So, I'm approaching the halfway point in Charles Taylor's massive, wonderful work, A Secular Age. I'm generally a quick reader, able to rip through texts briskly. As I tell my graduate students, though, some kinds of writing demand that even the speediest reader slow down.
Taylor's is definitely one of those slow-it-down works. This is the magnum opus a senior-level super-scholar like him spends a decade or more producing, and such an epic-but-detailed study requires time and thought from readers. It's the kind of book that, as I read it, I can tell that it's re-shaping the deep structures of my thinking about present-day evangelicalism. Again, I'm only halfway through it, but I can't help but write/rave a bit about it to hash out some of his thoughts for myself.
As the title suggests, Taylor's interested in secularity (he mostly limits his scope to Western culture). He defines secularity not as the simple absence of religious belief nor even (pace the neo-athiests) as conscious rejection of religion. Instead, secularity as he defines it consists of religious belief becomes an option--an increasingly unusual or unpopular one--among an ever-growing range of belief options. By religion or faith, Taylor means (I simplify) a view of the human life-world shot through with the understanding or assumption of a particular dimension or significance (a "fullness" in his terms) to existence that transcends the material world.
How did it come about, he asks, that this assumption of a beyond-the-material, religious dimension of life enjoyed a default status in the 1500s but has in the 2000s become merely an option--and an increasingly discredited one at that? Drawing on a lifetime of study in history and faith, Taylor revisits and revises well-received narratives about the gradual displacement of faith in (mainly Western) culture. Specifically, he refutes two predominant, common-sense explanations for the present-day secular age.
First, he criticizes what he calls the "subtraction story" of secularism, in which post-Renaissance Humanity gradually sheds its primitive, constraining skin of superstition and mysticism, revealing a pure core of ever-maturing (scientific, naturalistic, materialist) reason. Thus, present-day secularity=humanity - religion.
Second, he departs as well from what might be called a replacement narrative, in which the energies previously devoted to religious faith and practice aren't so much shed as transformed by and subjugated to reasoned, scientific naturalism.
Both of these stories, Taylor contends, ignore the extent to which the historical victors in these struggles--the pure core of human reason finally freed from the jail of superstition; or the ever-indomitable figure of naturalistic science--are themselves products of historical processes. The triumph of secular reason occurs not out of some obvious philosophical superiority over faith but because historical processes in Western culture brought about different modes of thought about humanity, about knowledge, about society, about the world--all of which changed the ground rules for what constitutes a legitimate or illegitimate belief.
Or, to tackle this from a different angle: in the present, "science"--meaning materialist, observable-data, no-supernatural-explanations-allowed processes for knowledge--enjoys an unprecedented degree of assumed superiority over other modes of inquiry (e.g., religious or metaphysical modes). I say "science" in scare quotes to designate that this concept refers not to a specific methodology practiced by scientists but more to a general category at work in the social imaginary. If you want truth, nothing delivers today like "science." Why is this so?
For some proponents of "science" (or "reason"), science fully deserves its hard-won reputation for epistemological superiority. It really is better than any other mode of knowledge or study. Or, rather, a particular field or sub-field of study is considered better, more rigorous, more respectable, to the extent that it resembles the practices constitutive of "science," i.e., eschewing supernatural or non-material mechanisms a priori, producing knowledge as quantifiable and accumulative data sets, using inquiry modes that are independently verifiable by different investigators using the same experimental conditions, etc.
Now--lest I be misunderstood--I do not dispute that "science" as so defined works like gangbusters for a number of inquiries. If I want to know what causes influenza (and how to stop it), why stars go nova (and when/if ours will) , or what kind of seatbelt saves the most lives in a front-end car crash--give me science, please. Experiments, controls, repetition, peer review--all of these components of scientific processes produce (at their best) beautifully consistent, usable knowledge-sets. I can create a vaccine to avoid getting sick. I can rest assured that Sol has billions of years left to it. I can choose the safest seatbelt. In these and other fields, science compellingly sets up and passes the test of "does it work? does it produce results?"
But, as Taylor and numerous other historians have noted, the perceived superiority of "science" hasn't stayed restricted to such material questions. Throughout the nineteenth century, the scientific criterion for inquiry crept into and reshaped the groundrules for a number of disciplines that ask less concrete questions--history, law, sociology, psychology, aesthetics, philosophy, and politics. In all of these and more, scholars and researchers scrambled to standardize their practices, to make them resemble this new kind of inquiry that had proven so useful in other arenas.
