Abstract Carneiro, Larissa Soares
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
ABSTRACT CARNEIRO, LARISSA SOARES. Divine Technology: How God Created Dinosaurs and People (Under the direction of Jason Swarts). This study investigates how Creationism is socially, materially, technologically, and rhetorically produced. Simply put, the task is to scrutinize what is required to transform a religious folK tale into a scientific fact—how technological devices (material culture in a broader sense) and scientific rhetoric translate and materialize the pages of the Book of Genesis into what Creationists regard as scientific truth. Creationism or, as it was later rhetorically relabeled, Creation Science, is one of the major Creationist schools of thought. According to Creation Science, what is narrated in the first chapter of the first book of the Christian Bible is factually true as a record of what occurred during the divine creation of the universe in six days, and the subsequent event of Noah’s Flood. If religion was supposed to vanish in a more “enlightened” era, as suggested by Max Weber and other advocates of a rational modernity, the Creationist movement has survived in a highly modern, technological, and scientific era. As a matter of fact, it remains a major force in the most developed country in the world, the United States. So this study begins by asking why Creationists are still around and how they have constructed a science that has steadily defied the secular worldview regarding the origin of the universe and humanKind. In the search for answers, I found that, in fact, religion, science, and technology have not been historical strangers to one another. Furthermore, it is a mistaKe to characterize Creationism as an anti-modern movement. Creationists do not oppose scientific progress or technological development. To the contrary, they embrace them. Regarding it scientific, technological, and material construction, Creationism is not always very different from its secular counterparts—evolutionary and uniformitarian accounts. For example, Creationists conduct research and submit their data to technological scrutiny. They sometimes worK in laboratories and they write technical books and scientific articles. They attend Creationist conferences, where they present their work, and they have founded natural science museums. However, if all these elements (booKs, articles, lectures, museums, and laboratories) have been overlooked as isolated artifacts by scholars studying Creationism. This dissertation demonstrates the ways in which these various enterprises operate as technologies that taKe shape in an assemblage of different actors, working together to produce scientific truth. In this study, following the suggestion of the sociology of science and the rhetoric of science, I proceed from two major premises. First, whereas scholars such as Stephen Jay Gould (2002) have advocated the idea of religion and science as non- overlapping magisteria (NOMA), I challenge the claim that religion and science belong to different realms. One of the major critiques to both the rhetoric of science and the sociology of science is that science cannot be compared to religion as a social construction. For Latour (1993), the myth of modern purification - placing human and non-humans in different realms and separating the natural from the supernatural – never happened. Therefore, following Bruno Latour’s Actor NetworK Theory, this project aims to demonstrate that scientific progress has influenced religion as much as religious premises have long colonized science. Then, assuming that science cannot be studied as an isolated and single identity, but materially constructed through rhetorical procedures and established protocols, I scrutinize different tools and technologies used to transform religious belief into fact. By identifying these different features, it is possible to describe the rhetorical strategies employed to fabricate a sense of scientific truth. The method for investigating science is not only about the study of the production of knowledge. It is actually the analysis of the processes of translation, in which different actors are assembled in order to create a single version of reality. © Copyright 2016 Larissa Soares Carneiro All Rights Reserved Divine Technology: How God Created Dinosaurs and People by Larissa Soares Carneiro A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media Raleigh, North Carolina 2016 APPROVED BY: _______________________________ _______________________________ Jason Swarts Jason Bivins Committee Chair _______________________________ _______________________________ Victoria Gallagher William Kinsella DEDICATION To David, who is my inspiration and an endless source of motivation. I only made it because of you. ii BIOGRAPHY From master’s study to the present, my research interests have occupied the intersection of media, science, and religion. This consists of three overarching themes involving the relationship between science and technology, religion and technology, and the ways in which media and technology contribute to the production of both religion and science (material culture, in a broader sense). I tooK an MA in Communication in Brazil, focusing on the technological construction of the sacred on Islamic websites. More specifically, I argued that affordances of the digital environment (temporality, multimedia, and memory/database) allowed it to imbricate older media (icon painting and manuscript illumination) that were traditionally used to visualize sacred persons in a way that suited the production of online hagiographies of suicide bombers. This research on the relationship between religion and technology led me to North Carolina State University, where I finished my doctoral program. At NCSU, my studies have concentrated on the rhetoric of science, agency of technologies, and the role that science and technology play in religious worldviews. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It is not uncommon to hear that a ‘dissertation process’ is a long and lonely journey. I could not agree more with the first adjective. While in a doctoral program, one will intensively live each day of what seems to be an endless succession of weeKs, months, and years of hard and absorbing worK. But the second adjective could not be more incorrect. A dissertation is never a solitary activity. It is a succession of conversations, suggestions, revisions, support, and learning with many people. Therefore, it is necessary to express my deep gratitude to several professors and colleagues who offered me suggestions, recommended literature, read my worK, made me thinK through my own writing, and corrected my (many) mistaKes. In fact, I can hardly count the number of people who made my research possible. But let me try. First, I would liKe to thanK North Carolina State University for accepting me as a doctoral student in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program. I could not have been lucKier in joining a program with such Kind, helpful, and intelligent faculty. Over the course of my journey, I tooK classes that changed the way I understood and approached communicative practices. Perhaps there is nothing more powerful and gratifying than meeting people who change our mind and the way we thinK. Melissa Johnson was the best mentor that anyone could dream of. Patiently and generously, she guided me through my first publications and paved the way to begin my career as a teacher in the United States. Steve Wiley, Jeremy PacKer, NicK Taylor, Carolyn Miller, and Adriana Souza Lima taught me a great deal. Victoria Gallagher made iv possible for me to write a dissertation engaging the rhetorical perspective and concepts. William Kinsella was always right when recommending booKs that I should read. As a matter of fact, all the booKs he suggested ended up in the list of references of this dissertation. I also would liKe to thanK the people from the ‘other side’ of my research field—religious studies. Todd Ochoa from the University of North Carolina and Jason Bivins from North Carolina State University. Bivins, one of the members of my committee, conducted me through the maze of the historical and political life of fundamentalist Christians in the US, of which, I must confess, I had Known very little. I also want to thanK James Bielo from Miami University who generously guided me through a visit to the fascinating Creation Museum in KentucKy. One scholar deserves special acKnowledgment: my advisor, Jason Swarts. Although I have been trained in Communication, I did not hesitate to asK Swarts, from the English Department, to be my advisor. And I am glad that I did. An attentive and generous reader, Swarts knew exactly what I wanted to argue and knew even better how to improve my worK, maKing me seeing the many gaps I had missed. I enjoyed all the conversations about technology and Actor-Network Theory we had in his office, and I will always be very thanKful for that. Bruno Latour became a much easier enterprise through Swarts’s mediation. Finally, I want to thanK David Morgan, my husband, partner, and all-time favorite scholar in material culture and religious studies. The truth is that this dissertation would not exist without David. First, he is an example of hard worK and persistent v writing. Second, he taught me how to write in English by patiently reading all my chapters, checKing for grammatical mistaKes and for sentences that I had written in what he called ‘Brazinglish.’ Sometimes, these corrections met with a fight – but, alas, ‘it was always my fault’ in a frustrating struggle at learning to write in a language that only slowly has become my own. But David did even more than that. He never failed to encourage me, believing, sometimes more than I did, that the goal was in sight. Sometimes, all we need is someone to tell us that. Because I trust him with my life, I believed him. And so here I am. From the bottom of my heart, thank you, David Morgan. I do not Know enough words in English or in Portuguese to convey the depth of my gratitude. Last, but not least, I must add to this list of important people three furry, little, non-human creatures.