People of faith and people of science behaving badly

How different, epistemologically, are faith and science? The answer is: not much at all.

After all, foundationalism is dead. That is, with the demise of positivism, it is supposed to be understood that a stock of indubitable certitudes from which we might deduce all necessary knowledge does not exist. Instead, theories are devised by taking as data some of one’s beliefs about entities deemed within a theory’s scope. It is possible to back-track, but one must start there.

Knowledge is perforce set within a framework of a web of belief. No wonder Nicholas Wolterstorff, who developed these ideas with acuity, titled the book in which they are found, Reason within the Bounds of Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999 [1976]).

But men, as we know, behave badly. Everyone, it seems, believes that “I can do all things through [X] that strengthens me.” Not just Eliot Spitzer, but people of faith and people of science.[1]

Anthony Flew, before he began to change his mind, thought of it this way:

If one scrutinizes how people guard their religious convictions one sees that they treat them as compatible with the happening of anything whatsoever. In other words, these beliefs are not falsifiable. And because they are not falsifiable they do not constitute genuine assertions. They make no claims on actuality.[2]

But, as Wolterstorff remarked,

[S]ince the time of Flew’s lecture it has repeatedly been remarked by philosophers and historians of science that scientists convinced of the truth of some scientific theory behave exactly the way Flew says religious believers do. Accordingly, if Flew’s argument were a good one, we would conclude that convinced scientists do not assert anything either.[3]

But, it should immediately be pointed out, Flew was wrong about (some) religious believers. Furthermore, not all scientists behave badly either. At least not all the time.

Ideally, a person’s commitment to a particular working hypothesis – it does not matter whether it consists of “Christ is Lord” or “changes in the earth’s temperature correlate strongly with changes in the quantity of anthropogenic carbon production” – constantly runs the risk of coming into conflict with “new data,” however defined, and when conflict is perceived to occur, revisions occur. As Wolterstorff points out, “The claim that no such revisions ever occur because no such conflict ever emerges is utterly false” (op. cit., 27).

That’s why, on any given Friday, someone somewhere turns from being a believer to being an atheist, or the opposite, from being an atheist to being a theist.

Three kinds of beliefs are necessary, according to Wolterstorff, in any theory-making and theory-weighing: data beliefs, data-background beliefs, and control beliefs. The threefold distinction is helpful.

To be continued.

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[1] When Gary Hart, after certain facts became known, was forced to “focus on his family,” the Italian press almost without exception took Hart’s side against a puritanical America. The typical line, “They say it was a sin for Hart to do what he did? Given what a good-looker she is, it would have been a sin for him not to do what he did.” Upon seeing a few choice pics of Ashley Alexandra Dupré, many feel the same way today. If you have the means to pay for it, why not? At issue is how far to take the principle according to which all is fair in love and war. If the "all is fair" rule is applied to the gratification of basic desires – or to the protection of a global hypothesis in the realms of faith or science – then anything goes, and truth and justice are nothing more than wax noses.

[2] Per Wolterstorff’s summary, op. cit., 24.

[3] Op. cit., 24.

Comments

[Duane]

John,

Please advise me of the "new data" for the existence of God or gods.

[JohnFH]

Excellent question, Duane.

For Christopher Reeves, for example, it was a near-death experience.

For Anthony Flew, perhaps it was not so much new data as much as a conviction that the data long under his nose received a more cogent explanation in theism than in atheism.

For C. S. Lewis, it was the truth of paganism which he could not deny which led him, circuituously, to Christianity.

For a Sardinian youth I once knew, raised as a Baptist, it was the fact that "God" was not manipulated by the prayers of parents and others that led her to pray to this God who could not be manipulated. She thought she encountered a reality in that experience.

People leave atheism and embrace theism on a regular basis. The opposite is just as true. I'm just trying to capture what happens in terms of a respectable phenomenology of human experience.

I just read Bart Ehrman's account of his journey from theism to atheism (or is it agnosticism? I can't quite tell). It all started when he concluded that the author of the gospel of Mark might simply have made a mistake in reference to Abiathar. Funny, it is just these kind of mistakes in the Bible that I find reassuring as a believer.

I'm not so sure I could believe in a God who was so controlling that he did not allow someone like the author of the gospel of Mark to make, to begin with, innocent mistakes, and beyond that, difficult and debatable judgment calls in his handling of received tradition.

