Friday, November 18, 2005
(9:35 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Science: The Inner Truth and Greatness
Is Jared right?The choice, since Plato, has been between rationalism and superstition. The better definition of science, it seems, is not that it is a collection of disciplines seeking a certain kind of explanation (natural), but that it is the practice of rationally seeking explanations for phenomena. Philosophy (as Husserl says: "a rigorous science") can fit in comfortably here, perhaps even achieve pride of place. But religion: well, on the one hand it is opposed to the exclusivist claim of reason, and would withdraw from even the friendliest rationalism; but on the other hand, modern religion cannot comfortably stylize itself as brazen superstition, since Descartes and Shakespeare let the cat out of the bag and now even the most pious parishoner still feels a right to demand some kind of answer to the hardest questions. This suggests that religious leaders do not derive their persecution complex from debates over evolution, or x or y legislative agenda, or from the success of French literary theory in the 1980s, or from the lasciviousness of television; no, it is ultimately that history did not stop around 1600 that induces the social alienation now on display in the fight over Intelligent Design.The question of mysticism, brought up in the comments to Jared's post, seems crucial to me -- and not at all because I am a practitioner of any form of mysticism. "Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystical," as Wittgenstein says. Sticking with the common definition of science as the quest for naturalistic explanations for phenomena -- and I should be clear that I am not at all willing to concede the scientific model of experimentation the sole proprietary rights to the concept of "reason" and in fact would take any move or anything that smacks of such a move as a real impoverishment of human thought and life -- you're inevitably going to reach a point where there is no more possible explanation. Ultimately, let's say, the unexplainable is the Big Bang -- that this particular contingent universe came into existence at all. I'm not saying, "Oh goody this means I get to deploy 'God' to answer that question" -- that obviously just moves the question back a step. (To the question "Why God?" the only rigorous answer is "We're not allowed to ask that question" -- this is why the post-apostolic church had to reject Gnosticism, and that rejection seems to me to rescue Christianity from the charge of being simply a superstition.)
Now of course we could make the move of claiming that what we really want is science in the broad sense of Wissenschaft, but in point of fact, that's not what goes under the name of science nowadays. All that goes under the name of science is calculative reason -- which is important and wonderful. All praise to calculative reason! It's not the answer, though. From a pedagogical standpoint, the answer is probably to actually include philosophy classes in high school curricula, because if the Intelligent Designers (whom I loathe) have any good point at all, it's that a lot of questions simply aren't being raised. It's actually giving the science teachers too much credit to assume that they're propagating some kind of radical materialist atheism, and it's not going to work to say, "Because we have evidence that species evolved, God doesn't exist." That's stupid. The question of God's existence or non-existence isn't an empirical question that can be answered by digging into the ground and piecing together the bones we find. It's a subject for sustained rational inquiry, but it's not an empirical question. The short-circuit reasoning that claims that science has somehow demonstrated God's non-existence is the sign of a radical thoughtlessness on the part of our scientists -- an empiricist fundamentalism.
Something like "Intelligent Design" actually has a pretty long pedigree, although the more reputable advocates of the position were far above the petty "God of the gaps" nonsense of our current sordid set of pseudo-scientists. It's not self-evidently right, but the fact that it's found to be so satisfying by so many people might be taken as a symptom of the impoverishment of human inquiry by American scientism. Sartor resartus, one might say.
Thus in the "Science vs. Intelligent Design" debate, I would say that both are right. First, yes, absolutely -- the advocates of Intelligent Design are not arguing in good faith, but are instead simply deploying this convenient philosophical position as a counteroffensive in the culture wars. But also, yes, absolutely -- science as calculative reason (i.e., Actually Existing Science) does not provide the answers to the questions that Intelligent Design is raising on the literal level. So the solution, in my opinion, is to leave the science curriculum the way it is and to add a rigorous philosophical program alongside it. Just insisting on "science"'s monopoly on reason over against "religion" is not going to cut it -- that's just question-begging, and it ignores the fact that "science" has factually been reduced to mere calculative wisdom. The more radical solution is to take the Intelligent Designers at their word and promote rigorous rational inquiry into ultimate questions -- which would be much more dangerous to religious fundamentalisms than any kind of knee-jerk scientism could ever dream of being.
