestrials

are said to have gained telepathic powers so they

can read earthlings’ minds, a quality previously at-

tributed to angels.

Perfection. Again, projecting evolution under-

stood as progress infers that the extraterrestrials

who have evolved for a very long time not only

have perfected technology but have also perfected

bodily health and social morality. They have con-

quered disease, live for extraordinarily long peri-

ods, and, most importantly, they are pictured as

living in peace, especially peace with nuclear

power and without ecological deterioration.

Redemption. Having achieved transcendent

travel, ultimate technological knowledge, and so-

cial perfection, the space travelers are in a position

to save the earth from the threat of nuclear war

and ecological disaster. The extraterrestrials are

Gnostic redeemers because, as new religious

groups forming around UFO belief testify, their

mission is to teach citizens of Earth to pull together

into a single planetary society that lives in peace,

prosperity, and harmony with nature. This entire

belief structure is a modern myth—what Carl Jung

called a “myth of things seen in the sky.”

The UFO phenomenon, which includes both

believers and what is believed, provides a gate into

understanding the dynamics of a culture totally im-

bued with natural science, so much so that reli-

gious sensibilities must make their appearance in

sublimated form.

See also EXOBIOLOGY; EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE

Bibliography

Condon, Edward U. Final Report of the Scientific Study of

Unidentified Flying Objects. New York: Dutton, 1969.

LetterU.qxd 3/18/03 1:07 PM Page 910

UPWARD CAUSATION

— 911—

Hynek, J. Allen. The UFO Experience. New York: Ballan-

tine, 1972.

Jung, Carl. Flying Saucers: A Myth of Things Seen in the

Sky. New York: Bantam, 1959.

Klass, Philip. UFOs Explained. New York: Random House,

1974.

Lewis, James R. The Gods Have Landed: New Religions

from Other Worlds. Albany: State University of New

York Press, 1995.

Peters, Ted. UFOs—God’s Chariots: Flying Saucers in Poli-

tics, Science, and Religion. Louisville, Ky.: Westmin-

ster John Knox, 1976.

Peters, Ted. “Heaven’s Gate and the Theology of Sui-

cide.” Dialog, A Journal of Theology 37, no.1 (Winter

1998): 57–66.

TED PETERS

UNPREDICTABILITY

The term unpredictability refers to the failure of

predicting future events out of a given state of af-

fairs with the help of scientific laws, which relate ef-

fects to causes. By establishing fundamental unpre-

dictability within the basis of scientific description

itself, quantum theory and the theory of complex

systems have undermined a central conviction of

classical physics namely, that precise predictability

is in principle achievable. While quantum theory

seems to point to a fundamental ontological inde-

terminism, unpredictability entailed by the theory of

complex systems can be reduced to deterministic

laws and is routed in the sensitivity of complex sys-

tems to minimal deviations of their initial conditions.

See also CHAOS, QUANTUM; CHAOS THEORY; PHYSICS,

UANTUM

DIRK EVERS

UPWARD CAUSATION

When the direction of causal influence extends

from ‘higher’ levels of reality (say, those above the

level of physics) down to ‘lower’ levels of reality,

we speak of downward causation. The various sci-

ences are commonly, though not uncontrover-

sially, assumed to stand in some hierarchical rela-

tionship to each other. Physics is considered the

basic science, with the other sciences (chemistry,

biology, psychology, and the social sciences)

stacked on top, each dealing with mereologically

more complicated fusions of physical events than

its predecessor. This assumption is often comple-

mented with the principle of the causal closure of

the physical realm. This principle states, in effect,

that physical events (even huge conglomerates of

physical events possibly constituting such macro-

events as earthquakes, mental states, or a crash in

the stock market) are causally produced by an-

tecedent physical events alone (though these latter

events may in their turn be more illuminatingly de-

scribable in the jargon of relevant nonphysical sci-

ences). That is to say, fundamentally there is only

one kind of “real” causation, namely, causation at

the level of microphysical events. Thus, causation

extends upward all the way from the physical do-

main to the higher-level domains supposedly

stacked up on top.

Consequently, according to this view, causation

at these higher levels of existence, in particular

mental causation, is always in some sense derivative

or epiphenomenal. Jaegwon Kim’s doctrine of su-

pervenient causation, for example, holds that there

exists a macro-causal relation between two events

just in case there is a micro-causal relation between

the two events upon which they supervene. Clearly

such a definition of supervenient causation renders

all macro-causation epiphenomenal. In particular,

since mental causation is a species of macro-

causation, the way the mind matters in this world is,

on this view, epiphenomenal as well. It has been

observed, however, that Kim’s doctrine presup-

poses an unnecessarily restricted notion of event-

supervenience known as local supervenience.

See also CAUSATION; DOWNWARD CAUSATION;

UPERVENIENCE

Bibliography

Kim, Jaegwon. “Epiphenomenal and Supervenient Causa-

tion.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 9 (1984): 257–270.

THEO C. MEYERING

LetterU.qxd 3/18/03 1:07 PM Page 911

— 913—

VALUE

The word value commonly refers to the worth of

something: an object or event, a person or action,

an idea or institution. Its value can be understood

as objective, a quality or feature it possesses inde-

pendently of one’s experiencing it. The sunset is

beautiful whether it is observed or not; honesty is

the best policy even if people do not think so. A

thing’s value can also be understood as subjective,

a positive feeling or idea that it arouses or that is

imputed to it. Good art is whatever one happens to

like; moral codes are social constructs. In econom-

ics, the (subjective) market value of a commodity

or service is the price someone is willing to pay for

it at a given time; its (objective) normal value is the

price it would command in a perfectly functioning

open market. By metaphorical extension, the value

of a variable in mathematics is its assignable nu-

meric worth: The value of x in 2 × x = 6 is 3.

Value is also a verb. To value something is to

esteem it, to take it into account in making a

choice, to assert its objective or subjective worth.

The American philosopher and educator John

Dewey distinguishes between prizing and appriz-

ing: To prize something is to like it, to appreciate

it, to enjoy the experience of it. There is no expla-

nation required: People simply like what they like.

Dewey calls these de facto values, which he con-

trasts with de jure values, values that have been

judged, with respect to their causes and conse-

quences and by comparison to other alternatives,

to be genuinely worthwhile, not only desired but

desirable. Just as science has an experimental

method for discriminating warranted from unwar-

ranted hypotheses, Dewey argues, so a method of

criticism is needed for discriminating among val-

ues, helping people select those values most con-

ducive to their self-realization and to the attaining

of a common good.

A thing’s value can be either intrinsic, itself

the source of its value, or extrinsic, the source of

its value lying elsewhere: in God’s will, a subjec-

tive judgment, or another value upon which it is

dependent. In a context of means and ends, a

thing has final value (sometimes, confusingly,

called its intrinsic value) if it is the goal of a pur-

posive effort; it has instrumental value if valued as

a means for achieving that goal. Dewey argued

that all values are both final and instrumental: Any

end one seeks is also a means toward further

ends. In the eighteenth century, the philosopher

Immanuel Kant argued that rational beings are

ends in themselves: They have infinite worth be-

cause there is no other value for which their value

could legitimately be sacrificed, made merely a

means. Note that all instrumental values are ex-

trinsic, but some extrinsic values are not instru-

mental: Theistic religions claim that persons are

valuable not intrinsically but because they are cre-

ated by God.

Value theory, or axiology, an approach in

which value as a general category is made the pri-

mary object of philosophical analysis, is a nine-

teenth and twentieth century development in West-

ern thought. Among the leading value theorists are

Bernard Bosanquet, J. N. Findlay, Alexius Meinong,

and Max Scheler in Europe; Alejandro Korn in Latin

LetterV.qxd 3/18/03 1:07 PM Page 913

VALUE

— 914—

America; and C. I. Lewis, Ralph Barton Perry, John

Dewey, and Stephen Pepper in the United States.

Their strategy is usually to provide a generic analy-

sis of the nature and conditions of value, then to

apply these concepts to the various realms of value

their theory either predicts or interprets.