Such science-ization has proven less successful for the fields of religion and theology. Unlike, say, an anthropology of religion or history of theology, theology per se typically holds as foundational certain warrants that are incompatible with "science," e.g., the existence of God. For this very reason, some thinkers--the neo-Atheists like Richard Dawkins, for example--consider theology (or religious belief more broadly) a non-starter. It isn't, can't be, "scientific" because its very practice, inquiry into and about the supernatural, violates naturalistic precepts. Not scientific=not reasonable=irrational/discredited.
Now, I'm just getting to the part where Taylor deals with the 19th century, where many of these changes I've skimmed over take place. I've not yet read his treatment of that century or of the next, and I can hardly wait to read his lengthy rumination on/response to these developments and their present-day incarnations. But, were I to guess at his response to the religion=not science=compromised equation (which he presages throughout), I would imagine he would point out that that equation only proves compelling from the same vantage point that legitimates science in the first place. That is, religion fails a legitimacy test only when the game is "how scientific is it?" But the notions that the how-scientific-is-it criterion is A) clearly and naturally identifiable as a selfsame concept over time; and B) automatically--always and everywhere--superior to other criteria--these are imminently contestable.
Science's self-evident definition and superiority are new assumptions, new players on the philosophical field. As such, these assumptions don't get to declare themselves victors simply by changing the game's rules for everyone else ("Only purple teams can score points. Purple team wins!").
That's my guess at Taylor's conclusions, anyway. I'll update when I read them for myself.
More later,
JF
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Friday, February 19, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Stanely Fish, Religion, and Science
Apologies: this again will be a short-ish post. I have a lot on my mind this evening, from funding cuts and termination notices for non-tenured faculty at my university to the Democrats' upset in Massachusetts (and the threat that poses to health reform hopes) to my first of teaching tomorrow.
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:
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
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
Friday, October 9, 2009
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
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
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Uncertainty, Creationism, Science
So--young-earth creationist evangelicalism loves "science" but hates uncertainty.
By "science," they seem to mean inductive examination of readily apparent data or details--e.g., how does the bombardier beetle's defense work? Such examination, in their view, properly yields solid facts about the world, facts which of course reveal the grandeur of God. Evolutionary theory, in this view, is not proper science because it functions not as a readily apparent fact or set of facts but as a provisional, revisable explanation of the data. To the creation scientist, evolution is a "guess" unproven by data, a guess that unscientifically biases the interpretation of available data and immorally contradicts the grandeur-of-God conclusions.
Thus we have the common anti-evolutionist attack that evolution is "only" a theory.
Now, mainstream scientists from any number of fields can (and have, and do) marshal a great deal of evidence to demonstrate that evolutionary theory (and other scientific theories that contradict a "young earth") is well supported by data from numerous studies. A number of anti-evolutionist scientists respond with detailed criticisms of such evidence. Evolutionary scientists respond with even more detailed counter-criticisms, and so on. Such back-and-forth barrages of evidence and criticism have historically sucked up a lot of air in late-twentieth century creation-evolution debates.
Two quick observations about such data wars: First, in no way do I suggest that these wars feature evenly matched opponents. Evolutionary theory in general enjoys broad consensus across scientific fields. What do I mean by "consensus"? I mean that, in pretty much any center of scientific research and teaching, the basic validity of evolutionary and other "old earth" theories is not an active question. Certainly, areas of revision and debate within such theories exists, but (as I will argue later), this is qualitatively different than saying there's ongoing doubt about whether evolution in general (versus, say, young-earth creationism) holds water. For all intents and purposes the old universe, evolutionary model is the only game in town. Science-based opponents of evolution are by comparison few and far between (though there are certainly more of them now than ever before).
Second, although the data-war debates often (and very quickly) become more super-specialized than my training allows me to follow, at no point do the anti-evolutionists get any closer to winning my support for the young-earth creationist case. Certainly my trust in the mechanisms of scientific-scholarly consensus has something to do with this. But more compelling is the fact that all this anti-evolutionist effort goes into attack. Historically, very little young-earth creation science research or writing presents positive propositions of its own. Where's the proof for a young earth as described exactly in Genesis? Would an objective examination of available non-Biblical data lead to a young-earth conclusion?
In other words, even if anti-evolutionists were successful in undermining evidence for evolution, it does not follow that young-earth creationism is therefore correct. Remember, science (for young-earth creationism) isn't about a theory or model about which you find some support. It's about discovering positive, absolute truth derived directly from readily available data. To meet its own definition of science, the young-earth model would have to function as the only logical conclusion from all data currently available. But very little in the creationist library advances any such claim. At best, young-earth creation science strains to offer mechanisms that might conceivably explain how, for example, light from stars seven million light-years away could possibly have reached earth in 6,000 years (the current favorite? "gravitational lensing"). This is a far cry from the plain-and-sure Truth standard to which creationists hold evolutionary theory.
