Why 'Theology Is a Simple Muddle' Part I
by Lee Harris
http://www.techcentralstation.com/081905B.htmlCHAPTER ONE
A Proposal for a Concordat
Blessed are the peacemakers, which is why I am writing this essay, in the hope of reconciling the irreconcilable, and to bring harmony where it has not hitherto been heard. My goal is to provide a rational basis for a concordat between fundamentalist Christians, on the one hand, and neo-Darwinists like Richard Dawkins, on the other. My hope is to put an end forever to all the senseless bickering that has gone on for so long on both sides of this question; and my technique for achieving my quest is to use common sense to explain to both parties that the other fellow's point of view should be taken seriously, because both points of view in this perennial metaphysical battle contain a truth, and because neither one of them, taken alone, contains the whole truth.
Is my hope quixotic? Obviously, but it is part of a quest that I began forty-three years ago on a Sunday morning in spring, which, with the reader's kind indulgence, I will relate as a way of presenting the uniquely existential dimensions of this particular scientific controversy, and why it affects so many people so deeply, unlike most other scientific controversies.
The Story of My Monkey Trial
The Sunday in question came toward the end of the school year, when I was finishing the ninth grade. I had already gotten into trouble with my Sunday School teacher, and with my class, for asserting the heretical proposition that the Bible contained passages of poetry.
Poetry in the Bible? My classmate exclaimed with the zeal of outraged Pharisees. What unexampled impiety. The Bible was all prose, from one end to the other; and not only that, it was non-fiction prose, since, if you think about it, what is fiction but a fancy way of lying, and the Bible obviously contained no lies in it, because it was the Word of God.
On the morning of what I have come to think of as my Scopes trial, however, the issue wasn't poetry; it was Darwin. No sooner had I sat down in the little cubicle where my Sunday School class met than a number of boys pounced on me with a question that had clearly been carefully premeditated. "What were you doing last night?"
Their tone was that of a sharp cross-examiner in a trial where I sat as the accused, and where I knew perfectly that my guilt or innocence would be inferred from the answer I gave to the question before me. Nonetheless, I answered it candidly. I told them (just as they expected!) that I had watched the TV premier of the classic 1955 film, Inherit the Wind, a thinly fictionalized version of the Scopes trial that had been held in the sleepy little town of Dayton, Tennessee in the early nineteen twenties.
The actual trial, as some of us might recall, attracted worldwide attention because it pitted Clarence Darrow, the most famous American trial lawyer against William Jennings Bryan, the Peerless Leader of the populist and agrarian wing of the Democratic Party, and thrice the candidate of his party for the highest office of the land. (In the stage and movie version, the names of the antagonists are, somewhat pointlessly, changed; but I will ignore the pseudonyms and call the Bryan figure "Bryan" and the Darrow figure "Darrow.")
Despite his wife's urgent advice to steer clear of the trial, Bryan had volunteered to represent the farmers of Dayton for free. Indeed, he also offered to pay Scopes' fine when the trial reached a verdict against him. This small humanizing detail is omitted in the film, along with Bryan's own remarkably cogent political justification of the position he took in defending the right of the farmers of Dayton to decide what kind of things could be taught, at their expense, to their own children.
The film makes no mention of Bryan's political objections, but concentrates exclusively on his Biblical literalism. It pictures the clever Darrow torturing the slow-witted Bryan with the classic conundrums that have always been used to confound those who subscribe to the doctrine that every word in the Bible is literally true. Did the sun literally stand still upon Gibeon, did the Red Sea literally part to allow the escape of the children of Israel, and, most important of all in light of the subject of the trial, did God literally create the world in six days, did he literally fashion Adam out of the dust of the earth, and did he literally create Eve from drawing a rib from her mate?
In the movie, Bryan is so hard pressed that he has a heart attack on the stand-something that didn't happen at the actual trial, though the physical breakdown is clearly meant to symbolize Bryan's spiritual breakdown under Darrow's ruthless cross-examination of his deepest and most cherished illusions.
Left unmentioned in the movie, however, is Bryan's actual motive for coming to Dayton. He came not to defend his own theological creed, but his political creed. He believed that the people of a community should be permitted to control what their children were taught; he believed it was wrong for an elite outside of a community to come into that community and to commandeer the education of the children for its own purposes and to promote its own agenda; he believed that human beings had a fundamental right to imagine the world as they saw fit, and to teach their children to imagine it in the same way.
Before we scoff at this position, let us make a thought experiment. Suppose that tomorrow aliens of a vastly superior intelligence were to land all over the world. Because they have mastered technology that is far beyond our ken, and because their science is (literally) light years ahead of ours, there is no one on the planet who is in a position to evaluate or assess their enormous fund of knowledge. Would we, the human community, be willing to turn over our schools to this alien elite, and let them decide what to tell our children about the universe and our place in it? Would we say to ourselves, "Look at their superior knowledge-it makes ours look shabby and pathetic. Let's abandon our scientific tradition and simply adopt theirs, lock, stock, and barrel. So what if we don't understand it. So what if we can't even begin to understand it-at least, by taking it on blind faith, we will be able to believe the right things, even if we cannot hope to know them for ourselves."
But even this analogy is not strict enough. Because the alien elite in my thought experiment would also have to tell the leading authorities in our scientific community, "What you think you know is all wrong. Your so called scientific tradition is a joke, and should not be treated with seriousness or dignity-it just needs to be junked."
If an elite group of men enter into a community and claim to possess a truth that no one in the community can judge for himself, by the standards of common sense that the community normally falls back upon to make judgment calls about the ordinary questions, then this elite group may be said to possess a gnosis-a Greek word that we shall use to indicate a special source of knowledge that gives cognitive authority to those who have it, and where those who lack this knowledge are in no position to be able to evaluate it. For example, if you tell me that a long series of numbers add up to 123, and if I can check your addition by adding these numbers for myself, either in my head, or on paper, or by means of a calculator, then we are not dealing with gnosis, because we each are capable of adding the sum, and because we both recognize the legitimacy of the other's method: if our tallies conflict, we both agree that one of us has made a simple error in our calculations, and we will redo them until we find the error and are thus able to come to an agreement.