Traditionally, however, thinkers have con-

cerned themselves not with value in general but

with specific values: aesthetic (beauty), ethical or

religious (goodness), and scientific or philosophi-

cal (truth). Sometimes these kinds of value are

thought to be distinct, for instance, claiming that

the criteria for a thing’s being true have nothing to

do with its desirability. Others argue for a hierar-

chy among the kinds, usually in terms of some ver-

sion of Plato’s divided line, beginning with the

transient values of immediate perception and

imagination, rising through practical and then the-

oretical concerns, and arriving finally at something

ultimate, the source of all lesser values: a contem-

plation of the Form of the Good or of Beauty, or

communion with God or the Absolute. In the early

nineteenth century, the philosopher Georg Wil-

helm Friedrich Hegel temporalized this hierarchy,

so that the ultimate became not an eternal govern-

ing ideal but a historical culmination, not a gov-

erning rule but an achievable goal.

The notion of a “final value” for individuals to

achieve is usually given an ethical slant. Aristotle,

for instance, finds this achievement to be the hap-

piness that comes from a life of appropriate actions

accomplished with excellence. Confucius recom-

mends combining principled action with energetic

striving, melding Heaven and Earth into a moder-

ate way of living. For the Stoic, one’s culminating

humanity is to be found in tranquility of mind; for

the Christian, in selfless love; for Friedrich Niet-

zsche, in the effective exercise of one’s will to

power; for Josiah Royce, in loyalty to a cause; for

Jean-Paul Sartre, in authenticity.

This notion of a value as an achievement, as a

quality of something made, has been explored

metaphysically by pragmatists and process philoso-

phers. For instance, Robert Cummings Neville, in-

fluenced by Charles Sanders Pierce and Alfred

North Whitehead, argues that all values are

achievements of harmony. A value is an integration

of diverse elements. The more they are diverse, the

more complex the attained harmony; the more

complete or intense their integration, the more sim-

ple the harmony. Complexity and simplicity are op-

posites, however. The challenge is to increase both

in a harmonic contrast, making the most value pos-

sible in a given circumstance. Neville then works

out the implications of this theory for the traditional

realms of value, defining truth, beauty, and good-

ness as kinds of harmonic contrast.

One’s personal values are evidenced by the

things one finds valuable. Insofar as they are com-

patible and consistently held, they comprise one’s

personal value system. Emile Durkheim argues that

for people to be organized into communities it is

necessary that individual value systems be subor-

dinated to a shared social value system. God, says

Durkheim, is that historically fashioned cultural

value system projected as an ultimate reality inde-

pendent of those who hold it. Hence should the

societal order break down, its members will feel

alienated from God, stripped of their sense of

worth: They will suffer a condition of valueless-

ness, the despair of anomie.

See also AESTHETICS; AXIOLOGY; BEAUTY; VALUE;

ALUE THEORY; VALUE, RELIGIOUS; VALUE,

CIENTIFIC

Bibliography

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald. En-

glewood Cliffs, N.J.: Library of Liberal Arts, 1962.

Confucius. The Analects, trans. Raymond Dawson. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Dewey, John. Experience and Nature (1929). New York:

Dover Publications. 1958.

Durkheim, Emile. Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans.

John A. Spaulding and George Simpson. New York:

Free Press, 1966.

Kant, Immanuel. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals

(1785), trans. James W. Ellington. Indianapolis, Ind.:

Hackett, 1981.

Neville, Robert Cummings. Recovery of the Measure: Inter-

pretation and Nature. Albany: State University of

New York Press, 1989.

Perry, Ralph Barton. Realms of Value: A Critique of

Human Civilization. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-

versity Press, 1954.

Scheler, Max. Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics

of Values: A New Attempt Toward the Foundation of

an Ethical Personalism, trans. Manfred S. Frings and

LetterV.qxd 3/18/03 1:07 PM Page 914

VALUE,RELIGIOUS

— 915—

Roger L. Funk. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University

Press, 1973.