But ultimately the data wars overlook a crucial point: science isn't about discovering Truth. In the early twentieth century, Karl Popper famously argued that science doesn't tell the story of small facts leading to big, certain truths. It's instead, he writes, a process of provisional explanations--hypotheses and theories--being repeatedly challenged by experiments that try to disprove them. Unassailable scientific theories do not exist. Indeed, any truth statement that presents itself as unassailable by definition fails to be scientific. In Popper's view, all legitimately scientific statements are falsifiable though experimentation. The best theories are at minimum those that withstand repeated experimentation without being falsified.
Since Popper's time, other historians and philosophers of science have challenged and modified Popper's standard. The best scientific models and theories, for example (I draw here on Michael Ruse's arguments), aren't merely falsifiable; they're also (among other things) predictive, productive, and consilient. That is, scientific models accurately predict yet-to-be discovered objects and phenomena, they inspire new kinds of experiments and new directions in research, and their explanations and predictions jibe with those of other fields' scientific theories.
Most importantly, however, scientific statements and models are tentative. Few scientists would claim that their theories are the final, complete, total word on any subject. Here the writings of science philosopher Thomas Kuhn prove especially valuable. Kuhn wrote that "normal science" within a particular discipline (say, astronomy) tends to operate under a single prevalent explanatory model, a paradigm. That paradigm, like any scientific model, opens certain avenues of experimentation and research while leaving others unexplored. For centuries, the Ptolemaic model of the universe (earth at the center, with the heavenly bodies orbiting around it) ruled.
Evidence that appears to dispute the dominant paradigm gets explained via additions to or elaborations of that paradigm. At times, for instance, Mars appeared to observers to travel backward for a bit (traveling in retrograde) before resuming its normal course across the sky. Operating under a Ptolemaic paradigm, medieval astronomers simply (well, not simply) added "epicycles"--revolutions within revolutions--to their model.
Finally, Kuhn, argues, paradigms so stressed become vulnerable to challenge by a radically new and contradictory paradigm, such as the Copernican or (later) Galilean models of a heliocentric solar system. Paradigm shifts change what "normal science" in a particular field is. Avenues of inquiry and experiment once open become closed off; previously unexplored ones open. Previous data gets re-interpreted through the lens of the new (and generally superior) paradigm.
Kuhn has his detractors, but few historians or philosophers of science would dispute that science involves revisable claims, not final truths. It is in the nature of science, in other words, to be uncertain.
More tomorrow,
JF
By "science," they seem to mean inductive examination of readily apparent data or details--e.g., how does the bombardier beetle's defense work? Such examination, in their view, properly yields solid facts about the world, facts which of course reveal the grandeur of God. Evolutionary theory, in this view, is not proper science because it functions not as a readily apparent fact or set of facts but as a provisional, revisable explanation of the data. To the creation scientist, evolution is a "guess" unproven by data, a guess that unscientifically biases the interpretation of available data and immorally contradicts the grandeur-of-God conclusions.
Thus we have the common anti-evolutionist attack that evolution is "only" a theory.
Now, mainstream scientists from any number of fields can (and have, and do) marshal a great deal of evidence to demonstrate that evolutionary theory (and other scientific theories that contradict a "young earth") is well supported by data from numerous studies. A number of anti-evolutionist scientists respond with detailed criticisms of such evidence. Evolutionary scientists respond with even more detailed counter-criticisms, and so on. Such back-and-forth barrages of evidence and criticism have historically sucked up a lot of air in late-twentieth century creation-evolution debates.
Two quick observations about such data wars: First, in no way do I suggest that these wars feature evenly matched opponents. Evolutionary theory in general enjoys broad consensus across scientific fields. What do I mean by "consensus"? I mean that, in pretty much any center of scientific research and teaching, the basic validity of evolutionary and other "old earth" theories is not an active question. Certainly, areas of revision and debate within such theories exists, but (as I will argue later), this is qualitatively different than saying there's ongoing doubt about whether evolution in general (versus, say, young-earth creationism) holds water. For all intents and purposes the old universe, evolutionary model is the only game in town. Science-based opponents of evolution are by comparison few and far between (though there are certainly more of them now than ever before).
