Narrative, Religion and Science
Fundamentalism versus Irony, 1700–1999

Stephen Prickett explores the 'narrative' in ways of thinking about the world over 300 years.

Stephen Prickett (Author)

9780521811361, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 March 2002

290 pages
23.6 x 15.6 x 2.3 cm, 0.6 kg

'Written with wit and verve … It is the best kind of popular cultural thinking, helping the educated lay person to hold together a range of 'stories' from the last three hundred years of the cultural history of the West … this is an attractive and stimulating book' Theology

An increasing number of contemporary scientists, philosophers and theologians downplay their professional authority and describe their work as simply 'telling stories about the world'. If this is so, Stephen Prickett argues, literary criticism can (and should) be applied to all these fields. Such new-found modesty is not necessarily postmodernist scepticism towards all grand narratives, but it often conceals a widespread confusion and naïvety about what 'telling stories', 'description' or 'narrative', actually involves. While postmodernists define 'narrative' in opposition to the experimental 'knowledge' of science (Lyotard), some scientists insist that science is itself story-telling (Gould); certain philosophers and theologians even see all knowledge simply as stories created by language (Rorty; Cupitt). Yet story telling is neither innocent nor empty-handed. Prickett argues that since the eighteenth century there have been only two possible ways of understanding the world: the fundamentalist, and the ironic.

Introduction: Arthur Dent, Screwtape, and the mysteries of story telling
1. Post-modernism, grand narratives, and Just-So stories
2. Newton and Kissinger: science as irony?
3. Learning to say 'I': literature and subjectivity
4. Reconstructing religion: fragmentation, typology and symbolism
5. The ache in the missing limb: language, truth, and presence
6. Twentieth-century fundamentalisms: theology, truth, and irony
7. Science and religion: language, metaphor, and consilience
Concluding observational postscript: the tomb of Napoleon
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Religion: general [HRA], Philosophy [HP], Literary theory [DSA]