This, however, is not how gnosis works. With gnosis, one party claims to have a method for discovering truth that the other party lacks. It may be because the party claiming gnosis has received divine revelation whereas the other party has not. Or it may be because the privileged party has keener intuitions than the less privileged. The influential English literary critic F.R.Leavis, for example, argued that certain persons, like himself, have a special faculty for identifying great works of literature which normal people lack. Leavis could intuit the greatness of the novels of D.H.Lawrence by a process that is frankly a mystery to less gifted mortals such as myself, who would rather have an important appendage removed than to read another monstrosity like Women in Love. Or the elite claiming gnosis may base their cognitive superiority on their access to secret traditions and esoteric lore, passed down from generation to generation, and forever guarded from the undiscriminating eyes of the vulgar, in which case the cognitive elite approximates the sociological entity called a priestly caste.
When we discuss a priestly caste, the assumption is often made that the priests have deliberately chosen to make their knowledge inaccessible to the ordinary person. For example, the Chinese literati spared no efforts to keep a monopoly of reading and writing to themselves; and a similar tendency can be found in virtually every priestly caste. From this perspective, any claim about esoteric knowledge that cannot be shared with the general public is viewed as hogwash; if anything, the priestly caste has gone to trouble to make their pretended secret knowledge appear to be far more difficult to access than it really is-a device dubbed obscurantism.
Yet what about quantum physicists? Where do they fit sociologically? Their knowledge is inaccessible to the average person, at least without elaborate initiation into the mysteries. Yet do we wish to accuse quantum physicists of engaging in esoteric hocus-pocus in order to baffle and bewitch the masses into accepting their cognitive authority over them? That is going too far-and yet, what happens to a society where so much of what constitutes science is no longer comprehensible to the average layman, and where questions that touch very close to home can only be decided by an intellectual elite whose process of inference cannot be checked and verified by the man in the street?
Unlike Darwin's theory of evolution, the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle, though shocking to common sense, has never caused much of an uproar, no doubt because it does not touch most people very close to home. But Darwin's theory does hit close to home, and especially when his theory is used, as it was used in Inherit the Wind, as a vehicle for discrediting the beliefs of fundamentalist Christians, and indeed to call into question that whole concept of God, not to mention a Divine Providence that keeps an eye on the sparrow, and knows when each one falls.
How close to home Darwin's theory hits people was made clear to me that morning in Sunday School many decades ago. Because when I was asked about my opinion of Inherit the Wind, and when I tried to give my honest answer to their question, I immediately found myself under a state of siege that went on for several months-a siege in which I found myself pitted against not only my Sunday School class, but all the other Sunday School classes as well, not to mention the deacons, the preacher's wife, and the preacher himself.
My position was that a person could believe in Darwin's theory of evolution and still believe in God. I did not see a necessary conflict between the two ideas, nor why they could not be combined together in some way-or indeed, in a variety of different ways.
This position we will call the Reconciliation Thesis for short; yet my endorsement of it did not reconcile me to the Southern Baptist Church in which I had been brought up and into which I had been baptized only two years before. Yet, I am proud to say, I stuck by my guns, and did not recant my position-not even when the preacher was brought in to confront me, face to face, much as the Emperor Charles the Fifth was brought in at the Diet of Worms to deal with that troublesome Martin Luther fellow. (Well, perhaps not exactly like that.)
The preacher, in our confrontation, tried to make a joke of the whole affair, and told one. A man comes across a monkey coming down the steps of the library and under his arms he is carrying two books. One is Darwin; the other is the Bible. "What are you doing with those books," the man quizzed the monkey, to which the latter replies, "I am trying to figure out if I am my brother's keeper or my keeper's brother."
Yet, oddly enough, what I remember most vividly is the prayer with which my Southern Baptist auto-de-fe began. It was delivered by my own Sunday School teacher, a man who bragged often that he had never gotten beyond the third grade-a boast that no one who knew him could doubt. It was sharply directed at me as I well knew at the time, though I was not then aware of how much it would come to haunt me later in life. It referred to Jesus's remark in the gospels that it would be better to have a millstone tied around your neck and cast into the sea than to lead his little ones astray.
My Sunday School teacher was right: We all have the ethical responsibility to consider the consequences of our ideas on the behavior of other people. If I can persuade a child to imagine the world in a certain way, and to imagine it this way automatically and unthinkingly, then I have, in a sense, constructed the world that the child will inhabit for the rest of his life. The Jesuit motto, "Give me a child until the age of seven, and he is mine for life," is evidence of this truth-and it is the reason the Protestant tradition has always insisted that only the parents of a child have the ultimate right to teach him how he is to imagine the world-a right that can be delegated, but never abolished.
The Protestant tradition does not trust gnosis in any form, be it based on theological expertise or scientific pedigree. If an elite claims esoteric knowledge that I cannot verify in my own experience, then that elite automatically falls under suspicion in the eyes of the Protestant. If every man is a priest, according to the famous Lutheran maxim, then everyman is a cosmologist and metaphysician as well. If men I don't personally know make claims about the world that I am unable to check out for myself, why should I trust them? And what happens, politically speaking, to any community in which more and more decisions about their life are left in the hands of a cognitive elite whose claims to knowledge become increasingly difficult for the average person to verify with the instruments of common sense that are at hand? Again, the farmer can always check the addition of the grocer who sells him his supplies; but how can he check Darwin's theory of evolution or the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics?
The farmers in Dayton, Tennessee who did not want their children being taught Darwin's theory of evolution, were questioning authority, unlike those people who have accepted the theory simply because it was what educated people of the time happened to think they ought to believe. This, after all, is a theory complicated enough in its implications that a philosopher of the stature of Daniel Dennett could attack a paleontologist of the stature of Stephen Jay Gould over its correct interpretation-and the farmers of Dayton were expected to be able to make up their own minds about it? On what possible basis? Should they have collected funds to take an excursion of the Galapagos Islands and seen the finches with their own eyes?
