Page - 55 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/02

Emulating Science | 55www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/2, 53–64 material scientific strategies in order to argue against the premises of evolution. Following modern scientific sensibility and simulating the protocols of secular science, creationists developed rhetorical tactics to measure what is under- stood by mainstream science to be immeasurable: God and the mythical events described in the Book of Genesis. This article focuses on one of the most important strategies for scientific reasoning: visual representation. the sociologist John Law provocatively stated that science may be characterized as the history of representing visually what scientists try to describe.4 Conceptions of how life works are built through the arrangement of materials in natural science museums and all kinds of graphic and pictorial images, which also produce simplified visual displays that facilitate public consumption. Scientific representations, continues Law, are the “secret weapons” of science: they convert the complexity of living bodies, chemicals, and procedures into a set of figures and texts that can be easily understood by anyone.5 Moreover, Bruno Latour has contended that scientific rhetorical strat- egies can be constructed in such a way that it hides any trace of ownership or even cultural context.6 such pictorial statements aim to achieve the status of a universal truth that transcends time and space. But scientific representations are not exclusively the object of investigations of sociology of science. rhetoricians such as Lawrence Prelli, alan G. Gross, and Jeanne fahnestock have argued that graphic techniques and modes of display, such as the ones found in natural science museums, articles, and textbooks, are not mere images. in fact, they constitute part of the rhetorical toolkit that has played a role in the construction of scientific facts.7 fahnestock, for instance, defines what she calls “figures of science” as visual devices that add rhetorical force to the persuasive effect of scientific claims. In science, she continues, this genre of image has historically been used as a strategy for reasoning. “These fig- ures epitomize lines of arguments” and “it is impossible to remove them from reasoned prose.”8 In her original study, Fahnestock explains scientific represen- tations in terms of the 2,500-year tradition of figures of speech. She moves be- yond metaphor and analogy to consider modes of figuration less discussed but extensively used in technical reasoning, such as antithesis, incrementum, and polyptoton. to my reading, fahnestock’s arguments recall Law’s claim: in sci- ence, figures are means for simplifying what would otherwise be too complex to be rapidly captured. In her words, scientific illustrations are “constructions 4 ibid., 338. 5 Law 1986a, 46. See also Law 1986b, 1–38. 6 Latour 1987, 21–62. 7 for further consideration, see fahnestock 1999; Prelli 1989; Gross 2006. 8 fahnestock 1999, 43.