Second, although the data-war debates often (and very quickly) become more super-specialized than my training allows me to follow, at no point do the anti-evolutionists get any closer to winning my support for the young-earth creationist case. Certainly my trust in the mechanisms of scientific-scholarly consensus has something to do with this. But more compelling is the fact that all this anti-evolutionist effort goes into attack. Historically, very little young-earth creation science research or writing presents positive propositions of its own. Where's the proof for a young earth as described exactly in Genesis? Would an objective examination of available non-Biblical data lead to a young-earth conclusion?
In other words, even if anti-evolutionists were successful in undermining evidence for evolution, it does not follow that young-earth creationism is therefore correct. Remember, science (for young-earth creationism) isn't about a theory or model about which you find some support. It's about discovering positive, absolute truth derived directly from readily available data. To meet its own definition of science, the young-earth model would have to function as the only logical conclusion from all data currently available. But very little in the creationist library advances any such claim. At best, young-earth creation science strains to offer mechanisms that might conceivably explain how, for example, light from stars seven million light-years away could possibly have reached earth in 6,000 years (the current favorite? "gravitational lensing"). This is a far cry from the plain-and-sure Truth standard to which creationists hold evolutionary theory.
But ultimately the data wars overlook a crucial point: science isn't about discovering Truth. In the early twentieth century, Karl Popper famously argued that science doesn't tell the story of small facts leading to big, certain truths. It's instead, he writes, a process of provisional explanations--hypotheses and theories--being repeatedly challenged by experiments that try to disprove them. Unassailable scientific theories do not exist. Indeed, any truth statement that presents itself as unassailable by definition fails to be scientific. In Popper's view, all legitimately scientific statements are falsifiable though experimentation. The best theories are at minimum those that withstand repeated experimentation without being falsified.
Since Popper's time, other historians and philosophers of science have challenged and modified Popper's standard. The best scientific models and theories, for example (I draw here on Michael Ruse's arguments), aren't merely falsifiable; they're also (among other things) predictive, productive, and consilient. That is, scientific models accurately predict yet-to-be discovered objects and phenomena, they inspire new kinds of experiments and new directions in research, and their explanations and predictions jibe with those of other fields' scientific theories.
Most importantly, however, scientific statements and models are tentative. Few scientists would claim that their theories are the final, complete, total word on any subject. Here the writings of science philosopher Thomas Kuhn prove especially valuable. Kuhn wrote that "normal science" within a particular discipline (say, astronomy) tends to operate under a single prevalent explanatory model, a paradigm. That paradigm, like any scientific model, opens certain avenues of experimentation and research while leaving others unexplored. For centuries, the Ptolemaic model of the universe (earth at the center, with the heavenly bodies orbiting around it) ruled.
Evidence that appears to dispute the dominant paradigm gets explained via additions to or elaborations of that paradigm. At times, for instance, Mars appeared to observers to travel backward for a bit (traveling in retrograde) before resuming its normal course across the sky. Operating under a Ptolemaic paradigm, medieval astronomers simply (well, not simply) added "epicycles"--revolutions within revolutions--to their model.
Finally, Kuhn, argues, paradigms so stressed become vulnerable to challenge by a radically new and contradictory paradigm, such as the Copernican or (later) Galilean models of a heliocentric solar system. Paradigm shifts change what "normal science" in a particular field is. Avenues of inquiry and experiment once open become closed off; previously unexplored ones open. Previous data gets re-interpreted through the lens of the new (and generally superior) paradigm.
Kuhn has his detractors, but few historians or philosophers of science would dispute that science involves revisable claims, not final truths. It is in the nature of science, in other words, to be uncertain.
More tomorrow,
JF
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
From Fascination to Certainty: Creation Science
Let it not be said that evangelicals hate science.
Well, perhaps some of them do, but most of the conservative evangelical groups I study would contest that allegation. Indeed, those perhaps most often labeled as anti-science--young-earth creationists--generally profess a sincere love for science. A quick examination of young-earth creationist media and books provides some degree of confirmation for this.
Take, for example, the Incredible Creatures That Defy Evolution series. These three films operate like simple nature documentaries. A host, David Hames, sets up a series of mini-lessons on various "incredible creatures" narrated by one Dr. Jobe Martin. Dr. Martin, who identifies himself both as a trained dentist and a former evolutionist, describes some of the features that make this or that particular incredible creatures so, well, incredible. The bombardier beetle, for example, gets its name from a peculiar defense mechanism: when threatened, the beetle simultaneously releases two chemicals which explode when mixed, making a series of pops. Here's Dr. Martin himself to explain:
The rest of the film (and, I presume, its two sequels) proceeds similarly. Describe some fascinating feature of an animal and express incredulity that such a brilliant mechanism could possibly have come about via evolution.
