As a layperson Science reader, daughter of a
biologist, and wife to a Presbyterian minister, I found much to enjoy --
and much to question -- in P. Bloom and D. S. Weisberg’s Review
“Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science” (18 May 2007, p. 996).
In particular, I delighted in the genius of the term “promiscuous
teleology," as if those of us who subscribe some sense of order and
meaning to the universe are to be as easily dismissed as horny teenagers.
Yet the phrase’s presuppositional and (dare I say it) subjective
negativity bothered me and was advanced elsewhere in the article by the
authors. How else can one construct an unsupported syllogism in which a
wholesale rejection of science proceeds categorically from a belief in an
immaterial soul, much less lump such belief together rhetorically with
astrological divinists who have out-of-body experiences and consort with
fairies?
Most of the folks I know, including myself, embrace firmly the
scientific tenets of evolution and the biological basis for thought and
emotion, while still intuiting a fundamental, nonscientific reality that
enlivens us beyond the physical. Thomas Aquinas called it “ensoulling”;
The Jewish Torah calls it "ruach," or “the breath of God.” And just as any
good scientist would never argue that we create oxygen because it is
physically necessary to our survival, so too I accept the presence of an
independent spirit, informed by and integrated fundamentally with our
bodies.
So call me a dualist, and I'll remind you of the famous statement by
F. Scott Fitzgerald: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability
to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time.”
Dina Strasser
Victor, NY
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