"This humanness cannot be purged from science"

Thus says Del Ratzsch, convincingly, in a paper delivered at a recent "Science and Religion Conference" held at the University of Toledo. Nor can it be purged from any reasoning, understanding, or knowledge. It bears strongly on the question of whether science is the quintessential, premier, or only reliable fount of knowledge.

There is enough in this paper to fill several blog entries. I'm torn between going into it in depth here, or taking the time to read the rest of the conference proceedings. For now I'll just throw out some quotes from the paper as tidbits.

The paper's conclusion conveys the heart of the message, though of course it is dangerous to run ahead of the argument and its supporting statements in that way. For those who want to see it here, with the same caution in mind, the thrust of the paper is that the "humanness" in science--a cognitive terrain onto which scientific (and other) knowledge is mapped, has been under-recognized but can no longer be ignored. Ratzsch affirms the unique value of science, yet he points with convincing evidence, for example, to what we now know of emotion, feeling, aesthetics, etc. as absolutely inescapable aspects of knowledge, decision-making, and hypothesis generation and theory formation. He shows that materialist evolutionary explanations of human reasoning fail. The implication of this is that science cannot claim to rest on purely objective ground; moreover, it owes both an historical and a continuing intellectual debt to Biblical categories of thinking.

These quotes are obviously not in context, so if they seem unsupported here, Ratzsch is certainly not to blame. I hope you'll see them for what they are and follow them to their source.

As Polanyi once remarked, the personal dimension is "no mere imperfection but a vital component of knowledge."

. . .

If feels or intuitions or the like really do constitute one bedrock of science itself, then that same faculty can hardly be rejected in other realms and applications on mere grounds that it does not come up to some 'scientific' evidential snuff, since it partially defines scientific evidential snuff.

. . .

Thus, science cannot straightforwardly provide the rational justification for its own foundations.

. . .

Dennett lauds Darwinian evolution as a "universal acid", but the acid may be more universal than Dennett suggests - dissolving even its own case for itself.

. . .

I wish to suggest a fourth principle concerning cognitive terrains: 4. the 'fine-tuned' cognitive terrain required by science is religion-shaped.

. . .

As a historical matter of fact, modern science arose only once, and that took place within the Western European context of Judeo-Christian theology and praxis - not in Egypt, India, the Middle East, or China, all of which had earlier and longer cultural and technological traditions than had Western Europe. Although there are disputes over degrees, virtually every serious historian of science recognizes that that was not mere coincidence - that some specific Christian theological doctrines (most notably creation and divine voluntarism) played key roles in the origin and rise of modern science.

. . .

Of course, it might well be that even if religion was instrumental in getting science up and running, that science has long since left any such connection behind. But despite widespread assertions that science and its theistic heritage are separable, it is not at all clear that this separability thesis is true. It may be that the overtones of the theological conceptual context of science are not only essential, but have filtered deep into the very bones of science, and that science cannot be theologically filleted. Let me suggest some considerations which make that position at least plausible.

. . .

Science works only in a very particular sort of reality and only with a very particular sort of conception of reality. The requisite picture - of a comprehendable, intelligible, uniform, predictable, even beautiful, cosmos which can in principle make sense to finite minds like ours when observed via perceptual faculties like ours - is a picture of a cosmos structured in fundamental ways like a mind would do it. It is a picture of a cosmos structured like a creation.

. . .

Paul Davies has remarked that "Science began as an outgrowth of theology, and all scientists, whether atheists or theists ... accept an essentially theological worldview."

. . .

Science depends upon a fund of absolutely indispensable presuppositions which not only grew out of a theistic context, but still look awfully like the weight-bearing members of a creation - intelligibility, coherence, reliability, beauty, and the rest of the familiar list.

. . .

There is a potentially significant - and intriguing - reported result from studies of scientists. Hudson summarizes results of one study as follows:

[Begin Hudson quote] Scientists and non-scientists differ significantly in their reactions to descriptions of nature. Compared with non-scientists, scientists show a marked preference for metaphors of nature which are anthropomorphic - with certain significant exceptions. They reject anthropomorphic metaphors if these suggest nature as threatening or anarchic. [End Hudson quote]

Note that this 'marked preference' is a preference for the conceptual structure reflecting a benevolent (at least not threatening), faithful (not anarchic), person. That predilection could explain an otherwise surprising observation by astronomer Fred Hoyle: " I have always thought it curious that, while most scientists claim to eschew religion, it actually dominates their thoughts more than it does the clergy."

It might also explain why some unbelieving scientists protest vastly too much - e.g., Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Francis Crick, E.O. Wilson, Peter Atkins, Michael Shermer, George Williams, William Provine, etc. One sometimes wonders just who they are trying so shrilly to convince.

. . .

But can we do any better than sheer metaphor here [in describing the coordinate relationship of science and religion]? I do not know how to work this out in any very substantive way, but in one area it might go something like this. The uniformity concept which science inescapably deploys has a dimension of brute rigidity to it, a necessity which nonetheless (somewhat awkwardly) embodies a contingency as well - a nomological necessity as it is often termed. Religion, addressing the same reality, must also acknowledge both that contingency and that uniformity, but here the concept has a depth dimension of agency - a character of deliberate, voluntarist free choice (the contingency) of faithfulness (the uniformity). The necessity vector reveals to us the firmness of God's commitment to faithfulness - a commitment that goes nearly beyond our agency-based conceptions of freedom. The voluntarist vector reveals to us the utter inadequacy of formal characterisings of the rigidity of laws - an inadequacy which strenuous Positivists efforts to the contrary failed miserably and predictably to overcome.

Posted: Fri - April 28, 2006 at 04:27 PM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

"This humanness cannot be purged from science"

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson