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Abstract
The culture of modern science continues to establish its public identity by appealing to values and historical conceptions that reflect its appropriation of various religious ideals during its formative period, most especially in the rhetoric of Francis Bacon. These elements have persisted because they continue to achieve similar goals, but the scientific culture's growing need for autonomy has required their secularization. The Darwin fish emblem manifests this secular reshaping. This essay shows this by tracing out the lineaments of this older Baconian world view in the scientistic ideology of those whose identity is compressed into this symbol.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Professor Jennifer Monahan for her help with the design of this study.
Notes
1. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Maussumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 28.
2. Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 6.
3. Doris Graber, Verbal Behavior and Politics (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 293, 311–12, 319.
4. The questionnaire was designed to elicit commentary regarding the assorted attitudes, values, and beliefs that users invest in the emblem. It consisted of the following three probes and was distributed on approximately 140 automobiles displaying the emblem. 1) Please explain why you chose to put this emblem on your car. 2) Is there a specific group of persons you wish to say something to by displaying this emblem? 3) Would you please explain what the Darwin-fish emblem means to you.
5. The attitudes expressed by a minority of Darwin fish users are not scientistic at all, so what I am summarizing here are the most general patterns that manifested among the symbol users surveyed in this study.
6. Deirdre McClosky, The Rhetoric of Economics, 2nd ed. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 50. Other scholars offer similar definitions. See Ian Cameron and David Edge, Scientific Images and Social Uses (London: Butterworths, 1979), 3; Richard Olson, Science Deified and Science Defied: The Historical Significance of Science in Western Culture from the Bronze Age to the Beginnings of the Modern Era ca. 3500 B.C. to ca A.D. 1640 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), 62; Shiping Hua, Scientism and Humanism: Two Cultures in Post-Mao China, 1978–1989 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995); Tom Sorell, Scientism: Philosophy and the Infatuation with Science (London: Routledge, 1991), 1.
7. The following comprises a small sample of the historical studies that have explored this relationship: John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991); John Hedley Brooke, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000); Reijer Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (Edinburgh, UK: Scottish Academic Press, 1972); Reijer Hooykaas, Robert Boyle: A Study in Science and Christian Belief (Lanham, MD: Academic Press of America, 1997); Reijer Hooykaas, Faith, Fact and Fiction in the Development of Science: The Gifford Lectures Given in the University of St. Andrews (Boston: Kluwer Academic Press, 1999); David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, eds, God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986); Thomas M. Lessl, “Francis Bacon and the Biblical Origins of the Scientific Ethos,” Journal of Communication and Religion 15 (1992): 87–98.
8. John Angus Campbell, “Scientific Revolution and the Grammar of Culture: The Case of Darwin's Origin,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 351–76.
9. Campbell, “Scientific Revolution,” 368.
10. This is supported by the fact that 21 of the 51 Darwin fish users surveyed in this study regarded the symbol as a humorous or parodic expression.
11. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 2: 212.
12. I use the term “presence” in the sense given by Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 115–20. Scientific culture also alleviates these tensions simply by avoiding philosophical reflection. See Thomas M. Lessl, “Gnostic Scientism and the Prohibition of Questions,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5 (2002): 133–57.
13. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 351.
14. Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: Norton and Co., 1989), 28–34.
15. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1933; reprint, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953).
16. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. with commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), bk. 3, 344.
17. Thomas M. Lessl, “The Galileo Legend as Scientific Folklore,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85 (1999): 146–68; James Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 19–100.
18. John Amos Comenius, Via Lucis, trans. E. T. Compagnac (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938); John Amos Comenius, Panorthosia or Universal Reform: Chapter 1–18 and 27, trans. A. M. O. Dobbie (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995); Daniel Murphy, Comenius: A Critical Assessment of His Life and Work (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995); G. H. Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius: Gleanings from Hartlib's Papers (London: University Press of Liverpool, 1947); Robert Fitzgibbon Young, Comenius in England (1932; reprint, New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1971).
19. Theodore Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 3–31; Campbell, “Scientific Revolution,” 352–58.
20. Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols (1870; reprint, New York: Garrett Press, 1968), 4: 262, 268. All subsequent references are to volumes in this edition.
21. Bacon, Works, 3: 224.
22. Bacon, Works, 4: 20.
23. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1946), 50.
24. Charles Whitney, Francis Bacon and Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986).
25. Bacon, Works, 4: 262.
26. Howard Hotson, “The Historiographical Origins of Calvinist Millenarianism,” in Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe, vol. 2, The Later Reformation, ed. Bruce Gordon (Brookfield, VT: Scholar Press, 1996), 159–81; Andrew Branstock, “Millenarianism in the Reformation and the English Revolution,” in Christian Millenarianism: From the Early Church to Waco, ed. Stephen Hunt (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 77–87.
27. Bacon, Works, 4: 92.
28. This image is available at http://www.usm.maine.edu/eng/renaissanceart.htm (accessed 24 August, 2006). On the Christianized attributes of the image see Whitney, Bacon and Modernity, 33–35.
29. Bacon, Works, 3: 340.
30. Bacon, Works, 3: 340.
31. Bacon, Works, 7: 215.
32. Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (South Bend, IN: Gateway Editions, 1953), 215–16.
33. Margaret Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 76–84; Richard Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958), 104–45.
34. Dorothy Stimson, Scientists and Amateurs: A History of the Royal Society (New York: Henry Schuman, 1948), 133–46; Joseph Ben-David, The Scientist's Role in Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 80–87.
35. Voltaire, Letters on England, trans. Leonard Tancock (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 115.
36. Lessl, “Galileo Legend.”
37. A detailed examination of the emerging association between scientific practice and the ethos of the Protestant gentleman has been undertaken by Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
38. Northrop Frye, “Myth, Fiction, and Displacement,” in Theories of Myth, ed. Robert Segal (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 132.
39. Frye, “Myth,” 122.
40. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Hollywood, CA: Universal Pictures, 1982).
41. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 77–79, 137.
42. For a more elaborate discussion of this messianic pattern in science fiction see Thomas M. Lessl, “The Mythological Conditioning of Scientific Naturalism,” Journal of Communication and Religion 28 (2005): 23–46.
43. Janice Hocker Rushing, “E.T. as Rhetorical Transcendence,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 71 (1985): 188–203.
44. Rushing, 189–91.
45. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 61–62, 88.
46. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 2.
47. White, Tropics of Discourse, 88.
48. White, Content of the Form, 21.
49. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
50. The phrase “double voicing” is Mikhail Bakhtin's from The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 301–31.
51. Leah Ceccarelli, “Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 407–9.
52. Of the 51 respondents, 14 interpreted the Darwin fish as symbolizing the compatibility of science and religion.
53. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives and a Rhetoric of Motives (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1962), 665.
54. Bacon, Works, 3: 220–21.
55. Burke, A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives, 665.
56. John Angus Campbell, “A Rhetorical Interpretation of History,” Rhetorica 3 (1984): 232.
57. If this contributor only means to say that the morality based on scientific fact is reducible to some particular fact of nature, such as pleasure or emotion, he/she is voicing what G. E. Moore has called the “naturalistic fallacy”: Principia Ethica (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1929), 10, 13–14, 18–20.
58. Bacon, Works, 3: 221.
59. See Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1976), 1–25.
60. Bacon, Works, 4: 32–3.
61. Collingwood, 53.
62. The surveys alluded to here were most probably polls concerned with human evolution rather than the age of the earth. Such studies consistently show that 45–50% of Americans assent to the statement: “God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” See George Bishop, “Religion and American views on the Origins of Species,” The Public Perspective 9 (August/September, 1998): 39.
63. Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham, “Scientists are Still Keeping the Faith,” Nature 386 (April 3, 1997): 435–36.
64. Theodore Olson, Millennialism, Utopianism, and Progress (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 192.
65. John Draper, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, 5th ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1875); Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1898).
66. See especially Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, 1–90; Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991).
67. Frank Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 13, 16.
68. Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Turgot on Progress, Sociology, and Economics, ed. Ronald Meek (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 58.
69. Turgot, Turgot on Progress, 58.
70. Campbell, “Rhetorical Interpretation,” 232.
71. Michael Ruse, Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 42–83; Michael Ruse, The Evolution–Creation Struggle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 213.
72. Ruse, Evolution–Creation, 213.
73. Ruse, Evolution–Creation, 213.
74. Ruse, Monad to Man, 531–32.