The Protestant farmers quite correctly detected that here was an issue over which they should refuse to accept the word of other men. They rightly recognized that they were being pushed into accepting a view of the world that had been concocted and disseminated by men who, like Thomas Huxley, Clarence Darrow, and Richard Dawkins, did not believe in God and who wanted others not to believe in God as well. In which case, why trust anything they say? When men have such an axe to grind as this, who is naïve enough to think they will not use it to chop other people's beliefs to pieces?
Our cognitive elite says, "How terrible! The Dayton farmers refuse to accept modern science." But why should anyone be morally obliged to accept modern science? How important on a man's list of values is being right about the theory of the development of species? If you are a biologist, it might matter to you passionately; but if you are a farmer trying to raise your kids to be good people, it will matter far more to you what their basic metaphors about the universe will be.
To say that the human species is the result of random processes, and that we are here as the consequence of a huge explosion sixteen billion years ago, may well be true; but it isn't very reassuring. Nor is it in any way, shape, or form, provable. It is itself a metaphor of the world, and one that is clearly drawn from our own experience of random events within a very small potion of this world. We close our eyes and reach into a basket holding lottery tickets and we chose one at random. That is a sense of random that the farmer can understand. But to say that his own existence is random, or that the planet he is on is random, or that the existence of the whole cosmos is random-then the clear common sense meaning of the world begins to fall apart. If everything is random, then what meaning can random have?
Furthermore, when the Dayton farmers looked around them, what they saw was not randomness, but purpose and significance. They believed that they were special, and that their children were special. They believed that they were among God's elect. They believed that God is a good father who will look after those who remain faithful to him, and that he loves us just the way we ought to love our own children.
This was also how my third-grade dropout Sunday School teacher saw the world, and it was the way he wanted his children to see it as well. Was he wrong to want to perpetuate the illusions that had made his rough life bearable?
Thus the deep reason the very mention of this topic riles up the blood on both sides of the question. It matters-it has, in the words of William James, a "cash value" for ordinary men and women that the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle lacks. It makes a difference in our basic orientation with the world whether we believe that we are the result of random and accidental processes or whether we believe that there is a God who watches over us every moment of our lives, and who takes a personal interest in our fate.
What of Creationism?
Should my defense of the right of the Dayton farmers to reject Darwin's theory of evolution be taken as an implicit defense of what is called the doctrine of creationism, and which is currently being advertised as a scientific alternative to the theory of evolution? Not at all.
Like my Sunday School teacher, the farmers in Dayton, Tennessee who did not want their children taught Darwin's theory of evolution were emphatically not creationists, in the contemporary sense of this word. They did not pose as scientists advocating what they considered to be a scientific position; rather they were simple men who had accepted the poetry of a simple creed that made all of the universe the product of an incomprehensible act of grace. Nor did they ever believe that science could produce evidence in favor of their convictions, because science had nothing to do with it. Their way of knowing their truth did not require statistics or quantitative analysis, nor any of the trappings of the scientific method. What they knew they knew with all their hearts and all their being.
The Dayton farmers were too smart to be gulled by the snake oil of creationism; they had no need for pseudo-science because they had no need of real science. It didn't matter in the least to them; and thus there was no desire to dress up their heart-felt faith in the fancy dress of scientific jargon and terminology. Adam and Eve were as real to them as their neighbors. They were persons, just as God was a person; for the farmers lived, like most of humanity has lived, in a world in which the dominating metaphor has been drawn from the human personality, and not from the domain of intellectual abstractions known as laws. Personality explained as much of the universe as they felt needed explaining, and it explained it to them pretty satisfactorily. The theory of evolution, Darwin's or anyone's, was not something that had any cash value to them. By learning it, it didn't make their corn grow taller or their kids work harder. And by just looking around them and observing the world real close, where could they see it? It was like being told that the land you had farmed all your life had once been at the bottom of the ocean and had been heaved up to be a mountain, only to be worn down by the gradual erosion of rock-who could take such craziness seriously?
The Dayton farmers believed that God created the world in six days; but they did not believe in creationism. For them it was enough that the Bible had told them so; they did not go seeking for scientific evidence to support the clear as day Word of God.
Today many fundamentalist Christians are dissatisfied with the argument that "The Bible tells us so," and are seeking to establish the notion that there is a scientific alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution, which they have dubbed creationism. Others, not necessarily fundamentalist Christians, have agreed that Darwin doesn't have the definitive answer, and have put forth, again as a rival scientific theory, a position known as intelligent design theory. Though the two positions differ in many ways, what they both have in common is that they reject the simple "The Bible told us so" attitude of the Dayton farmers, and are attempts to prove the inadequacy of Darwin's theory on purely scientific grounds. The Dayton farmers didn't want Darwin taught at all; the modern proponents of creationism and intelligent design theory want these to be taught alongside of Darwinism-and this is the source of much of the contemporary political controversy over the teaching of evolution.
In order to avoid getting bogged down in biology, I will not discuss any of the ponderous evidence, pro or con, that has been put forward between in the ongoing debate between the Darwinists and the anti-Darwinists. I will not inspect the evidence offered at the recently opened Creationist Museum, nor will I challenge Dawkins to explain again the origin of the eye, nor bring up the subject of fossil lacunae. Instead, I will assume that every possible objection that has been raised to Darwin is sound, and that all the flaws that the theory is alleged to have are really there.
The Darwinists will howl that I already betrayed their trust; but they will howl (I hope) only until I have been able to explain why I have afford such generous terms to their enemy: it is in order for me to attack their opponents from the highest possible ground and one upon which we can all stand fairly equally-the ordinary soil of common sense.
But first of all we must examine the meaning of the all important term "science," and it is to this task we must now turn.
CHAPTER TWO
What makes a certain human activity science?
What makes a certain human activity science?