GEORGE ALLAN

VALUE,RELIGIOUS

Value functions in religion in at least three ways: as

the ground of obligation, as the framing values ori-

enting culture and thinking, and as specific moral

traditions.

Value as the ground of obligation

One of the chief functions of religion is to explain

why people should be moral or spiritual at all, and

to cultivate a fundamental human constitution of

living under obligation. Religions define people as

responsible. Even in vaguely antireligious secular

societies such as those of the North Atlantic nations

at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this

obligation-making function is recognized as “civil

religion.” When religions fail to function even as

civil religions, serious relativism gains currency, as

has been analyzed by Robert Bellah (b. 1927) and

his collaborators.

Religions represent fundamental human oblig-

atoriness to rest on what they take to be ultimate,

as examined by the Comparative Religious Ideas

Project in The Human Condition and Ultimate Re-

alities, as well as by Ninian Smart (1927–2001).

Roughly speaking, the religions of East Asia, Con-

fucianism and Daoism, take the ultimate or Dao to

be intrinsically good with powers by which human

beings can become great. Obligation in the East

Asian context has connotations of attunement and

participation in cosmic and social orders, and as

such is friendly to science in the form of practical

technology, ranging from ancient practices of med-

icine and dietary regulation to modern scientific

technology. The main religions of South Asia, in-

cluding the many forms of Hinduism and Bud-

dhism, consider the ultimate to involve some ver-

sion of a contrast between what is apparently real

in daily life and what is really real. The notion of

living under obligation in these religions has con-

notations of coming to enlightenment about this

distinction, observing culture-building obligations

regarding daily life on the one hand and religious

fulfillment or actualization obligations regarding

what is really real on the other. Because science is

regarded as studying the daily world of appear-

ances, South Asian religions can encourage both

theoretical and practical science with great enthu-

siasm: Science is detached from concerns for what

is really real, and can stand in little conflict with

theological interests.

The West Asian monotheistic religions of Ju-

daism, Christianity, and Islam symbolize the ulti-

mate as a God who creates the world and to

whom people are responsible in freedom. In the

ancient metaphors, God is like a king who issues

decrees that obligate people; to be a person is to

stand before God as before a judge. Science often

is prized in West Asian religions as a way of un-

derstanding God, creation, and the divine norms.

This was particularly so in medieval Islam and in

European science in the modern world. Neverthe-

less, the imperatives associated with the moral tra-

ditions of these religions can be in conflict with

those that seem to arise from scientific under-

standing. West Asian religions engender conflicts

between “conservative” religious values and

“modern” scientific ones, conflicts that are more

difficult to engender in some other Asian religious

traditions.

The common distinction in modern European

science between facts and values is of utmost im-

portance regarding the religious function of defin-

ing obligation. Early modern science modeled itself

on mathematical systems and sought to character-

ize the world as a set of explainable facts and

value-neutral laws. By implication, value was sup-

posed to be derived from human interest or pro-

jection, not from the nature of things. Although

there have been attempts to define human obliga-

tion within a scientific system, as for instance in the

modern social contract theories of Thomas Hobbes

(1588–1679) or John Locke (1632–1704), the cul-

tural upshot of the modern scientific distinction be-

tween fact and value is to say that the ground of

obligation cannot be known and is a matter of per-

sonal or subjective preference. Hence the existen-

tial cultural importance of the question, Why be

moral? If a person can choose not to be moral,

there seems to be nothing in the nature of things to

indicate that this would be a mistake. So long as

modern science has a “factual, non-value” philoso-

phy of nature, it tends to undermine the religious

LetterV.qxd 3/18/03 1:07 PM Page 915

VALUE,RELIGIOUS

— 916—

grounding of obligation, regardless of which reli-

gious conception of ultimacy is operative.

Value as cultural orientation

The function of religions to provide framing or ori-

enting values for cultures has already been men-

tioned. The East Asian orientation to the ultimate as

attunement and participation is associated with

positive assessments of the value of life, nature, and

human social affiliations. Disease, moral failings,

and spiritual perversity are interpreted as mis-

attunements, not invincible ignorance or sin.

