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it seems that several things are getting mixed up here.
first off there is a genre problem: is the development/evolution of life a properly scientific or religious question? who decides that?
personally, i don't find religious explanations to be compelling, and many in this thread obviously don't either--but that's not really the issue.
who decides in a public school, say, where to put questions regarding evolution? if it's a scientific question, then at least some of the standards of scientific explanation can be said to obtain. by that i mean when the question is classified as scientific, certain standards obtain for what counts as evidence, what kind of narrative is admissible, that kind of fit there needs to be between evidence & explanation.
what this classification would resolve then is the matter of which type of explanation counts and which do not.
in a public school context, where would such a decision be made?
probably at the level of setting the ciriculum, yes?
if creationists wanted to be consistent, they would not be trying to get their beliefs taught in science classes as if they were a viable alternative explanation for data understood in more or less science-based terms: they'd be trying to get the space in which the question of the origin of life moved to something like a religion course.
and that would amount to a decision about what kind of question it is.
and deciding that would also decide what kind of explanation is and is not legitimate.
that seems to me to be the underlying issue here: what kind of question is being asked when one asks about the origin of life.
second, there is a problem with the assumption that science is a single entity, that it occupies a position of producing entirely "objective" or non-problematic information. like anything else, in principle scientific results should be approached critically, engaged, interpreted. the problem is obviously the nature of technical language involved & the ways in which access to that language is distributed socially.
the one place i agree with strange famous is in the claim that would lead in this direction, to advocating a critical relationship to scientific information. but i don't see the need to go from there in the direction he goes in. i understand the critiques of scientific rationality that are being kinda mangled in his post--i just dont see any reason to go there.
at the same time, these professions of Faith in this abstraction called Science (btw what does that word refer to? are theoretical physics and, say, botany doing the same thing? do they use the same language games? are they parsing the world in the same way? how so? you could think about the divergent understandings of, say, entropy that happen when you shift from physically-based to bio-system based systems...but that's another matter)---these professions of Faith are kinda quaint.
as are the accompanying claims that Science=Reason and so Religion=the opposite. it's not so simple. if it were, we wouldn't be having this conversation because religions would have long ago imploded. this isn't simply to stand the above on its head either...it's to say that Religion is no more a single thing than is Science.
so the debate has headed into a goofball space.
but carry on.
it's fun anyway i suppose.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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