There are two basic ways of approaching this question. We can debate about how to define science, and wander far and wide into questions of epistemology and metaphysics; or we can take a vulgarly common sense approach and define science as whatever scientists do, defining a scientist as anyone who is recognized by the scientific community to be a scientist like themselves.
The first approach attempts to find an objective standard by which we can distinguish science proper from non-science. In the philosophy of science this is known as the Demarcation Problem-that is, what is it that marks off real science from pseudo-science? The naïve response is that science is about what you can prove, whereas pseudo-science is about what you can't prove.
The problem here is, What constitutes a proof?
In Aristotle's physics, a rock, when dropped, falls to the earth because like attracts like: rock is like the earth, and is therefore attracted to it. Similarly, a fire ascends upwards, because it wishes to return to the heavenly source of fire, the empyreum-the suns and the stars. Rain drops that fall on a hillside likewise seek out their own element, the water that is collected together in lakes and rivers.
Now the curious thing about Aristotle's physics is that any fool can "prove" that it is true. Drop a rock and see it fall; light a fire and see it rise; spill some water near a lake and see it hasten to it.
Now compare this with Newton's First Law that a body at rest remains at rest and a body in motion remains in motion, unless acted on by another force. Could anyone in Newton's time prove that a body in motion, when not acted upon by an outside force, would remain in motion forever? Can anyone prove it today? After all, even if we could show that a body in motion continued to move at the same speed for several trillion years, would that prove that Newton was right? Not at all-because his law doesn't say that the body will remain in motion for a long long time, but that it will remain in motion forever and forever. Can we prove that ghosts, demons, and fairies do not exist? Can we prove that the Big Bang occurred?
We can present evidence for and against-but at what point does this evidence amount to a proof? When the evidence convinces everyone? But does this mean, Everyone who is now alive, or everyone who will ever live in the future? For example, the evidence for Aristotle's physics convinced everyone for thousands of years, yet it convinces almost no one today.
The matter is no different if we argue that scientific proof exists when a select group of experts are all convinced that a theory has been proven, since those who have been taught and trained by this group of experts may in fact decide to overturn the theory that their teachers have taken to have been proven beyond a shadow of doubt-an event known as a scientific revolution.
Popper, Science and Pseudo-Science
A well-known attempt to evade this issue was provided by Sir Karl Popper. He suggested that what distinguished science from pseudo-science was that a scientific theory could be falsified, whereas pseudo-science could not be. For example, if I claim that a heavy cannon ball will fall to the earth much faster than a light golf ball, I have devised a scientific theory. Why? Because someone can climb up to the top of the Empire State Building and drop both balls, while someone at the bottom can see if the heavier ball lands way before the lighter one. Now since my theory will be clearly falsified by this experiment, then, according to Sir Karl Popper, I have clearly devised a theory that deserves the honorific title of being a genuine scientific theory.
Indeed, by this standard, it becomes remarkably easy to generate a multitude of genuine scientific theories. For example, I can claim that human beings can fly from the Empire State Building to the Chrysler Building by flapping their arms wildly, and here again we have another scientific theory. Or else I can claim that human beings can swim from California to Japan while holding their breathe under water, so long as they are reciting the Lord's Prayer to themselves, and voila! here again we have a genuine scientific theory.
The historical background to Popper's attempted solution of the demarcation problem was his intense hatred of the "theories" of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, and his desire to show that their elaborate conceptual schemes were examples of pseudo-sciences, and were undeserving of the honorific title of a genuine scientific theory. What bothered Popper most about both Marxists and Freudians was their insistence that their theories were definitive and final-each group believed that they possessed the key to explaining all phenomena, and both refused to entertain the notion that their pet theory could be proven false.
Let us take an actual example. Freud once had a patient who violently disagreed with his theory of dreams. According to Freud's theory, dreams were always the fulfillment of an unconscious wish, often a wish that was too shocking for our conscious mind to openly confess. One night the patient who disagreed with Freud's theory had a dream that Freud was unable to interpret according to his theory-the dream did not appear to represent the fulfillment of the patient's unconscious mind at all. Puzzled by this anomaly Freud pondered for several days whether he needed to challenge his own theory-to declare that it had been falsified. But then he had an "Ah ha" experience. The patient had wished to falsify Freud's theory of dreams, and so he had dreamed a dream that would appear to do precisely that-but why had he had this dream? Because he wished to challenge Freud's authority-to rebel against the father figure. Hence, instead of falsifying Freud's theory, the patient's dream had been yet another confirmation of it-at least, in Freud's own mind.
The Marxists behaved in the same irritating way. For example, when capitalism did not collapse around the end of the nineteenth century, as earlier Marxists had anticipated, Lenin devised an explanation of this failed prediction-capitalism had hit upon a ruse by which it could postpone its inevitable fate for several decades longer, namely through imperialism. Capitalism was still doomed, and would have already collapsed, just as Marx argued, except for this new and unexpected development.
This refusal to admit that their theory had been falsified, or even to envision the possibility of falsification, was, according to Popper, what marked out Marxism and Freudianism as pseudo-science.
Yet what about Einstein's General Theory of Relativity? When Einstein and the Polish mathematician Herman Minkowski had worked out the implications of this theory, it was found to have a puzzling and disturbing consequence that Einstein had not foreseen and could not accept. It predicted that the universe was expanding! To Einstein, in 1917, this was a frankly embarrassing aspect of this otherwise beautiful explanation of the nature of gravity, and he felt that something had to be done about it.
Einstein's solution was to come up with an ad hoc device that would cancel out his predicted expanding universe and that would render the universe static and stationary, as he (and everyone else in 1917) thought it ought to be-a device that Einstein called the cosmological constant, a constant whose sole purpose was to make the General Theory "fit" the static picture of the universe that physicists held in 1917.
In 1929, however, this picture of a non-expanding universe was dramatically altered when Edwin Hubble made his observation that the universe is expanding and is not static, at which time Einstein repudiated his cosmological constant and called his ad hoc introduction of it into the General Theory "his greatest mistake."