Now, Dr. Martin's reasoning could be faulted on several counts, but it's clear that he and the film as a whole know have a fairly accurate, even sophisticated understanding of the mechanisms over which he marvels. He does not, in other words, lie about how the beetle's defense works (or about the surprisingly complicated processes involved in a giraffe's drinking water). Indeed, I get the strong sense that Dr. Martin, the host, the filmmakers, and their audience (conservative church groups and home schools) are honestly fascinated by such wonders of nature. But for the "how could this possibly be evolved?" skepticism, these films don't differ that much from standard Animal Planet fare (well, cheap Animal Planet fare).
A surprising amount of current creationist discourse similarly consists of marveling at nature--how this or that animal behaves, how the earth moves around the sun, how big the galaxy is, etc. Creationists (and for this blog entry I mean young-earth creationists) defend their love of science via reference to the mass of facts and tidbits they collect and enjoy. In their view, the wonders of nature operate as proof of God's greatness. How could they not be scientists?
And, so far as that goes, who can blame them? Young-earth creationists are hardly alone in finding spiritual inspiration in nature. I remember how once when I was working at a summer camp in the mountains outside of Sante Fe, I climbed up a mountaintop that overlooked the camp valley. It was a clear night with a full moon--bright as you could want--and dazzling. In the quiet, cool evening, with a million tiny suns above me, I sang "How Great Thou Art."
Where I and others differ from the anti-evolutionists, however, is in the young-earth creationists' insistence that such fascination with nature is itself science. Well--they mean not fascination so much as investigation, and then not just any kind of investigation but a particular mode of investigation. For creationists, science involves the observation and analysis of apparent facts of nature. Anything beyond the plain-facts approach ("here's what the bombardier beetle does and how it does it") reeks of pseudoscientific guessing. The theory of evolution, they argue, isn't science but an unobservable "guess" that contaminates scientists' ideally pure investigation of the plain facts of nature (in living animals, in fossils, in geology, etc.).
Scholars like George Marsden have pointed to turn-of-the-(19th) century evangelicalism's tacit reliance on a particular philosophy of science, the Scottish School of Common Sense. From this tradition, evangelicals and fundamentalists derived the idea that properly scientific investigation consists of induction, examining readily available facts and cautiously drawing general conclusions from those specifics. Deductive reasoning--starting with a general hypothesis and searching for specific confirmations of that hypothesis--is epistemologically invalid. It fails to give certain truth. Only induction--examining the simple, plain-sense facts readily available to the senses--can generate reliable truths.
Marsden goes on to demonstrate how this inductive philosophy of science bolstered the late-19th-century Princeton school of Biblical inerrancy. You approach the specific facts clearly presented in the Bible and use them as the foundation on which to gradually, carefully build theological truths. To read the Bible by the light of hypothesis (say, the hypothesis of Isiah's multiple authorship) is to traffic in uncertainty.
That anti-evolutionist creationists read nature and the Bible similarly isn't surprising. Both are, in creationist theology, revelations from God. The Bible is the Special Revelation; nature is the General Revelation. Of course, since God is complete and without contradiction or change, the general and the special revelations must match each other. And, in the creationist approach, both do so--provided that you deal with both scientifically, i.e., inductively.
More tomorrow,
JF
Well, perhaps some of them do, but most of the conservative evangelical groups I study would contest that allegation. Indeed, those perhaps most often labeled as anti-science--young-earth creationists--generally profess a sincere love for science. A quick examination of young-earth creationist media and books provides some degree of confirmation for this.
Take, for example, the Incredible Creatures That Defy Evolution series. These three films operate like simple nature documentaries. A host, David Hames, sets up a series of mini-lessons on various "incredible creatures" narrated by one Dr. Jobe Martin. Dr. Martin, who identifies himself both as a trained dentist and a former evolutionist, describes some of the features that make this or that particular incredible creatures so, well, incredible. The bombardier beetle, for example, gets its name from a peculiar defense mechanism: when threatened, the beetle simultaneously releases two chemicals which explode when mixed, making a series of pops. Here's Dr. Martin himself to explain:
The rest of the film (and, I presume, its two sequels) proceeds similarly. Describe some fascinating feature of an animal and express incredulity that such a brilliant mechanism could possibly have come about via evolution.
Now, Dr. Martin's reasoning could be faulted on several counts, but it's clear that he and the film as a whole know have a fairly accurate, even sophisticated understanding of the mechanisms over which he marvels. He does not, in other words, lie about how the beetle's defense works (or about the surprisingly complicated processes involved in a giraffe's drinking water). Indeed, I get the strong sense that Dr. Martin, the host, the filmmakers, and their audience (conservative church groups and home schools) are honestly fascinated by such wonders of nature. But for the "how could this possibly be evolved?" skepticism, these films don't differ that much from standard Animal Planet fare (well, cheap Animal Planet fare).
