Provisional But Reliable

I need to qualify the last thing I wrote yesterday, that science (as practiced by mainstream scientists in the present) is a matter of uncertainty.

An anti-evolutionist would seize upon this statement with some glee, trumpeting that evolution only works as a theory of life's origins, and only then as an ever-revisable theory. Scientists discover some new bit of data, goes the anti-evolution critique, and "move the goal posts," rewriting their theory to fit the new facts. For the creationist, operating under a basically nineteenth century view of science, this is cheating. Science, in this latter view, is legitimate to the degree that it produces (reveals, actually) unchanging truths of God's creation. Young-earth creationism, argue the proponents of such a view, is superior to evolutionary theory in that its account of the origins of the universe does not change to accommodate the latest discovery; instead the data--when properly interpreted--are shown to support good old six-day creation.

I need, therefore, to explain how the uncertainty of scientific theories (particularly longstanding or well-tested ones) does not imply unreliability--quite the opposite. The first test of any theory's legitimacy is pragmatic: does it work as an explanation of the data? A theory that the sun rises only because the cock crows would fail to explain how the sun rises when the rooster oversleeps. It is, in Popper's terms, easily falsified by repeatable experimentation and (in others' formulations) fails to make substantiated predictions or to inspire new directions for research.

Theories that survive tend to be theories that display explanatory power. They withstand tests of falsification, they link to and unify theories in related fields, and they define directions for new research. They are in that sense reliable.

But reliability--even extensively substantiated reliability--does not grant theories the status of absolute, eternal truth. A theory or paradigm can be extremely useful and fruitful without necessarily being, by subsequent standards, accurate. Newtonian physics, though inferior in many ways to relativity physics or quantum mechanics, proves as venerable as it does because it works--it wields explanatory power--for the time/space scales most of us deal with in everyday life. At or near super-luminary speeds, or at sub-atomic levels, Newtonian physics break down and are better explained via reference to a subsequent paradigm. Indeed, as any fan of Nova or the Science Channel knows, scientists hope one day to find an even better paradigm that might unify the currently disparate theories of relativity and quantum mechanics.

Do they have such a theory now? Not that I know of (though brane theory seems like a hopeful candidate). Thus there are in physics a number of areas of uncertainty or even contention. Yet, within their respective realms, Einstein's relativity and quantum mechanics remain good (in the scientific sense) explanatory models. Evolutionary theory similarly has areas of uncertainty, and biologists regularly anticipate the development of newer and better models to account for and predict organisms' change over time.

Contra the creationists, such uncertainty--scientists' knowledge that even their most reliable theories may one day be replaced by another model--constitutes the very stuff of (present-day) science, not its opposite. The scientific method, insofar as one (or ones) may be delineated, isn't a sure-fire process for arriving at final truths but a method for managing the testing and refinement of theories. These theories, particularly well-established ones, are simultaneously reliable and provisional.

I've spent time hashing this out because the evolution/creation debates (and again, many scientists and believers view this as a false dichotomy) reflect, I think, similar certainty/uncertainty tensions about epistemology and ontology explored by conservative evangelicalism. The nineteenth century shift toward fundamentalism came about in reaction not only to Darwinian theory but also in reaction to the "higher criticism" of the Bible and liberal theology. Such higher criticism could be seen as advancing a new paradigm for approaching Biblical texts, a new definition of what it meant to study the Bible as a scholar.

For the higher critics and liberal theologians of the 1800s (and here I stray beyond my expertise and must be general), the Bible needed to be approached as any other text from any other culture. Bracketing a believer's reverence in the divine inspiration of scripture, the higher critics mobilized methods and tools from fields like archeology, philology, and literature to examine various different manuscripts of Biblical books. Comparative analyses of the oldest texts yielded to these critics a picture of the Bible not as a unified, stable work of a single Author but as a patchwork of stories and accounts that were written, redacted, passed down, altered, and combined over centuries by a number of different writers and editors in a number of different times and places. Moreover, this picture of the Bible was itself open to change as new scholarship made new discoveries or offered new theories of authorship, translation, and transmission.

The fully developed view of the Bible as inerrant, infallable, plenary (complete), and Divinely preserved crystallized in reaction to such scientific investigations. Faced with a destabilizing and provisional theory of Biblical origin, the "Bible-believers" of the late 1800s, echoed by the leading theologians of Princeton Seminary, asserted that the Bible was complete and true "as-is." No paradigm beyond "plain sense" was necessary to understand the Bible. And if the "science" of the higher critics or the science of the Darwinists suggested pictures of reality at odds with the plain sense of scripture, then bully for the scientists.

Thus was the seed planted of what evangelical Mark Noll later diagnosed as "the scandal of the evangelical mind": there is no evangelical mind. Conservative evangelicals, the heirs to the Bible believers and anti-modernists of the 19th century, removed themselves from mainstream scientific (or even, more generically, from scholarly) discourse. If the Bible is understood best by those who have been educated least, then scholarly study of scripture can only undermine the certainty that defines faith.

More tomorrow,

JF