Were Einstein's ad hoc efforts to make the General Theory fit the facts any different from Lenin's ad hoc efforts to make Marxism fit the facts, or Freud's? Was Einstein's psychological unwillingness to see his beautiful theory falsified any different from theirs-and if so, should we reject Einstein's claims to be a genuine scientist, along with Marx's and Freud's?
This question is made even more intriguing by the fact that, according to Roger Penrose in his book, The Path to Reality, "Very recently, observations of distant supernovae have led most theorists to re-introduce Λ [i.e., Einstein's cosmological constant], or something very similar, referred to as 'dark energy', as a way of making these observations consistent with other perceived requirements."
The introduction of ad hoc devices to save a theory from clashing with the "perceived requirements" founded on the observed facts of the time has always been and will always be part and parcel of the development of scientific theory, and to argue that Einstein was not behaving like a bona fide scientist because he introduced such a device into the General Theory is patently absurd, though no more absurd than the idea that a man should be regarded as a genuine scientist for postulating the clearly falsifiable theory that all human babies are born with eight arms.
In short, Sir Karl Popper's attempt to distinguish science from pseudo-science by reference to his doctrine of falsifiability ends up by condemning immensely fruitful and illuminating theories as pseudo-science and by elevating the most absurd nonsense to the honorific position of being genuine scientific theory. If all you need to make a scientific theory is to come up with a prediction that can be falsified, then any idiot can devise thousands of such scientific theories out of the most bizarre rubbish imaginable.
In fact, if you look at the historical development of any of those scientific theories that are universally regarded as real science, such as the Copernican heliocentric theory, or Darwin's theory of evolution, or Einstein's General Theory, you will see the enormous role played in the development of these theories by their authors' keen determination to stand by their essential vision despite all the obstacles that were thrown in the way. Great scientific theories are not the product of the faint of heart or the easily dissuaded. It is not the willingness to set aside one's theory that demarcates the true scientist, but a fanatical commitment to hang on to a theory despite the mounting evidence against it.
The Darwin Example
There is no better example of this truth than Charles Darwin's adherence to his theory despite the crushing attacks made against it toward the end of his life, when many of the world's leading scientists, such as Lord Kelvin, came to regard Darwin's theory as nothing more than a pseudo-science because it could not be reconciled with "the perceived requirements" imposed by the theory of thermodynamics as it had been developed toward the end of the nineteenth century. For Lord Kelvin, it was obvious that the sun could not have been burning for anywhere near the length of time required for the evolution of tadpoles, not to mention that of man. A fire can only burn so long as it has fuel, and he calculated that the fire of our sun could only have been ablaze for, at most, several hundred thousand years-far short of the virtual eternity that Darwin had calculated into his theory of evolution.
Of course, Lord Kelvin did not know what was coming next in the development of physics, namely the discovery of the enormous energy that was contained in the atom. He did not realize that the fire of our sun was the result of millions of thermonuclear explosions, and so he failed to realize that the sun was much older than his calculation appeared to show. But then Charles Darwin did not know about nuclear fusion either-and this meant that the only way he could continue to hang on to his theory was for him to bet that the physics of his time was not the last word on the subject.
In short, Darwin could only continue to uphold his ideas by stubbornly refusing to admit defeat. He had to go on believing that he was right, and that the leading physicists of his time were wrong-an attitude that, according to Popper's theory, should have marked him as merely another quack, oblivious to the evidence that clearly marked out his own pet theory as false.
The strongest objection to Popper's theory is that it all boils down to the psychological attitude of the scientist. One who is willing to let his theory be falsified is, according to Popper, a scientist; one who isn't willing is a pseudo-scientist. Yet, as we have seen, if the test of science is simply the psychological resistance to abandoning one's own theory, then all the great scientists would automatically fall into the category of pseudo-scientists, since the mark of a great scientist is his intense reluctance to abandon his theory at precisely the moment when the faint of heart would begin to doubt it.
It is for this reason that some philosophers of science have fallen back on sociological analysis in order to distinguish between real science and junk science-and it is this approach that I will take in what follows. Here the issue is not one of defining science, but rather one of defining the scientific community, that is, those who do what their society regards as science. This approach is nominalist, rather than essentialist, pragmatic, rather than dogmatic. It deals, in short, with the messy world of flesh-and-blood and not with the spotless world of Platonic ideals.
By the scientific community, I mean something quite concrete and easily recognizable. It includes professors who teach in science departments of universities, and those who do scientific research for the government or for private businesses; it is a clearly apprehended sociological category, the most critical component of which is that a scientist is paid a salary by responsible men, like university administrators and CEO's. Scientists are people who get paid to do science and to teach it-and paid by reasonable people, and not kooky billionaires looking for an illicit elixir of eternal youth.
To use a comparison drawn from Christian theology, the scientific community is the visible church, such as the Roman Catholic Church, so that you know at a glance whether a scientist is a member of it. It is not like that mysterious invisible church in which it is not always clear who the saints are. In principle, by the sociological criterion to which I am appealing, someone could sit down and make a list of all the members of the world scientific community, though it would certainly be arranged in accordance with proximity to positions of power and influence within the community, so that Richard Dawkins, for example, would be near the pinnacle, while a man who taught seventh grade biology in Wilbur, New Mexico, population 400, would be much much further down on the totem pole.
Needless to say, the beliefs and views of those who are at the apex of this cognitive pyramid will tend to control and determine the beliefs and views of those who are lower down on it. Select cardinals in the Roman Catholic Church, for example, can tell a priest what counts as orthodoxy; but the priest cannot take this liberty with the cardinal. Nor should he be able to-after all, those at the top of the cognitive pyramid have usually gotten there for a good reason, and one of the best of these reasons is the mastery of the cognitive tradition whose pyramid you are at the top of. If it is Catholic theology, then you had better be able to talk sensibly about St. Thomas Aquinas; if it is physics, then you better know the ins and outs of the Maxwell field equations.
