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Nord’s Net: "Ways of Knowing" for the Science
Classroom It is apparent that Professor Warren A. Nord has
found Eddington’s parable of a fisherman’s net advantageous in supporting his
side of an ongoing discussion about religion and science in school curricula. He
has employed the story on a number of occasions in various articles. Readers
should not carelessly absorb "Nord’s Net," however. Whenever any given allegory
finds widespread and frequent employment in intellectual discussion, it deserves
some scrutiny -- which is the purpose of this essay. You may not
be familiar with the net parable, so let’s have Nord himself acquaint you with
the tale. The following is a quote that succinctly summarizes both the parable
and Nord’s direct application of it. It comes from Taking Religion Seriously
Across the Curriculum, by Nord and Haynes. The astronomer Arthur
Eddington once told a parable about a fisherman who used a net with a three-
inch mesh. After a lifetime of fishing he concluded there were no fish
shorter than three inches. Eddington’s moral is that just as one’s fishing net
determines what one catches, so it is with conceptual nets: what we find in the
ocean of reality depends on the conceptual net we bring to our
investigation. For example, the modern scientific conceptual net
allows scientists to catch only replicable events; the results of any experiment
that cannot be replicated are not allowed to stand. This means that miracles,
which are by definition singular events, can’t be caught; scientists cannot ask
God to replicate the miracle for the sake of a controlled experiment. Or, to
take another example, the scientific method requires that evidence for knowledge
claims be grounded in sense experience -- the kinds of experience that
instruments can measure. But this rules out religious experience as a source of
knowledge about the world. First I will place Nord’s premises in
the context of how two approaches to human understanding -- science’s
"replicable events" approach to knowledge, and religion’s "miracles and
religious experience" approach -- have interacted over the centuries. Maybe
later, I will take up the educational ramifications of implementing his premises
in public education. When the author says "scientists cannot ask God to replicate the miracle for the sake of a controlled experiment", he implies that______.
A．scientists can do something that God may not be able to do B．scientists cannot work miracles, because it is only God that does wonders C．scientific experiments should not be controlled if we intend to work miracles D．scientific experiments may not solve all the problems for the sake of experiment