Description - Constructing "the Beginning" by Simon Locke
Creation science is the target of much attack these days from both within and outside the orthodox scientific community. However, this text does not provide an attack on creationism - nor a defence. The author's interest is not in creationism, but rather, it is in the questions of the role and significance of science in modernity or the public understanding of science. Locke's approach to this issue is a discursive and rhetorical one. Creationism is treated as a case study of the argumentative engagement between science and non-science which - in his view - is as central to the commonsense lifeworld as it is to the lives of its intellectuals. An important dimension of the public meaning of science in modernity is its limits and its relations with other modes of thought and belief, which continue to survive as discourses in the wider culture. Creationism is merely one example of this general feature. The book begins with a discussion of the current issues in the public understanding of science in relation to traditional sociological views of the impact of science on modernity.
This is examined through rationalization and the contrasting view derived from the sociology of scientific knowledge which points to the likelihood of a much more complex and variable relationship than rationalization proposes. It continues with an argument and detailed analysis that focuses on three main points: the problem of a competing account of reality (the world), in the form of evolution; the problem of competing accounts of the Bible (the Word), in the form of different versions of Christianity; and the realization that both of these problems must be managed together in such a way that creationists' own version(s) of the world and of the Word are compatible - a compatibility achieved through a "discursive syncretism". The final chapter brings together the strands of the argument to further develop the implications of the dilemma of science for the public understanding of science through the idea of "science as a cultural resource" and its possible relation to other such cultural resources within modernity - such as Christianity. It is suggested that much so-called "anti-science" could be made sense of in these terms and proposes further research in this direction.
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