Those at the apex of the cognitive pyramid of the scientific community have the presumptive right to decide whether a certain activity should be honored with the term "scientific," just as those at the apex of the Roman Catholic hierarchy have the presumptive right to decide whether a certain belief is orthodox or heresy--an analogy that underlies the metaphor of scientific heresy that is used by the most respectable scientists in regard to ideas that simply clash too deeply with scientific orthodoxy. The notion of "junk science," for example, in scientific circles approximates to the notion of heresy in religious ones. It establishes a demarcation line between ideas that are safe, and those that are dangerous-and yet this is a line that, as we have already seen, can only be defined (and defended) by those who are already regarded as the custodians of right-thinking or orthodoxy perched at the apex of the cognitive pyramid. No Platonic standard can be useful in a world in which everyone thinks they alone possess it. What good would the Paris meter be, if everyone had one of their own at home?
There is no Platonic solution to the Demarcation Problem, but there is a practical one, and that is the establishment of scientific orthodoxy through the creation of privileged institutions and a privileged elite. This elite decides who gets money to do research; but it also decides what will be taught in public schools. For example, no one believes that the public schools should be forced to present the hollow earth theory as an alternative to the orthodox solid earth theory as taught by all reputable geologists. Nor has anyone proposed that physics teachers should present an alternative theory to Copernicus' heliocentric system, in order to explain how the sun could stand still upon Gibeon. Those who accept Joshua's miracle accept it as a miracle, and don't worry themselves overmuch about its implications on the various theories of modern cosmology.
To associate scientific consensus with the concept of ecclesiastical orthodoxy is offensive to the Platonist, but a truism to the sociologist. For example, consider the following remarks made by the American economist and sociologist, Thorstein Veblen.
"Platonism is to the individual what revelation is to the community."
Yet the project of science could not exist without some notion of scientific orthodoxy; and this orthodoxy has to be determined by a scientific elite, i.e., those at the top of the cognitive pyramid. It would be ridiculous to treat the views of the world's leading biologists or physicists as if they were on par with the ideas of a lowly gym coach who happens to be stuck teaching physics to his football team, not to mention the lone crank working feverishly in his spare moments, trying to prove that scientific orthodoxy is all wrong, and that perpetual motion machines really can work.
Yet what if the lone crank is Albert Einstein? When he published his special theory of relativity, his status as a scientist was not even at the base of the cognitive pyramid: he was a patent clerk, and hence he fell more properly into the class of cranks working in their basement. Only this crank actually succeeded in overthrowing the scientific orthodoxy not only of his time, but of the entire period of modern physics, going back to Isaac Newton's publication of his Principia.
Though, when it comes to revolutionary lone cranks, it is hard to beat Charles Darwin, whose father once said to him, "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family." The son of an immensely wealthy family, who never had to worry about money a moment of his life, nor about much of anything else, whose pursuits were those of the garden variety dim-bulb English playboy, a typical Trollope young twit-was it possible that such a ridiculous figure would provide an entirely new paradigm for understanding the natural order?
As we all know, the answer is Yes. But Darwin's feat, like Einstein's, throws a monkey wrench into the theory of scientific orthodoxy we have just now been proposing. For scientific orthodoxy after Einstein and Darwin was radically different from scientific orthodoxy before them-but how can an orthodoxy change without raising the indelicate question in the mind of those who ascribe to the "new" orthodoxy that there may not be, waiting in the wings, an even newer orthodoxy to replace the current one-in which case, what sense does it make to call it an orthodoxy? Wouldn't it be wiser, and intellectually more honest, to announce plainly that all scientific theories are inherently susceptible to being overthrown and replaced with a wholly new paradigm? Shouldn't there be warning stickers on scientific textbooks advising: Caution-theories herein contained are all subject to future replacement by entirely different theories?
Kuhn and Scientific Revolutions
The American philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, addressed these issues in his influential theory of scientific revolution, and two of his terms may be of service for our purposes. The first is the idea of normal science. This is whatever the scientific community, especially at its apex, happens to be doing. It is what I called orthodoxy earlier, but, after examining the case of Einstein and Darwin, we have been forced to find another way of indicating what is taken by a specific scientific community to be the standard and proper way of doing science, and this activity we will now call normal science.
Now outside the domain of normal science there is bound to be a great deal of abnormal science-some of which is exceedingly abnormal, and frankly "junk science," like the hollow earth folk. Yet, as we have seen, there is also the possibility that one of these abnormal scientific pursuits might come to overthrow and supercede the normal science of its time-the process by which this comes about being called by Thomas Kuhn a paradigm shift.
For a considerable period of time, normal science of the Western scientific community has assumed Darwin's theory of evolution to be roughly true, even if there is a divergence of opinion on how it should be interpreted. As noted earlier, the American philosopher Daniel Dennett argued in his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea that Stephen Jay Gould did not get Darwin right; yet both regarded themselves as Darwinists. Furthermore, Darwin's own original theory, as is well-known, was profoundly modified by the inclusion of Mendel's genetics, providing the foundation of what is now called the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Yet none of this alters the critical role of Darwin's original insights.
Now where the Darwinists are obviously correct is in arguing that Darwin's theory is the normal science of our epoch. As an historical assertion, this is something that the most adamant creationists must be willing to acknowledge as a fact, even if it is only to lament it.
But that is where the creationists are wrong. If there is to be science at all, there must be a body of normal science that is what the scientific community generally accepts. Science, if it is to be socially valuable to us, must display consensus about certain basic principles-if no two scientists agreed on anything, what would be the point of appealing to it to settle questions that otherwise divide us? Furthermore, despite the historical phenomena known as Kuhnian paradigm shifts, it is desirable that science appear to be relatively settled and fixed-you do not want to push too far the idea that every question is still up in the air, since if that occurs, the project of science lapses back into the classical skepticism of the Greeks and Romans-and no fate could possibly be worse. Science, if it is to be socially beneficial, must assume a dogmatic quality about some things: there must be certain truths that are axiomatic, and that we must accept, in order to proceed with the tasks of normal science.