A surprising amount of current creationist discourse similarly consists of marveling at nature--how this or that animal behaves, how the earth moves around the sun, how big the galaxy is, etc. Creationists (and for this blog entry I mean young-earth creationists) defend their love of science via reference to the mass of facts and tidbits they collect and enjoy. In their view, the wonders of nature operate as proof of God's greatness. How could they not be scientists?
And, so far as that goes, who can blame them? Young-earth creationists are hardly alone in finding spiritual inspiration in nature. I remember how once when I was working at a summer camp in the mountains outside of Sante Fe, I climbed up a mountaintop that overlooked the camp valley. It was a clear night with a full moon--bright as you could want--and dazzling. In the quiet, cool evening, with a million tiny suns above me, I sang "How Great Thou Art."
Where I and others differ from the anti-evolutionists, however, is in the young-earth creationists' insistence that such fascination with nature is itself science. Well--they mean not fascination so much as investigation, and then not just any kind of investigation but a particular mode of investigation. For creationists, science involves the observation and analysis of apparent facts of nature. Anything beyond the plain-facts approach ("here's what the bombardier beetle does and how it does it") reeks of pseudoscientific guessing. The theory of evolution, they argue, isn't science but an unobservable "guess" that contaminates scientists' ideally pure investigation of the plain facts of nature (in living animals, in fossils, in geology, etc.).
Scholars like George Marsden have pointed to turn-of-the-(19th) century evangelicalism's tacit reliance on a particular philosophy of science, the Scottish School of Common Sense. From this tradition, evangelicals and fundamentalists derived the idea that properly scientific investigation consists of induction, examining readily available facts and cautiously drawing general conclusions from those specifics. Deductive reasoning--starting with a general hypothesis and searching for specific confirmations of that hypothesis--is epistemologically invalid. It fails to give certain truth. Only induction--examining the simple, plain-sense facts readily available to the senses--can generate reliable truths.
Marsden goes on to demonstrate how this inductive philosophy of science bolstered the late-19th-century Princeton school of Biblical inerrancy. You approach the specific facts clearly presented in the Bible and use them as the foundation on which to gradually, carefully build theological truths. To read the Bible by the light of hypothesis (say, the hypothesis of Isiah's multiple authorship) is to traffic in uncertainty.
That anti-evolutionist creationists read nature and the Bible similarly isn't surprising. Both are, in creationist theology, revelations from God. The Bible is the Special Revelation; nature is the General Revelation. Of course, since God is complete and without contradiction or change, the general and the special revelations must match each other. And, in the creationist approach, both do so--provided that you deal with both scientifically, i.e., inductively.
More tomorrow,
JF
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Koukl, Inquiry, and Science
And now, the rest of the story.
Yesterday I praised evangelical approaches such as Gregory Koukl's for their willingness to engage (at least partially) the worldviews of nonbelievers. I think that willingness goes a long way toward refuting the stereotype (well-earned, I'm afraid) of evangelicals as doing nothing more than sticking their fingers in their ears and going "lalalalalala" whenever they encounter ideas not instantly recognized as "Bible-believing Christian."
Unfortunately, Koukl and other worldview evangelists refuel that stereotype by taking on only part of the task of critical inquiry. Much of Koukl's book--actually a lot of worldview evangelism materials--could serve as material for a general course in critical thinking and argumentation. There's a surprising renaissance of old-fashioned logic training (ex: types of argument, varieties of fallacy, etc.) in conservative evangelical circles. It's not for nothing that Regent University (the conservative college founded by Pat Robertson) has a reputation for winning national moot-court-debate competitions. Koukl and apologists like him make for excellent rhetoricians.
But they miss the boat on a truly critical thinking experience in this respect: they assume from the get-go that own views, their own worldviews, are utterly impregnable. I do not mean they have confidence in their views; any debater invests at least a modicum of confidence in his or her stance. But inquiry is different than debate. In debate, the point is to win, defeating the opposing side and convincing some audience (perhaps the opposing side itself) that your argument is superior. Inquiry, however, demands that the answers not be known in advance. Going into an inquiry with the certainty that you will emerge with exactly the same set of opinions as you started out with is evidence that you never really meant to engage in an inquiry at all.
