Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation (Deferrals and Disciplines)

Science and Faith, originally published by Rowman & Littlefield in 1990, recapitulates, focuses, and recontextualizes much of the thinking done in Gans’ first two books formulating his “new way of thinking,” Generative Anthropology: The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (1981) and The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology (1985). Science and Faith conceives religious revelation as a cognitive phenomenon, a method for the discovery of human truth. The anthropological truths contained in biblical and other religious texts cannot be perceived by those who treat them as ethnological artifacts. Religion remains faithful to the conception of human origin as an event, a hypothesis non-generative anthropologies refuse to consider. Gans argues that only a human science that respects this fundamental religious intuition is capable of assimilating the human self-understanding on which Western culture, including its science, is founded. This new edition of Science and Faith, with a new Preface by the author and a new Foreword by the series editor, is jargon free, requiring no detailed disciplinary knowledge, while addressing issues in anthropology, religion, philosophy of history, and linguistics. All it requires, as Marx once said, is a reader ready to think for him or herself.