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Such as the Southern Baptists, have maintained that scripture is inerrant throughout. The 1970s and 1980s have seen a growth of fundamentalist membership and political power. ). I in public schools should be forbidden because it is contrary to scripture. More recently, a new argument called "scientific creationism" or "creation science" has asserted that there is scientific evidence for the creation of the world within the last few thousand years. The law which was passed by the Arkansas legislature in 1981 required that "creationist theory" be given equal time with evolutionary theory in high school biology texts and classes.

The observer as subject is a participant inseparable from the object of 38 observation. Fritjof Capra and other adherents of Eastern religions have seen parallels here with the mystical traditions which affirm the union of the knower and the known, deriving ultimately from the participation of 39 the individual in the Absolute. Michael Polanyi envisions a harmony of method over the whole range of knowledge, and says that this overcomes the bifurcation of reason and faith. The unifying idea is the personal participation of the knower in all WAYS OF RELATING SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY 39 knowledge.

The WAYS OF RELATING SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY 23 interaction of observation and theory is more complex than the positivists had assumed. Moreover, the positivists had dismissed metaphysical questions, but had often assumed a materialist metaphysics. Since Wittgenstein's later writings, the linguistic analysts argued that science cannot be the norm for all meaningful discourse because language has many differing uses and functions. Among scientists, the success of molecular biology in accounting for many of the basic mechanisms of genetics and biological activity has often been taken as a vindication of the reductionist approach.