War of the Worlds? Science and Religion in Contemporary Literature

《世界大战》的主要目标是什么？当代文学中的科学与宗教旨在阐明和解释英语世界文学中宗教与自然科学之间话语交流的持续相关性。为了为这个复杂的研究领域提供一个令人信服的方法论基础，该项目借鉴并结合了两种不同的理论前提。首先，它找到了一个解释所审视的争论的基本原理，这个基本原理深深植根于西方社会思想史中，植根于1959年由c.p.斯诺（c.p. Snow）发起（或者更确切地说是复兴）的关于两种文化（人文科学和自然科学）主导西方知识生活的辩论中。在这场辩论的背景下，该项目将重点关注宗教知识丰富的世界观（Snow所阐述的对立面中人文学科的代表）的支持者和那些支持宇宙和人类生命背后机制的科学解释的支持者之间的争论。在过去的几十年里，这场争论愈演愈烈。传统上，宗教和哲学被认为应该对宇宙的起源和本质以及人类生命的意义和目的等基本问题提供相关的答案；然而，近年来，来自不同学科的知识分子比以往任何时候都更坚持要求自然科学享有这一特权。因此，该项目将重建争论中几个参赛者交换的各种论点，这项调查将为选择处理手头问题的虚构文本的分析提供基础。因此，本研究的目的是揭示这些文本捕捉争议本质的不同方式，将其几个基本方面转化为叙事学概念，提供深刻的意识形态谈判和新的语境框架。语言的普遍符号系统是宗教、自然科学和文学之间的联系，这些不同学科之间的意识形态战壕和话语策略似乎并不像乍一看那样不相容。文学一直关注的是目前正在争论的基本问题（自从培根科学出现以来一直如此），它的叙述似乎可以为知识分子所陷入的一些意识形态僵局提供一条出路。通过这种方式，该项目将为当代文化研究的一个核心方面做出重大贡献，并将帮助我们更深入地理解思想史上最持久的智力竞赛之一。

The principal objective of War of the Worlds? Science and Religion in Contemporary Literature is to illuminate and explain the continuing relevance of the discursive exchange between religion and the natural sciences for the literatures of the English speaking world. In order to provide a convincing methodological foundation for this complex field of study, the project draws on and combines two different theoretical premises. For one, it finds a rationale explaining the controversy under examination, one which is deeply embedded in the history of ideas of western societies, in the debate, initiated (or rtaher revived) by C. P. Snow in 1959, about the two cultures (the humanities and the natural sciences) dominating the intellectual life of the occident. In the context of this debate, the project will then focus on the arguments exchanged between champions of a religiously informed Weltanschauung (representative of the humanities in the antithesis Snow has formulated) and those favouring scientific explanations of the mechanisms behind the universe and human life. This controversy has been fought with increasing (emotional) vigour over the past few decades. Traditionally, religion and philosophy were supposed to provide the relevant answers to those fundamental questions about the origin and nature of the universe as well as correspondent problems concerning the meaning and telos of human life; in recent years, however, intellectuals from different academic disciplines have claimed this prerogative, more insistently than ever, for the natural sciences. The project will therefore reconstruct the various arguments exchanged by the several contestants in the controversy, and this survey will provide the basis for the analyses of select fictional texts dealing with the issues at hand. The aim of the study is, then, to reveal the different ways in which these texts capture the essence of the controversy, translating as they do several of its fundamental aspects into narratological concepts, providing profound ideological negotiations and new contextual frameworks. The universal sign system of language being the link between religion, natural science, and literature, it will appear that both the ideological trenches between and discursive strategies of these different disciplines are not as incompatible as they may appear at first sight. Literature has always been concerned with the fundamental questions that are currently under debate (and have been so ever since the advent of Baconian science), and it will appear that its narratives can perhaps show a way out of some of the ideological impasses intellectuals have manoeuvred themselves into. In this way, the project will contribute substantially to a central aspect of contemporary cultural studies and it will help us reach a deeper understanding of one of the most enduring intellectual contests the history of ideas has ever seen.