But maybe that's the difference that comes with being raised in a relaxed United Methodist setting as opposed to a totalizing environment like the one Ehrman experienced.

[Duane]

So, I guess that means that there isn't any new data, or even old data, but just varying ways of shuffling around ideas. Since this series seems to be about episiotomy, I hope you will deal with probability (both formal and, more importantly, informal probability) in theory building. As you know, I think Bayes was generally on the right track. To oversimplify, we hold some opinion on P with some probability that P is the case. New data increases or decreases, the probability of P. The probability of P can never be 1 but it can never be 0 either. However, if P is, for example, "there is a door to my right in this room," the probability of P being correct is so high that I can confidently assert that P is the case with no need to equivocate. I've tested P several times today and over the several years that I've lived in this house and worked in this room it has always been the case. On the other hand, the probability that there is an elephant in this room is so low as to be negligible. But if I were to begin smell elephant droppings, I might start looking for an elephant even if some other explanation eventually proved more satisfying from a probabilistic point of view. The most interesting Ps have probabilities ranging from .1 to .9. P being any Iron Age chronology for the Levant is a good example. P being, "the US should intervene militarily in Darfur" is another. Yes, I do think ethical judgments are subject to the same epistemological considerations but I don't think they can rely on epistemology alone. So what is the probability of there being any god? What is the probability of there being the God you worship? What data would increase or decrease that probability?

[J. K. Gayle]

Ideally, a person’s commitment to a particular working hypothesis – it does not matter whether it consists of “Christ is Lord” or “changes in the earth’s temperature correlate strongly with changes in the quantity of anthropogenic carbon production” – constantly runs the risk of coming into conflict with “new data,” however defined, and when conflict is perceived to occur, revisions occur.

John, What a wonderful post. Thanks for showing us the new data in "choice pics of Ashley Alexandra Dupré." Flew rocks, and your post here, with its contemporary relevance, does too!

Lest I'm sounding too laudatory all of the sudden after reading every word you wrote, I'll only object to one. Why do you have to say "ideally" in my epigraphic sentence above? Plato could only imagine such new things. Human conversion (even away from God) makes us "really" in his image. (But I didn't mean to dredge up your old posts on Impassibility).

[JohnFH]

Duane,

"Episiotomy"? You had me scrambling for the dictionary, but I'm still scratching my head.

I agree with you completely about probability, and I like the way you formulate the questions. But I don't understand your comment about no new data. For Christopher Reeves, his near-death experience constituted new data. I read somewhere that Charles Darwin, who considered going into the ministry (I'm glad he didn't! I consider him an excellent biologist), lost his faith (though he wasn't really an atheist) due to a death in the family that convinced him that God, if there was a God, was not a being he could worship. Once again, an event is understood by an observer to constitute new data.

In response to your last questions, there are lots of possible answers out there.

For example, does the beauty of a snowflake, not one, but all snowflakes, suggest intelligent design? In the eyes of many, the existence of snowflakes increases the likelihood that the world was created by an intelligence of some sort.

Does the propensity of human beings to imagine that there is far more to reality than meets the naked eye, is that simply healthy paranoia, an adaptive trait, run amok, or do things like experiences in which body and "soul" are detached from one another make it more likely that consciousness is shaped by, but not reducible to, physiological processes? Einstein spoke of a noosphere; it is surprising to see how many people find this concept convincing to some degree. What does it say about the structure of the universe if there is such a sphere in which interactions occur beyond obvious physical restrictions? In the eyes of many, it points to the likelihood that philosophers going back to Plato and before, all the way to Whitehead and Davies today, were not merely dreaming insofar as they posit a Godlike reality of some kind.

For many others, of course, it is the experience of love that makes them believe in God, or want to believe in God. But philosophers have generally shied away from unpacking this much. Personally, I think that's because the experience of love is prickly and delicious at the same time. raw and wild and profoundly satisfying but also, often, deeply disappointing. It's as if the experience opens a window to a reality which is conspicuous by its absence. Is God like that? Believers, of course, have just as many unanswered questions as do atheists: more, in my experience!

