It's Tuesday, so my Science and Scripture writing continues from last week...
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Experience vs. Reason
Believe it or not, philosophers have debated extensively these last two hundred years about what science actually does and what its goals truly are. We will mention a few of the details near the end of the chapter. For the moment, here is a practical, common sense approach that will hopefully allow us to move forward. We will mention more specific controversies as they seem relevant.
When the scientific method was first detailed by Francis Bacon in the 1600s (more below and in the chapter that follows), it fed directly into a stream of thought called empiricism. In empiricism, the path to truth is through our senses -- "seeing is believing." Our eyes, our ears, our touch, taste, and smell all "write" on the whiteboard of our minds. As the ancient Greek Aristotle once said, "There is nothing the intellect that was not first in the senses." [10]
However, David Hume (1711-76) -- who took empiricism to its logical extreme -- realized that many aspects of common human understanding do not come from our senses. For example, you can hit a pool ball with a cue stick and experience every moment along the way. It's getting closer. It's getting closer. It is barely touching. The ball is moving. The ball is moving. What you can't experience is the rule of cause and effect that says, "The cue caused the ball to move." You can experience individual moments, but it is your mind that "glues" those moments together.
The same is true of time. We experience moment after moment, but we do not experience time as the glue our minds assign to those moments. The same is true of the relationship between events and the "values" we assign those events. If someone hits me, I experience pain, but I do not experience the "value" that says it is wrong for you to hit me. Hume extended empiricism to what seemed a ridiculous conclusion -- that cause and effect, time, and values might be illusions.
Hume remained an empiricist despite what seemed a non-sensical implication. [11] However, he awoke another philosopher by the name of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) from what he called his "dogmatic slumber." Kant suggested a simple way of looking at our knowing that created a cosmic shift in philosophy. He suggested that the content of our minds comes from our senses, yes, but that it is inevitably organized according to certain "built-in" or innate categories that God had given us. These categories included concepts like cause and effect, space and time, and right and wrong. [12]
I like to use the analogy of a Google Doc or some similar processing software. The user inputs text into the Google Doc. I am typing into a text "box" as I write this chapter. My typing is like our senses -- our senses "type" stuff into our minds.
But there are rules. Google Docs won't make you breakfast (yet). It won't take out your trash. I can't doodle outside the box (yet). What I am getting at is that there are rules to how the content is entered.
So it is with our minds, Kant argued. Our senses don't input the things of the world into our minds as they are. Our minds "glue" the inputs together in certain predictable ways that come pre-loaded onto our "hard drives," so to speak. In the end, we do not see the world as it actually is. We see the world as our minds process our experiences. We see the world as it appears to us.
With this simple framework, Kant set the stage for the debates of the last two hundred years over knowledge. These debates have spilled over into the philosophy of science, as we will explore in slightly more detail near the end of this chapter. Despite Kant's dethroning of any concept of pure empiricism, the first part of the 1900s was dominated by a group called the "positivists" who apparently did not get the memo.
On the other hand, there are other philosophers who have almost suggested that science is nothing more than different social groups who believe different things. [13] Thomas Kuhn (1922-96) did see some paradigms as more effective than others but went a long way toward suggesting that scientific paradigms were less about progress in understanding as new groups simply organizing data in a different way. [14] A "constructivist" view of science sees it far less as the study of what is true about the world as scientists imposing their own frameworks on the world.
Both extremes seem a little less than satisfying, especially given all the developments in technology that improved understandings of science have made possible. Surely there are other perspectives on science that have managed to hold these two sources of truth in better tension. Such an approach would not abandon the central role of our senses nor ignore the dominating factor of our paradigms. Arguably, there is such an approach.
Critical Realism
The notion of "critical realism" has appeared in several contexts over the last fifty years. [15] In general, the goal is to find a middle way between a naive realism -- which doesn't recognize the role our minds play in our perception of the world -- and some pure constructivism that suggests we are simply making up our sense of the world as individuals or society. [16] Roy Bhaskar, the originator of the phrase, proposed three categories of reality: 1) the actual, the events that happen in the world (apart from our senses or existence), 2) the empirical, that which we observe, and 3) the "real," the deep structures and mechanisms that make things happen.
Without committing to his precise formulation, we can discern in his three elements a way of looking at science and the world that checks all the boxes, as it were. First, there is the world as it is. This relates to what Bhaskar called the "actual." It is reality happening. If the earth did not exist, the universe would go on just fine. Christians have historically believed that God is the only truly necessary Being, That is to say, if the universe were not here, God's existence would not be affected. [17] God and the world are real. They are not simply constructs of our minds. This is an incredibly reasonable claim.
However, second, we do not have unfiltered access to the world as it truly is. We only know the world as our minds organize and process it. (By the way, this is true of the Bible as well.) This is what Bhaskar calls the "empirical." Our understanding of the world is finite and it is flawed. From a theological perspective, part of human fallenness is our inability to be fully objective. We are stuck in our heads, and our sense of the world is inevitably skewed.
Yet, third, surely there is something more. Here is where various critical realists might differ a little in their formulations. There are ways of thinking that work incredibly well. Consider logic. The rules of logic were explored 2300 years ago by Aristotle and have been taught repeatedly to this day. There are no known exceptions to these rules. There is a structure to logic that always seems to work without exception. If one's premises are true, and one's logic is valid, the conclusion must follow.
There is a close relationship between logic and math. Math parallels the world so well that some concepts first explored by mathematicians were later found to have actual correlates in the world. Take the square root of negative one, known as i. A smart middle school student might think, "Who came up with this idea? You can't find the square root of a negative number!"
Yet quantum physics regularly uses imaginary numbers. Those numbers help physicists explain the way particles function on the subatomic level. Some of the predictions of cosmology -- the study of the universe -- were first proposed because of equations. The existence of antimatter is an example of one such discovery.
What we find is that there is a correspondence between math and the real world that seems to belie an underlying structure to the world that the human mind can grasp very adequately. Call it what you will. The world exists, and though our perception of that world is heavily constructed by our own minds and culture, the quest for truth about the world does not seem completely in vain.
One key to critical realism is the fact that some constructs of reality work better than others. For example, if a construct helps us correctly predict what will happen next, that is a more successful one than if we are always predicting the wrong thing to happen next. The idea of cause and effect, for example, is consistently reliable as a predictor of what comes next. Bhaskar would say that in such cases we have hit on something that goes beyond our mere perception to something that is real. We are knocking on the door of structures and underlying mechanisms of the universe.
In this sense, we can go beyond what another school of realism -- pragmatic realism -- asserts. Pragmatic realism bascially asserts that we should only think in terms of what works, not in terms of actual truths about the world. [18] Leave the reality of the world as a black box we cannot look into and think only in terms of constructs that help us function in the world.
However, the existence of logic, math, and consistently dependable concepts like cause and effect may suggest we can say more than what the pragmatic realist does. Even if our way of talking about the world is subject to our language and paradigms, it would seem that our language is sufficient to express and predict some things with absolute accuracy (1 + 1 will equal 2 when the symbols refer to reality in their normal way).
The language and symbols we use to express the underlying reality of the world may vary. Nevertheless, in certain well known instances, it seems to be a fully accurate representation of what takes place as we experience it. The pragmatic realist brackets all consideration of the world as it actually is. The critical realist thinks more is possible.
Three Tests for Truth
The previous section has paved the way for what may seem common sense to most of us. It is conventional to speak of three tests for truth. The third is our ultimate fall back: the pragmatic test. We often consider something true if it works, if it helps us predict what will come next, if it helps us make our way through the world. It is our ultimate fall back because, even if the pragmatic realist approach should turn out to work better than the critical realists', we would still be able to have the conversation that is in this book.
A second classic test for truth is the coherence test. Does a proposed explanation contradict itself, or is it logically consistent. You might argue that it is an extension, by faith, that the same logic that works consistently in deductive thinking also applies to the external world. It is an act of faith, for we cannot see the external world as it is. But it is a "reasonable" hypothesis.
One of our goals in this book is to explore whether a coherent integration between science and Scripture is possible. This goal assumes that truths about external reality are fundamentally coherent, and logic works both deductively and inductively. [19] We will assess how well this hypothesis holds up as we examine various topics.
Even in science, there are instances where coherency remains a goal rather than a worked-out conclusion. A well-known example is the ongoing challenge of reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics. While each framework works extraordinarily well within its own domain, they resist integration into a single, coherent theory that explains all physical phenomena -- especially when it comes to extreme situations like black holes.
Do these incoherencies on the smallest level of reality indicate that, in the end, the universe is not coherent? Are matters of Scripture ultimately a matter of "blind faith," as Søren Kierkegaard generally believed? [20] Or is faith reasonable?
The third classic test for truth is the correspondence test. This test stands at the heart of why critical realism provides an important bridge from our perception to reality. If there is a real structure to truths about the world, then we should expect that our hypotheses and theories correspond to the data of the world. The more useful they are, the better they presumably will correspond.
Then there is the question of "elegance" in the correspondence. A complicated theory may account for the data, as the Ptolemaic model of the solar system did. In a complicated way, it mathematically expressed how the sun might actually go around the earth. But the Copernican approach -- whose math was initially less precise -- was more economical in its explanation. More on it in the chapter that follows.
These three -- the correspondence test, the coherence test, and the pragmatic test -- will be our friends in the pages that follow. We will not simply assume them uncritically. We will question them when it seems appropriate. However, they have stood the test of time as useful criteria for truthfulness. Hopefully, our confidence in them will only grow as we proceed.
[10] Aristotle, De anima III.
[11] He once remarked, for example, that empiricism left you with no reason to go out the first floor door rather than a second floor window. After all, you've never experienced what will happen in the future either way. In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion I.
[12] The primary work in which he suggests this approach was Critique of Pure Reason.
[13] E.g., Paul Feyerabend (1924-94) basically reduced science to sociology. In Against Method (New Left, 1975).
[14] Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago, 1962).
[15] The phrase was coined by Roy Bhaskar in 1975: A Realist Theory of Science (Leeds, 1975). In theology circles, the general concept was promoted by Ben Meyer, Critical Realism and the New Testament (Princeton Theological Monograph, 1989) and N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Fortress, 1992). Before Bhaskar, similar lines of thinking were found in the work of Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy (University of Chicago, 1958).
[16] We might align this perspective with postmodernism.
[17] The relevant theological term is God's "aseity." He does not require anything outside Godself. By contrast, the existence of our universe is "contingent." There is no need for it to exist.
[18] Richard Rorty would be the key figure in pragmatic realism. See Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University, 1979).
[19] Deductive reasoning begins with certain assumptions or "premises" and then uses the rules of logic to proceed to a valid conclusion. Inductive reasoning, as we will see, stands at the heart of the scientific method. In inductive reasoning, we begin with the observations of data in the external world and then infer various hypotheses to account for that data, patterns, inferences. Deductive thinking has been likened to an upside down V, starting with assumptions and broadening out to conclusions. Inductive thinking is like a right side up V, starting with data and inferring hypotheses from there.
[20] Kierkegaard did not use this exact phrase, but it captures his sense of the absurdity (and yet validity) of religious belief in Fear and Trembling (1843).
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