Whereas Confucianism emphasizes positive cultural

work to attain attunement, Daoism emphasizes co-

ordination with nature. The South Asian emphasis

on a contrast between the world of appearances

and the really real produces a divided and balanced

kind of orientation: attention to the everyday and a

search for release from ignorance (at least on the

part of those ready for it). The common belief in

the West that South Asian religions do not have

strong ethical or scientific traditions is false; those

religions just do not associate ethics or science with

the religious quest except as preliminaries or

supports. The West Asian religions, by contrast,

strongly prize freedom and responsibility, and take

the issues of justice and righteousness to have an

ultimate, divine dimension; human moral failure is

a religious offence against God. These religions ori-

ent people to the world as a positive expression of

divine creation, but also sometimes treat nature as

providing temptations to sin because people have a

direct relation to God (namely, obligation) setting

them apart from nature.

The great religious traditions have evolved

through centuries, and the shape of their framing

value orientations has shifted accordingly. The East

Asian religions were deeply impacted for centuries

by Buddhism from India. The South Asian religions

have interacted with Islam and Christianity. The

West Asian religions have exhibited both world-

denying forms (as in early Christian asceticism)

and world-celebrating forms. The contemporary

interactions of the great world religious traditions

reflect both their long histories and the fact that

each has become a global religion, with cultural

embodiments in each of the world’s cultures.

Precisely because religions are culturally em-

bodied, the values otherwise resident in their vari-

ous cultures are powerful within the thinking of

the religions themselves. National interests, for in-

stance, can define different expressions of a reli-

gion against one another. The wars between Iran

and Iraq in the twentieth century, or between the

Christian nations of Europe, have involved calling

upon the same religious tradition to justify each

side against the other, reinforcing different inter-

pretations of what the religion means.

As orientations to science, the framing values

of the different religions have the effects already

suggested. East Asian religions value science for its

practical benefits. South Asian religions promote

an objective detachment about science because it

is not concerned with ultimate matters in the form

of the really real or ultimate religious quests. West

Asian religions can promote science as a kind of

piety inquiring into the mind and work of God, on

the one hand, and fear it as the source of norms

different from those of the tradition, especially the

norm of objectivity that treats the world as a mere

fact without value.

Value as traditions of morality

The great religions have long traditions of moral

interpretation reflecting their historical and cultural

locations and changes. Within each tradition are

often to be found arguments representing many

sides of basic issues treating war and peace, pat-

terns of family and social life, proper respect for

people in conditions of birth and death, life transi-

tions, and suffering. For instance, most religions

have both pacifist and just-war moral traditions.

The development of modern science has af-

fected religious moral traditions in many ways, two

of which are the following. Most moral problems

are framed by conceptions of natural conditions.

For instance, the ancient Greek belief that the ho-

munculus or complete human being is contained

in the male sperm made it plausible to condemn as

murder any male sexual activity, including mastur-

bation, not reasonably intended for impregnation.

This argument, though perhaps not the sentiment,

falls away completely when it is realized that a

human being requires genes from the mother’s egg

as well as from the father’s sperm. Or to mention

an example from the social sciences, distributive

justice could not be taken to have a global scope

so long as international economics was not under-

stood in systematic ways. For example, during the

LetterV.qxd 3/18/03 1:07 PM Page 916

VALUE,SCIENTIFIC

— 917—

Middle Ages, the Christian thinker Thomas Aquinas

(c. 1225–1274) could consider distributive justice as

limited to a king’s domain. But with the advent of

empirical global economic theory, the problem of

developing theories of global distributive justice is

suddenly a forced option for religious moral

thinkers.

In addition to the impact of science on moral

theory, the development of scientific technologies

has led to moral problems that did not exist before.

The invention of large bombs makes the old just-

war theories, which are based on restraint, obso-

lete. Biological technologies of cloning, organ

transplantation, and genetic manipulation lead to

dilemmas that were not previously imagined. Inso-

far as moral responses to new problems raised by

technological advances are to come from develop-

ments of the religious moral traditions, the religious

values themselves are in process of evolution.