I bracket all of these worries, however, to point you to a stimulating blog post by Stanley Fish on his New York Times blog. There Fish reviews (positively) and ruminates on (extensively) a book by Barbara Hernstein Smith, Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion. Smith (in Fish's view) effectively identifies and dismantles some of the common arguments that crisscross debates about the conflict between science and religion (e.g., science is but a kind of religion, religion is nothing more than cultish and anti-intellectual hogwash).
Both of these arguments, she contends--indeed, the whole framing of science and religion as locked in some winner-take-all struggle--are flawed. The argument against science (or perhaps, against materialist naturalism) involves science's inability to prove the ultimate epistemic validity of its own preconceptions. Science, like logical positivism, begins with axioms that cannot themselves be ultimately validated.
Fine, Smith says, but that doesn't make science any less valuable. Its value, she explains, lies not in our unshaken faith in the capital-T Truth of science but science's effectiveness at explaining, predicting, and controlling certain aspects of existence. We value science, in other words, not because we have Absolute Faith in its Eternal Truth (we don't) but because science allows us to meet and overcome particular challenges. Got a broken leg? Science can help. It matters not at all if the patient (or even, come to think of it, if the doctors) actually have Utter Faith in the power of casts and medicine. When it comes to fixing broken bones, science (i.e., medical techniques substantiated with science) works.
For other challenges--how ought we to behave? what kind of laws make for the best society? how can I live in the face of X suffering?--science works less well. For those kind of questions, other human endeavors (perhaps religious faith) work.
As some of Fish's commentators posted (see those under the "highlights" tab), Smith's case appears to echo that made twenty-odd years ago by Stephen J. Gould. Gould famously described religion and science as "nonoverlapping magisteria"--different enterprises differently suited to different tasks. They ask different questions, and they only come into conflict when they are mobilized in the service of tasks for which they are not intended (e.g., creation science).
I sense, however, that Smith's work goes beyond Gould. Fish certainly does. The piece of Smith's book he finds especially enticing isn't only the "they're not really in conflict" conclusion but her contention that contextualized pragmatism (does it work? for what does it work?) and not epistemic certainty (is it True?) ought to form the distinguishing characteristics between science and religion. This rationale offends some aligned with science (the first highlighted comment exemplifies this). The new scientism would argue that science isn't just different but better because it is in fact True. It describes Reality in ways that religion does not and cannot. Moreover, science willingly submits itself to proofs, ever ready for Reality to smack down X or Y hypothesis via experimentation. Religion, goes this line of thinking, fails because it doesn't similarly submit to falsification.
Of course, philosophers of science have moved beyond pure Popperian faslificationism as the sine qua non of science for some time now. The old canard of reflexivity still works: at what point or by what test does falsificationism itself become open to falsification? Historians of science point out that, were strict falsificationism the criterion for science, many of the most famous and influential scientists would fail the test. So too would many quantum physicists or string theorists, whose work is effectively (at this point at least) untestable yet still valid qua scientific work. Other philosophers point out that falsificationism declines to define exactly what constitutes a "test" or a proper "falsification"; one can nearly always attribute a failed test to a bad test ("We just don't have the technology to test this properly") rather than to a bad hypothesis.
Smith's argument is that A) science simply doesn't have access to some objective viewpoint from which one can adjudicate its Truth relative to religion; and B) it doesn't need such access. Why? Because humans don't operate by determining what system of thought (dare I say worldview) is transcendentally true or false; we care more, evolutionarily speaking, about what works in a particular situation. A longish quote:
What this means, among other things, is that the various projects we pursue and engage in may not all cohere in a single intelligible story. We may not be unified beings. In fact, Smith says, “the sets of beliefs held by each of us are fundamentally incoherent — that is, heterogeneous, fragmentary and, though often viable enough in specific contexts, potentially logically conflicting.” The potential for logical conflict, however, exists only under the assumption that all our beliefs should hang together, an assumption forced upon us not by the world, but by the polemical context of the culture wars.This is an old argument of Fish's, but it's well put here. Humans simply don't work via fidelity to all-encompassing, fully articulated, internally non-contradictory belief systems. We operate, instead, through an ever-shifting hodgepodge of cobbled-together beliefs that we keep or discard based largely on how well they work in helping us move through life. I needn't be convinced of the Theory of Gravitation to know I don't want to step out of an open fifth-story window. Were a wholly different explanatory model of falling things to come about that replaced gravity entirely, I'd still avoid open windows in high buildings.
Why does all of this spark my interest? I feel it captures some of my problems with worldview analysis and worldview evangelism.
More on that tomorrow,
JF
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