Monday, June 18, 2007
(1:17 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Falsifiability and Theology
Today Stanley Fish has a blog post up, sadly behind the TimesSelect paywall, in which he discusses the Atheism Trend. One point he picks up on is falsifiability, a criterion often used to polemically club religion. In order to get at this point, he quotes some statements expressing confidence that even though we don't have much to show for it now, the attempt to explain morality naturalistically is bound to bear fruit:This is a remarkable sequence. A very strong assertion is made – we will “undoubtedly discover lawful connections between our states of consciousness [and] our modes of conduct” – but no evidence is offered in support of it; and indeed the absence of evidence becomes a reason for confidence in its eventual emergence. This sounds an awfully lot like faith of the kind Harris and his colleagues deride – expectations based only on a first premise (itself asserted rather than proven), which, if true, demands them, and which, if false, makes nonsense of them.This is something like a popularized version of Derrida's late work on religion -- reason structurally requires a moment of "faith." Unless one is predisposed to think that "faith" is a bad thing tout court, this isn't any kind of "reduction" of science. Scientists do not and should not simply throw out their paradigm every three months -- it makes perfect sense to be relatively conservative about changes in the overarching framework of research.
Dawkins exhibits the same pattern of reasoning. He believes, like Harris, that ethical facts can be explained by the scientific method in general and by the thesis of natural selection in particular. If that thesis is assumed as a baseline one can then generate Darwinian reasons, reasons that are reasons within the Darwinian system, for the emergence of the behavior we call ethical. One can speculate, as Dawkins does, that members of a species are generous to one another out of a desire (not consciously held) to preserve the gene pool, or that unconditioned giving is an advertisement of dominance and superiority. These, he says, are “good Darwinian reasons for individuals to be altruistic, generous or ‘moral’ towards each other.”
Exactly! They are good Darwinian reasons; remove the natural selection hypothesis from the structure of thought and they will be seen not as reasons, but as absurdities. I “believe in evolution,” Dawkins declares, “because the evidence supports it”; but the evidence is evidence only because he is seeing with Darwin-directed eyes. The evidence at once supports his faith and is evidence by virtue of it.
The problem is that the emphasis on falsifiability makes it sound like scientists are radically open to change their views at any given time, when in real life -- for very good reasons -- they are more or less "dogmatic" about such issues. (This insistence on "falsifiability" ironically gives the Intelligent Design people a rhetorical "in." Due to the scientific polemicists' misrepresentation of their own procedure, the ID crowd gets to pose as simply open-minded and thereby "more scientific than the scientists." I'm sure they'd come up with some other lie if the scientific polemicists didn't provide them with this opportunity, but still.) This "dogmatism" isn't a negative thing, but rather it is what makes science such a hugely productive force in generating knowledge -- broad agreement about the framework of research allows individual scientists to plug away at their relatively obscure little corner, confident that they are contributing usefully to a larger enterprise. If everything really was up for grabs all the time, progress would be impossible.
What I would add to Fish's account is a defense of "religion" (or at least Christianity) from the common caricatures. Christianity is "dogmatic," but in much the same sense as science is -- dogma provides a general framework within which future questions are answered. And dogma does change over time. If everything was unequivocally "set" for all time in some indisputable set of revealed propositions, then the history of Christianity, with its many controversies and many moments of genuine uncertainty as to which side would win, would literally make no sense at all. Yes, there is the continual pose that every side is "orthodox" in the sense of defending the unchanging truths handed down by the apostles, but that doesn't seem structurally different from the scientist's implicit reference to "how things really are" -- if "how things really are" were obvious, then there would be no need for scientific inquiry at all, just as theological discourse would never even arise if all the questions had been anticipated and answered by the apostles.
Theological claims are also falsifiable within any given theological community -- it's not as if people can just say any old thing and be accepted. But more generally, one could even argue that major paradigm shifts have happened, using the principles of "internal critique." The most obvious example of this would be the Protestant Reformation, but there are many others. At any given point in time in any given church community, the teachings will seem "dogmatic" and unchanging, but that doesn't mean they're frozen in time, any more than scientific frameworks are frozen in time -- but wholesale change is fairly rare in either case, for good reasons.
From the scientific perspective, of course, theologians are just arguing about nonsense, and that's fine. But all these parodies of religion as absolutely locked in stone compared with the radical sense of open inquiry in science don't just get religion wrong -- they get science wrong, too. (And then there's also the problem, noted here previously, that when we enter into "science vs. religion" debates, we're suddenly thrown back into the amazing world of Newtonian mechanics!) I think it must be possible for an atheist to present science in an accurate and up-to-date way and to give an accurate portrayal of religion, but still give a convincing argument in favor of atheism. In fact, it seems possible that an atheist writer could put together a book from which an educated (but not theologically trained) believer might end up learning more about religion, because it's hugely rhetorically effective to know one's opponents' position better than they themselves do.
Ultimately, though, this lazy rehash of the polemics from the Victorian era makes me think that today's atheists are guilty of more than not taking religion seriously -- they're not even taking the presentation of their own position seriously.