Koukl equips his (evangelical Christian) readers with a number of tools for hacking away at an unbeliever's unbelief, all of which take the form of seemingly innocent questions. "I'm just curious," becomes the evangelist's motto. But Koukl isn't inquiring, really. Any information gained through the evangelist's questions is to be used as ammunition with which to entangle the unbeliever in a logical contradiction. And even these contradictions get phrased as questions (e.g., "How can you be for animal rights yet support abortion?"). These questions are thus doubly rhetorical; they mobilize tactical rhetorics for winning an argument while (eventually) asking a series of questions to which the evangelist already knows the answer.
Now, lest I accuse Koukl of deception, I think he's clear enough to his readers that he's not actually engaged in open-minded inquiry. This is apologetics--a defense of faith meant to be won or lost--and not pure curiosity. The problem, however, is that I don't see any evidence of honestly open-minded inquiry anywhere else in most conservative evangelical life. Similarly closed-ended investigations characterize multiple other realms of evangelical thought.
Take, for example, the evolution issue. The creation/evolution debate (already a false dichotomy for many believers) forms one of the primary sub-fields in my research. Its history is fascinating, and perhaps I'll sketch it out at a later point. Suffice it to say, though, that for the first time in the history of the evangelical battle against Darwinian-inspired theories of evolution, the default evangelical position is that of young-earth creationism, the belief that the universe was created in accordance with a literal reading of the first chapters of Genesis: everything at once, in six twenty-four-hour days. This was not, crucially, the position of most anti-evolution creationists for most of the first decades of the anti-evolution movement. William Jennings Bryant, the lawyer for the anti-Darwin prosecution in the Scopes Trial, himself held the opinion that the "days" of Genesis were likely eras of thousands, even millions of years.
Since the mid-twentieth century, however, creationism has gradually come to mean a "young earth" (young universe, actually) 6,000-10,000 years old. Evidence to the contrary, particularly geological and paleontological data (i.e., rock strata, fossils), get explained via the mechanism of the Great Flood. Only the young earth model, goes the argument, properly comports with an inerrantist reading of scripture. To question the young earth model, then, is to question the inspiration of the Bible.
This puts evangelical apologists in an extremely awkward position, having to explain mounds of evidence from astronomy, geology, chemistry, biology, paleontology, anthropology, archeology, and other scientific fields in a way that confirms the creationists' narrative of universal origins. Moreover, creation apologists strive to frame these explanations as more scientific than the scientists' own explanations. In other words, creation apologists will make the argument that it's evolution and not creationism that is anti-science.
Why are scientists who support evolution (and an old earth/universe) wrong? Because, argue the creation apologists, their conclusions keep changing. They traffic in uncertain theories, guesses about how the universe works. When presented with evidence that troubles or contradicts those theories, argue creationists, the evolutionists simply alter the theories. Creationists, by contrast, know the Truth about how the universe was formed, how the earth came to be, and how life emerged; they read the Bible. That truth doesn't change. It's merely more and more deeply supported by the data from various scientific fields.
Of course, most scientists would call this image of "science" laughably off-base. Science aims not for Eternal Propositional Truths but for better and more accurate descriptions and explanations of natural phenomena. Confronted with the allegation that theories change with evidence, scientists will say, "Of course they change! That's the nature of scientific inquiry." Science (ideally) isn't a contest to be won with tricks and debates but an open-minded, ever-revisable search for ever-more-accurate/useful explanatory models. If science weren't revisable, we'd still be stuck in a Ptolemaic universe with all of the heavens revolving around the earth in fixed crystalline spheres.
It's a problem to examine any data, conduct any experiment, read any scientific report with the answer to a scientific question already in mind. Any scientist not open to having his or her theories refuted or changed--any science unwilling to submit his or her theories to doubt, in other words--isn't doing proper science.
And here's where the arguments get tricky.
More tomorrow,
JF
Yesterday I praised evangelical approaches such as Gregory Koukl's for their willingness to engage (at least partially) the worldviews of nonbelievers. I think that willingness goes a long way toward refuting the stereotype (well-earned, I'm afraid) of evangelicals as doing nothing more than sticking their fingers in their ears and going "lalalalalala" whenever they encounter ideas not instantly recognized as "Bible-believing Christian."
Unfortunately, Koukl and other worldview evangelists refuel that stereotype by taking on only part of the task of critical inquiry. Much of Koukl's book--actually a lot of worldview evangelism materials--could serve as material for a general course in critical thinking and argumentation. There's a surprising renaissance of old-fashioned logic training (ex: types of argument, varieties of fallacy, etc.) in conservative evangelical circles. It's not for nothing that Regent University (the conservative college founded by Pat Robertson) has a reputation for winning national moot-court-debate competitions. Koukl and apologists like him make for excellent rhetoricians.
