Conversations With Touchstone: Theists, Scientists, & Fairy Giraffes With Butterfly Wings

Touchstone makes some awesome comments about this post of mine about the Dreher blog.

They're worth responding to in full, but I do so conscious that I'm gilding the lily.

I am not a scientist, but knowing and working with many, I agree that the "big questions" lose a lot of their draw for scientists, as they have for me (for much the same reason, I expect). But while this is regularly portrayed as some kind of philosophical Philistinism on the part of scientists, I think scientists in that position are just misunderstood; the big questions are as big and compelling as ever, but science as an epistemology frames those questions as... intractable.

That's an excellent phrasing of the problem.

Dreher's comment sections sees the analogy between evangelicals in science and homosexuals coming out of the closet.  But that's not nearly so apt an analogy as one between evangelicals in science and people who believe in fairy giraffes with butterfly wings [FGWBW's|.

If somebody came to a scientific discourse aggressively claiming that they believe in FGWBW's, they might expect to be ostracised simply because they are talking about things for which scientists have no real vocabulary, no test, and no reason to test.  FGWBW's are your personal and private delusion.  There's no reason why anybody else should have to reply to it.

American Christians, after the twentieth century's elaborate and futile campaign against scientific thinking, exhausted a tremendous amount of credit with science. That was an intellectual blunder of enormous scale, and damned near fatal to the intellectual credibility of theism generally. 

Of course it wasn't universal: there were and always have been Christians who can absorb and cope with real scientific discourse, and even scientists who have been brought to faith by their work.  But science cannot demonstrate, confirm, disconfirm, or even really talk about The Big Questions any more than it can confirm that water flows downhill because it's spat out by interdimensional FGWBW's.  And true believers are rightly shy about tangling up their faith with a discourse that has no brief for discussing it.

These questions remain, but science sheds new light on just how unknowable, and unapproachable those questions are. They are interesting in that we want want answers. They are "uninteresting" because we just can't even get a foothold on them in practice.

Science deals with things that are extended in time and space, and insofar as The Big Questions are supernatural or whatever, they are not approachable by science.

The bare-faced lie that is currently being perpetrated on American evangelicals generally is at least an interesting one.  It's that the Bible is itself a form of science, and simultaneously a "fact" that can be interpreted as reasonable persons interpret other facts. 

It's a highly modernist, Reformation approach to reality, and it creates a lot of confusion for the faithful.  There's a strong belief that for the Bible to be "true" it must be capable of insertion into scientific discourses at some level.  Witness the ludicrous (I'm tempted to use the word "insane") cottage industry of making Genesis 1-11 part of a coherent factual description of the world: you can actually read intellectual fingerpainting like this:

Since God is the Creator of all things (including science), and His Word is true (“Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth,” John 17:17), the true age of the earth must agree with His Word. However, rather than accept the biblical account of creation, many Christians have accepted the radioisotope dates of billions of years and attempted to fit long ages into the Bible. The implications of doing this are profound and affect many parts of the Bible.

So long as Christianity is committed to this view of scripture-is-true-equals-scripture-is-fact, evangelicals will rightly need to be shy about self-designating in the public sphere.

Nobody says, "Man, it's a shame that so many Byronists are forced by science to hide how they feel," or "How many baroque music lovers are kept in the closet by science."  The reason for that is that they don't confuse their discourses.  They know that they can't run an oscilloscope romantically, or do a contrapuntal statistical analysis.  They keep their discourses separate and well-insulated: however much the one might see a fire in the heart of creation or the other a contrapuntal pattern to astrophysics, it's just not likely to enter their scientific discourse as a definitive explanation of Everything.

There's nothing wrong with "extra-scientific" passions and beliefs.  Never has been. 

But insofar as evangelical Christianity has a self-declared agenda of persuading the world of an unprovable truth, it's kind of incompatible with science.

Touchstone again:

I think that also fuels some of the "anti-religion" in science. From a scientific standpoint, religious convictions must create a kind of dissonance for those watching: Did you just forget all about epistemology? How else do you do what we do as scientists and then drop it all to arrive at your religious beliefs?

I'm not sold on this as a matter of principle: I don't think an evangelical biologist has to entirely drop her epistemological values, because if she encounters something that her epistemological values don't account for, she's obliged to seek elsewhere for a coherent way of talking about it.

I've no problem with that.

But you can't then show up again at the lab saying, "We've been wrong all along."

Still less can you show up saying, "A bunch of Near Eastern tribesmen nailed the answers to all our questions four thousand years ago and wrote it down."

What's happened is that you've found an area of experience or thinking that lies outside the boundaries of your epistemological rigor.  But it doesn't invalidate the proper authority of that rigor in the realms where that rigor has always performed.

It's no surprise that the religion that *is* found in the scientific community tends to be "liberal". Conservative Christianity is epistemically quite ambitious in its claims, and flaunts/fights scientific epistemology at many more points than do the more tentative, less ambitious positions of liberal Christianity.

Yes.

And while an American evangelical Christian can renounce his movement's history of hostility to scientific thinking, he's got a well-earned credit-gap that others don't necessarily have.

Comments

[Touchstone]

Otter,

Some feedback just on the first section of your post, for now:

That's an excellent phrasing of the problem.

Dreher's comment sections sees the analogy between evangelicals in science and homosexuals coming out of the closet. But that's not nearly so apt an analogy as one between evangelicals in science and people who believe in fairy giraffes with butterfly wings [FGWBW's|.