Admittedly, there is a paradoxical air about what I am proposing here. Yet the paradox disappears if we distinguish between science as a mode of discovering new truths about the universe, on the one hand, and science as a traditional fund of reliable knowledge, on the other.
It is the scientific tradition that modern education is concerned with passing on. We did not require students to pass through all the stages of scientific development in order to catch up with contemporary science. We do not teach the Ptolemaic system in elementary school, only to have it replaced by the Copernican system in middle schools. Indeed, the way we teach chemistry and physics is, for the most part, the way the Roman Catholic Church teaches its dogma-through the form of catechisms. True, there are those adventures called science lab; but the whole point of the experiments undertaken in science lab is to prove to the student what the scientific community has already long known and propagated. Otherwise we would be rewriting scientific textbooks every time a student experiment failed to prove what it was supposed to. Boyle's law is not going to be repealed because thirteen year old Bobby McHiggins' experiment meant to prove it mysteriously went awry. We are far more apt to blame Bobby than Boyle. And are we wrong?
Seen in this light, there is nothing inappropriate about scientists treating certain subjects dogmatically. And just as keeping an open mind does not mean revising Boyle's law in light of Bobby McHiggins' experiment, so too an open mind does not entail entertaining, as a scientific proposition, the idea that God created the universe in the year 4004 B.C. If there is to be a tradition of science that is to be passed on and preserved, there must be a core of scientific orthodoxy, which, to use Kuhn's terminology, constitutes the normal science of an epoch. And in our epoch, Darwin's theory of evolution is normal science.
Science is an essential pillar of the Western tradition, and has aided immeasurably in chasing the bogeymen and demons from their natural place in the ordinary human imagination. We are born -- and, as if already programmed -- to be fearful of the evil eye, of witches, of ghosts and of ghouls, of things that go bump in the night. The higher religions, at their very best, offer a radiant alternative to the pandemonium of evil spirits that has plagued the night side of the human imagination for most of our history, and in many parts of the world, still continues to infect it; but the unthinking and automatic acceptance of science by people who don't really have an inkling how it works has proven to be, far and away, the most reliable method for ridding the world of goblins that need to be placated and spooks that must be appeased. An irrational faith in the power of science to explain the inexplicable has proven a boon for mankind far in excess of science's contribution to the development of modern technology.
The social and political importance of this de-demonizing function was one of the key ingredients to the success of Roman civilization. In Livy we read that each year the various reports of spooks and freaks and prodigies were required to be carried to the appropriate authorities in the city of Rome whose official capacity was the interpretation of such signs and portents. What better way to control outbreaks of panic and insane rumor has ever been devised? A goat is born with two-heads in Capua-what does it signify? Send someone to Rome to find out.
The centralization of the authority to interpret the preternatural anomalies that occur all around us is an inestimable blessing to a society that can accomplish this task. The Greeks did it, to a degree, with their oracles; the Romans with their priests; the Roman Catholic Church with their priests; and modern science with its priests.
It is good to believe that somewhere there are people who understand all the strange inexplicable things that happen to us humans; it is immeasurably reassuring solace in a world that sometimes appears to be so terrifically irrational in its workings.
This, of course, does not exhaust the value of science; but it explains why it is important for scientists not to feud too much or too publicly. It lessens the non-scientist's confidence in the world's rationality.
Yet science as a tradition is distinct from science as an ongoing project; otherwise there could be no scientific progress. But, to draw on Kuhn's useful distinction once again, the history of science shows that progress can be made in two quite different ways. First, there is the accumulation of new insights and the gathering of new facts brought about by those scientists who are engaged in the normal science of their period-this is in fact the overwhelming bulk of what real scientists actually do with their time. But there is also the paradigm shift that is characteristic of a genuine scientific revolution; and in this case there is a bold leap of the imagination that lands the scientist who is making this leap into completely unknown territory, often far from the boundaries of normal science.
What is noteworthy about this leap is that it is in no way forced upon the leaper by the data. The thinkers who have been responsible for the great paradigm shifts have not arrived at their conclusions by the patient accumulation of observations, or by working through the scientific methods of their time. Instead, the inspiration came from elsewhere.
Consider the origin of one of the great paradigm shifts of all time: Newton's first law. This asserts that, unless acted on by an outside force, a body in motion remains in motion, and a body at rest remains at rest. Has there ever been a proposition easier to be skeptical of? Who says that a body in motion remains in motion perpetually? And how could you possibly prove such an assertion? On the contrary, all around us we see bodies in motion that do not remain in motion for very long, let alone for all eternity.
Yet without this fundamental axiom, there can be no Newtonian physics. But where did it come from? Not from induction, but from a wild hypothesis-the famous apple-bouncing-on-the-heard flash of illumination that came to Newton while he was pondering what makes the moon revolve around the earth: Why it must be falling toward us, he suddenly concluded, pulled by the forces of gravity downward, and yet never cascading into us by virtue of Newton's first law. The first law explained the mystery-the moon was trying to go in a straight line, at the same speed that he had been given by its own impetus; but due to the earth's gravity, this straight line was constantly being bent into a curve around the earth.
Newton's first law explained the mystery of the moon's orbit; but what explained the mystery of the first law? Whose law was it? And why did Newton insist on its fundamental significance for understanding the universe, despite the natural skepticism that common sense should have made him doubt such an apparently absurd tenet: Everyone knows that bodies in motion do not stay in motion without a great deal help in the way of pushing and shoving, steam engines, internal combustion engines, and batteries.
In short, Newton did not arrive at his first law, or any of his laws, by being a skeptic; on the contrary, he arrived at them by jumping to a conclusion that lay far beyond the power of empirical observation. They came to him in an act of creative speculation-in precisely the same way Darwin's theory came to him.
Skepticism or Genius?