Scientists have so far investigated the human experience of beauty, and suffering, indeed, the whole realm of aesthetics, with great reserve. Perhaps these experiences are ineffable on an atheist reckoning. On a theist reckoning, they have a structure which was meant to be. The theist's claim is audacious, to be sure; but the atheist's claim does not line up at all well with how people, including atheists, actually go about living. It is normal for people to think of moral and aesthetic experience as more than the reserve of merely private opinion. We discuss these matters as if there were, in some sense, transpersonal, transcultural norms worth believing in, such as that "all men are created equal" (a demonstrable falsehood, of course, but we believe it "eschatologically").

[JohnFH]

Kurk, I'm glad you're enjoying this series. I said "ideally" because it's true that often, believers and scientists behave badly, that is, they adhere to whatever they adhere to, regardless of "new data." In the case of science, that's why historians of science talk about the structure of scientific revolutions, and how much water under the bridge often has to pass before scientists grudgingly walk away from old hypotheses and embrace new ones.

[Peter Kirk]

I suppose some people believe in God or accept Jesus as Lord on the basis of the balance of probabilities and are open to their mind being changed by new data. But I take issue strongly with any suggestion that this is the right and proper way to believe. Do you believe that your wife exists, or remain in a committed relationship to her, in this kind of way such that there is any conceivable evidence that could cause you to change your mind? I suppose someone could try to convince you that she is a hallucination, but would you be open to such an argument? Similarly for those who believe in God and have a personal relationship with him, as I suggested here.

[JohnFH]

Are you saying, Peter, that you are not open to changing your mind based on new data? I think you probably are, but you don't spend a lot of time thinking about the possibility.

Your analogy with married life fits pretty well. How many times, as a pastor, have I seen a husband or a wife blindsided by the other's infidelity? Lots of times. Sooner or later, the "new data" has to be accounted for. More often than one might imagine, reconciliation takes place. This, too, is analogous to what happens to everyone who holds to working hypotheses ("faith-based" or "scientific" - a false dichotomy). Anomalous data is not necessarily shown to fit into the general pattern. But given the general pattern's continuing validity, it remains the basis for a working hypothesis (that he/she loves me even so).

As for the language of probability applied to personal relationships, you're right, it doesn't quite work. But within the context of such relationship, that language has a place. For example, I may love my wife very much, but the probability of her calling me in the next hour or two to "remind" me to pick up Anna at preschool, is high as opposed to certain.

[Duane]

Sorry John, of course, I meant "epistemology." I sure wish there was an intention checker as well as a spell checker. I may have an additional more substantive comment later.

[Peter Kirk]

Are you saying, Peter, that you are not open to changing your mind based on new data?

Yes, John, I am saying this regarding the basics of the Christian faith such as the existence of God and the lordship of Christ. I am not saying it about many peripheral matters. And I may be open to some reinterpretation.

Your analogy with married life fits pretty well. How many times, as a pastor, have I seen a husband or a wife blindsided by the other's infidelity?

Are you suggesting that God is analogous to an unfaithful spouse? Yes, if there are new data about how God deals with me, I take that into account and adjust my understanding of him accordingly. But no data can convince me that he does not exist. As for whether he loves me, I admit to sometimes struggling with certainty on this point, but I do know that his love is far deeper than I can ever understand, and therefore that no observation I can make, even one which might seem to show that he doesn't love me, can in fact demonstrate that.

[Looney]

I guess this is a different viewpoint, but I work in high tech R&D and the elementary school notion of a scientist is not very practical for me.

The starting point for me in science is precise mathematical relationships involving measurable quantities. All of high tech runs on this kind of science. Then there is a hand waving kind which usually isn't falsifiable and has little similarity to the former science, but enthusiasts will insist until they end up in the grave that their beliefs are science too. More than half of "science" is the latter kind.

[JohnFH]

That's right, Looney, except that it's not really about elementary school notions of science. Astronomy, physics, geology, and biology all count as hard sciences, but the history of science teaches that it's hard for scientists to move from one paradigm to another, such as from Ptolemy to Copernicus and from Newton to Einstein. The geologist who came up with plate tectonics was derided by his colleagues for decades, but now, plate tectonics rule the field. The theory of evolution goes a long way toward explaining the evidence, but questions remain, as is usual in science. That leaves non-specialists choosing to opt out. But this is not a practical route for a biologist charged with describing the history of animal species.