If somebody came to a scientific discourse aggressively claiming that they believe in FGWBW's, they might expect to be ostracised simply because they are talking about things for which scientists have no real vocabulary, no test, and no reason to test. FGWBW's are your personal and private delusion. There's no reason why anybody else should have to reply to it.

I take your point, and agree, but note that it's hard to even process your improved analogy: FGWBWs are much easier to get a handle on than "cosmic designer", aren't they. A scientist can list to the proponent of FGWBW Theory and nod all the way; perhaps the FGWBWs are not perfectly similar to small giraffes with butterfly wings, but to a scientist, the fram or reference holds, at least. The scientist can say, with some confidence, that we have no knowledge of FGWBWs, or any substantial evidence to suppose they exist, but nonetheless, the belief at least is cast in terms a scientist could reject, or accept.

Which brings us to the deeper problem here -- the question of knowability, and the idea that some beliefs are "not even wrong", to invoke a phrase from the controversy over String Theory. I don't know much about Fairy Giraffes with Butterfly Wings, but if they are putatively real, biological organisms, however hard to find they may be, the belief in them can at least be addressed by science. We could find one, for example, and thus provide very good scientific support for the idea that such creatures exist.

But the "cosmic designer" is not like that, epistemically; a scientist (or anyone else, thinking a bit about it) would have to say this belief really can't be addressed as knowledge. It's not knowable, or assignable as "true" or "false", even to a degree. It's simply inert epistemically, a naked appeal to intuition, hope, credulity, or something else apart from the epistemology a scientist (or indeed a modern thinker) would invoke on questions of "true" and "false".

American Christians, after the twentieth century's elaborate and futile campaign against scientific thinking, exhausted a tremendous amount of credit with science. That was an intellectual blunder of enormous scale, and damned near fatal to the intellectual credibility of theism generally.

Yes, and I think that "dragging down theism with it" is a hugely underappreciated dynamic. Old earth creationists shrug, often enough, at young earth creationists; it's no skin off their theological nose if YECs are plunging deeper and deeper into denialism and irrationality and often enough, outright deceit, is it?

I think it is. Old earth creationists and theistic evolutionists don't affirm YEC beliefs on scientific questions, but the fact that a huge section of American Christianity lumbers along under YEC doctrines undermines the OEC and the TE, too. Why? Because the OEC has no way to draw lines between him and the YEC epistemically. Yes, the OEC doesn't fight the evidence so resolutely, but by the same token, between them it's reduced to subjective opinions for both. Neither can reject the other on anything more than a personally-biased basis.

If you doubt this (not saying you do, but if you did), consider: what would be an objective test in favor of OEC vs. YEC, or vice versa? Can you think of one? Well, if so, I say it's a trick question, and that objective test itself would cut the legs out from under the OEC as completely as the YEC. Neither can appeal to objectivity or straight reasoning, because it's self-defeating to do so. The tools an OEC would use to debunk YEC ultimate demolish his own position.

Given that, I agree it was a huge blunder on the part of modern American Christianity, but I'm not sure what the "wise" alternative would have been. At least for Christians who wanted to preserve their traditional doctrines and identity.

Of course it wasn't universal: there were and always have been Christians who can absorb and cope with real scientific discourse, and even scientists who have been brought to faith by their work. But science cannot demonstrate, confirm, disconfirm, or even really talk about The Big Questions any more than it can confirm that water flows downhill because it's spat out by interdimensional FGWBW's. And true believers are rightly shy about tangling up their faith with a discourse that has no brief for discussing it.

I hear you, again, and agree. But even FGWBWs controlling gravity and water flows is more tractable than the Big Questions you are talking about. And in defense of scientists, I repeat that it's (usually) not a problem of lack of interest on the part of the scientist, but the utter inscrutability of the Questions. Science is transformative that way: once you understand how it works (in its limited way), and that it works, that it really works, and provides a practical blade for dividing claims into knowledge or non-knowledge, it affects one's understanding of the world, and one's expectations of it. Once you deal in "the real business of knowledge", the Big Questions become abstract, utterly remote, and alien, even.

It's not that scientists can't be bothered, I think, but rather once they are bothered to consider, then what? There's no where to go for a scientist. There's not even a foothold to begin with on the Big Questions, or any way to know if you are going up the mountain, or down, or if there is any mountain there at all in the first place.

-TS

[Otter]

I take your point, and agree, but note that it's hard to even process your improved analogy: FGWBWs are much easier to get a handle on than "cosmic designer", aren't they.

Yeah, I hear that and appreciate it.

But I was mainly thinking of it from the point of view of evangelicalism with scientific pretensions: a young earth, a global flood, a Tower of Babel. And the guilt-by-association that falls on other sorts of Christians who do not offer up such theories but are understandably reluctant to tar themselves with the brush of the name of Christian.

So I wasn't really writing from the perspective of the nature of the claim so much as the history of the claimant: fundamentalism often comes believing it has evidence, and offers it up (to borrow a phrasing of Wodehouse) like some assiduous hound that will persist in laying a dead rat on the drawing-room carpet though repeatedly advised by word and gesture that market for same is sluggish or even non-existent. Science, having evaluated the proffered evidence and found that it's so far distant from proving evangelical claims, is actually entitled to a certain amount of prejudgement: the more evangelicals come waving evidence, the more of our time is about to be wasted. It's just what the history says, and because of the nature of the discipline, this exercise must be gone through ad nauseam.

But you're quite right that even FGWBW's would exist in the world science can address, not in a world of pure inference from the world that exists.

If we address the nature of the claims themselves, well, yeah...FGWBW's have a huge advantage. Great point.