Perhaps there is no greater mischaracterization of science than to see it as an exercise in skepticism, and no where is this clearer than when we turn to look at the psychological origins of those men who have been responsible for creating the new paradigm shifts that have revolutionized our understanding of the world since Copernicus displaced the earth and sent us swirling dizzily around the sun.
The creative genius that produces a paradigm shift is like an inventor who is suddenly fired with ideas of something to invent. He doesn't want to hear arguments why it can't be done; he only wants to figure out a way it can be done, because he wants to do it. He is easily excited by a new idea and it sets him aflame.
Charles Darwin, at the end of his brief and charming Autobiography, reveals the psychological traits of the paradigm-shifting genius.
"As far as I can judge, I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men. I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it….On the other hand, I am not very skeptical,--a frame of mind which I believe to be injurious to the progress of science." (Italics added.)
The ancient skeptic insisted on doubting everything. But how could such a skeptic ever develop a fruitful hypothesis? Too preoccupied with the objections against it, he would never explore the avenues that his hypothesis opened up for him-and for the world as well.
"A good deal of skepticism in a scientific man is advisable to avoid much loss of time, [but] I have met with not a few men, who, I feel sure, have often thus been deterred from experiment or observations, which would have proved directly or indirectly serviceable."
In short, the paradigm shifter is the kind of man who, like Darwin, cannot resist forming an hypothesis on every subject that comes before him. He asks, "How does this work?" Or he wonders, "What explains that?" Whereupon, out of the blue, he will hit upon an angle, a hunch, an inspiration.
Of course, in certain cases, there will be no one sudden inspiration, but a series of them. In Darwin's case, the first spark of his theory came from his observation that many of the animals that he came into contact with in England were in fact the undoubted product of intelligent design-a type of intelligent design that even the most ardent Dawkinsian would not think to dispute, namely the intelligent design that went into creating artificial breeds of dogs.
Darwin loved dogs, as his father's contemptuous comment about him suggested; but dogs were unnatural creatures. They had been bred by human beings over the course of many generations. Dogs, cats, and other breeds of domesticated animals, like sheep and horses-they had not come from the hand of God, but they were the handiwork of men. They had been shaped and molded after God's initial creation of life on earth. Adam and Eve made them, and not God.
The fact that animals could be made to change their characteristics over time by human breeding was evidence of astonishing plasticity in the nature of biological life. Forms were not fixed and immutable; they could be changed over time, and there were Cocker Spaniels enough in England to prove this by setting them beside (or inside) one of the many wolves that still remained.
This plasticity haunted him. After all, Darwin had been born in a geologically and biologically static world; or rather, into a world in which most people believed that world they saw about them-the landscape and the flora and fauna that filled it-had always been as it now was. Some might argue that things had always been that way since God had created the world in seven days early in the year 4004 B.C., as Bishop Ussher had meticulously calculated from adding up all the life spans of the various patriarchs. Others, following the Roman poet Lucretius, would argue that the world had always been the same way: it was fixed and eternal. England has always been England; the meadows in which our sheep roamed had always been meadows, and had always contained sheep in them.
The landscape was the first thing to go. The study of geology had revealed evidence that the English country side in which Darwin grew up had not always been what it now appeared to be. Glaciers had once filled England, and their traces still remained; but even more profound geological upheavals had been pointed out by the British geologist Lyell, whose book Principles of Geology Darwin took along with him on his famous voyage on the Beagle-a voyage that he later described as being "by far the most important event in my life" and the one that "has determined my whole career…."
As Darwin traveled from the tip of South America upward to the Galapagos Islands, he observed "great fossil animals covered with armour like that on the existing armadillo." In addition, he had been struck "by the manner in which closely allied animals replace one another in proceeding southwards over the Continent." And, finally, Darwin had been "deeply impressed…by the South American character of most of the productions of the Galapagos Archipelago, and more especially by the manner in which they differed slightly on each island of the group…."
In short, Darwin had been fascinated by the fact that the same basic design of animal turned out, in differing locations, to possess slightly different features-variations that showed up between different parts of a huge continent like South America, as well as between different islands in the same archipelago. Had they each been specially designed that way? Did each represent a completely different act of creation?
Here was the point where Darwin's familiarity with Lyell's geology forced a biological conclusion on him. The animals of Galapagos had a South American character to them; and yet the islands did not appear "to be very ancient in the geological sense." But if the islands were not very ancient, then obviously critters that lived on the island could not have been created at the same time all the other animals had been created. Yet because they were different species, though of a similar type, they could not be explained simply by the straightforward geographical migration of the original South American prototype: you do not alter the physiological characteristics of a cat by carrying him off to another continent. Something else, therefore, had to have been involved.
It was as if the original prototype had been retooled in some profound way by its new location; but the problem was, How?
Darwin tells us that the question "haunted" him-a term that had a powerful meaning for a man who credited himself with "unbounded patience in long reflecting over any subject."
The greatest challenge to Darwin was to explain how the retooling of the original animal always turned out to be a retooling which made sense, given the new environment in which the animal found itself. The retooling was useful and beneficial to the animal that had been retooled. In short, it seemed to be an intelligent retooling.
For example, consider the case of the famous finches on the Galapagos Island-each species of finch had been equipped with a different style of beak that permitted the members of this particular species to sustain itself by a different food source. Intelligent design? Obviously-but if so, what agent was responsible for the design? Did the finches design their own beaks? Of course not. But did it make any more sense to argue that the environment had designed the different beaks? Or to go back to Darwin's own words,
"it was…evident that neither the action of the surrounding conditions, nor the will of the organisms (especially in the case of plants), could account for the innumerable case in which organisms of every kind are beautifully adapted to their habits of life-for instance, a woodpecker or a tree-frog to climb trees, or a seed for dispersal by hooks or plumes."
How to account for all these beautiful adaptations-or, if you will, for all this intelligent-seeming design?
Darwin might never have been able to answer this question if he had been less infatuated with dogs. For whenever Darwin looked at one of his favorite dogs, he knew that he was looking at an animal whose appearance and whose behavioral characteristics had been deliberately and intelligently selected by a
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