But they miss the boat on a truly critical thinking experience in this respect: they assume from the get-go that own views, their own worldviews, are utterly impregnable. I do not mean they have confidence in their views; any debater invests at least a modicum of confidence in his or her stance. But inquiry is different than debate. In debate, the point is to win, defeating the opposing side and convincing some audience (perhaps the opposing side itself) that your argument is superior. Inquiry, however, demands that the answers not be known in advance. Going into an inquiry with the certainty that you will emerge with exactly the same set of opinions as you started out with is evidence that you never really meant to engage in an inquiry at all.
Koukl equips his (evangelical Christian) readers with a number of tools for hacking away at an unbeliever's unbelief, all of which take the form of seemingly innocent questions. "I'm just curious," becomes the evangelist's motto. But Koukl isn't inquiring, really. Any information gained through the evangelist's questions is to be used as ammunition with which to entangle the unbeliever in a logical contradiction. And even these contradictions get phrased as questions (e.g., "How can you be for animal rights yet support abortion?"). These questions are thus doubly rhetorical; they mobilize tactical rhetorics for winning an argument while (eventually) asking a series of questions to which the evangelist already knows the answer.
Now, lest I accuse Koukl of deception, I think he's clear enough to his readers that he's not actually engaged in open-minded inquiry. This is apologetics--a defense of faith meant to be won or lost--and not pure curiosity. The problem, however, is that I don't see any evidence of honestly open-minded inquiry anywhere else in most conservative evangelical life. Similarly closed-ended investigations characterize multiple other realms of evangelical thought.
Take, for example, the evolution issue. The creation/evolution debate (already a false dichotomy for many believers) forms one of the primary sub-fields in my research. Its history is fascinating, and perhaps I'll sketch it out at a later point. Suffice it to say, though, that for the first time in the history of the evangelical battle against Darwinian-inspired theories of evolution, the default evangelical position is that of young-earth creationism, the belief that the universe was created in accordance with a literal reading of the first chapters of Genesis: everything at once, in six twenty-four-hour days. This was not, crucially, the position of most anti-evolution creationists for most of the first decades of the anti-evolution movement. William Jennings Bryant, the lawyer for the anti-Darwin prosecution in the Scopes Trial, himself held the opinion that the "days" of Genesis were likely eras of thousands, even millions of years.
Since the mid-twentieth century, however, creationism has gradually come to mean a "young earth" (young universe, actually) 6,000-10,000 years old. Evidence to the contrary, particularly geological and paleontological data (i.e., rock strata, fossils), get explained via the mechanism of the Great Flood. Only the young earth model, goes the argument, properly comports with an inerrantist reading of scripture. To question the young earth model, then, is to question the inspiration of the Bible.
This puts evangelical apologists in an extremely awkward position, having to explain mounds of evidence from astronomy, geology, chemistry, biology, paleontology, anthropology, archeology, and other scientific fields in a way that confirms the creationists' narrative of universal origins. Moreover, creation apologists strive to frame these explanations as more scientific than the scientists' own explanations. In other words, creation apologists will make the argument that it's evolution and not creationism that is anti-science.
Why are scientists who support evolution (and an old earth/universe) wrong? Because, argue the creation apologists, their conclusions keep changing. They traffic in uncertain theories, guesses about how the universe works. When presented with evidence that troubles or contradicts those theories, argue creationists, the evolutionists simply alter the theories. Creationists, by contrast, know the Truth about how the universe was formed, how the earth came to be, and how life emerged; they read the Bible. That truth doesn't change. It's merely more and more deeply supported by the data from various scientific fields.
Of course, most scientists would call this image of "science" laughably off-base. Science aims not for Eternal Propositional Truths but for better and more accurate descriptions and explanations of natural phenomena. Confronted with the allegation that theories change with evidence, scientists will say, "Of course they change! That's the nature of scientific inquiry." Science (ideally) isn't a contest to be won with tricks and debates but an open-minded, ever-revisable search for ever-more-accurate/useful explanatory models. If science weren't revisable, we'd still be stuck in a Ptolemaic universe with all of the heavens revolving around the earth in fixed crystalline spheres.
It's a problem to examine any data, conduct any experiment, read any scientific report with the answer to a scientific question already in mind. Any scientist not open to having his or her theories refuted or changed--any science unwilling to submit his or her theories to doubt, in other words--isn't doing proper science.
And here's where the arguments get tricky.
More tomorrow,
JF
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