Some of those who read my piece of last week about the origin of life reacted badly when I pointed out that for all their pretenses of disembodied objectivity, no science is free from the ingredient of the intelligent design of the scientist. No experiment would have happened without the intelligent design of the scientist, no measurement* happens without the application of intelligence, not to mention that mathematics, itself, is, as well, the product of human intelligence**. The pretense that science does not depend on intelligent design is commonly done because we are supposed to pretend that science is some kind of dispassionate and absolutely objective understanding of the universe. And there is no more obvious fact than that our understanding is an intrinsically human activity.
The fact is, the idea that some kind of objectivity that could enter into human minds to reside there, independent of human mitigation, possibly exists is an absurd superstition. Yet it is exactly that superstition that pervades atheism and scientism. And it is ironic that it is in addressing the insertion of the concept of intelligent design within science that atheists wishing to criticize that insertion expose their own superstitious thinking about science. And there is no area of science that is as intrinsically well adapted to make that point as evolutionary science and the separate theory of the origin of life.
I am sure some will object to me pointing out that evolution is not directly relevant to the origin of life but evolution requires a change in organisms in a line of life. The truth is that nothing had evolved until there was at least one generation born of that organism and quite possibly, not for many generations after that. Its origin is not an aspect of evolution. We have no warrant to assume that evolution or even genetics is relevant to an understanding of the earliest generations of life on Earth. We don't know if what we know of inheritance, through an extremely complex chemistry in physically complex organisms, is relevant to inheritance in the earliest generations. Evidence is what would provide that warrant and there is no evidence available. Which, itself, is far too hard for many with an professional or ideological - and so emotional - attachment to Darwinism to accept. They've been angrily fulminating, in the name of science, against that hard truth of science for the better part of a decade, whenever I've stated it. And there have been none more angry about that than those who pretend to value, above all, the production of evidence as the gold standard of all thought.
To expand on that point, if there is one thing that is certain about a well conducted experiment it is that it is the willful act of one or more intelligent people. The scientist has an idea about an observed phenomenon in nature or even just an idea about the universe and tries to devise human activity to reproduce the same phenomenon by artificial means under controlled conditions, excluding as many extraneous factors as possible that will prevent the experiment from demonstrating the phenomenon so the scientist can measure the factors that produced it. In order to do that the material components that go into the experiment should be controlled, the temperature and time that those work under, controlled as well and any other physical variables possible also controlled for. The scientist wants to do the experiment or wants to get something out out it, to reach a conclusion by means which will stand up to review and, in many cases, be repeatable under similar or slightly varied circumstances. And the mere desire to publish something and not be overturned on review or replication or just the savage criticism of colleagues and professional rivals is an enormous component in the process. Sometimes the desire to uphold the ideological school of science that dominates in their field would seem to be the real goal.
I could go on with what the scientist wants to do in conducting an experiment or making an observation in nature and the ingenuity with which they plan on and carry out the fulfillment of that desire but my point is already served in that it is a hard fact of science that the scientists mind is an intrinsic part of what science does, it is an indispensable part of the entire process of science. Nothing would happen without it.
In his introduction to his greatly neglected book, "Computer Power And Human Reason", the eminent computer scientist and rather impressive thinker Joseph Weizenbaum was radically honest about just what scientists and mathematicians do. Among other things he said:
The man in the street surely believes such scientific facts to be well-established, as well-proven, as his own existence. His certitude is an illusion. Nor is the scientist himself immune to the same illusion. In his praxis he must, after all, suspend disbelief in order to do or think anything at all.
I will break into this quotation to point out several things that are both obvious and remarkable in those statements. The first is that this eminent scientist, an atheist working in one of the fields in which one of the central dogmas is that thinking is reducible to a mathematical description of a physical phenomenon, admits that what the scientist is doing is based on belief, just as much as the kind of belief the lay public mistakes for certainty. And he identifies what the scientist does in the course of his work is to pretend that he's not doing what the layman does, willfully deludes himself so he can believe in the reality of what he is doing.
He is rather like a theatergoer, who, in order to participate in and understand what is happening on the stage, must for a time pretend to himself that he is witnessing real events. The scientist must believe his working hypothesis, together with its vast underlying structure of theories and assumptions, even if only for the sake of the argument. Often the "argument" extends over his entire lifetime. Gradually he becomes what he at first merely pretended to be: a true believer.
Unlike many of the phenomena studied at the dawn of science, in physics, astronomy and chemistry, the phenomenon of evolution is not apparent in casual human observation, which can only happen in the period of one human lifetime and one human act of observation in a single human being. It happened and happens over such a long period and so subtly that no human being sees it with the naked eye within one period of observation. Even the evidence for evolution on the shortest of time scales, within microorganisms or things such as the adaptation of viruses exposed to immunology or humanly introduced chemicals requires intentional observation over generations. It's not a natural phenomenon like looking at a rock falling or ever throwing something up in the air to observe its falling.
Weizenbaum's comparison of the observation of science being like what a theatergoer does, is obviously spot on in the study of evolution because evolution inevitably deals with narrative descriptions of what happens to organisms, their birth, their lives in relation to their environment and in interaction with other organisms, their reproductive success and the tragedies intrinsic to physical life, the death of the original organisms, their parents and their offspring, in the narrative of evolutionary science, the eventual extinction of entire families and species.
And, since evolutionary science deals, inevitably, with many, many generations, going back well into the billions of years into the past, most of that action deals with individuals who cannot be observed and which left no direct evidence of what happened during their lives and what their physical bodies could tell us about that. It is inevitable that evolutionary science depends, entirely on HUMAN imagination, hopefully informed by at least some evidence and entirely, from the start of it, dependent on the intelligent imagination of human beings.
In the topic I dealt with, the imagined, theoretical organism at the beginning of life which Charles Darwin imagined as a non-human Adam, the seed of his tree of life is not the product of observation but of assumptions and ideological preferences. He imagined one because, he being a British man of science, an enthusiastic volunteer in an intellectual tradition increasingly wedded to materialist philosophy among colleagues who believed that objective truth lay in a reduction of phenomena to their inert physical chemistry and physics, set down in numbers and rationalized in equations that balanced. Their chosen oracle of the truth, science, and their ideological materialism led them to such an extreme scientism that to admit what they were doing was part of a tacitly agreed to prohibition. I know of no other group of scientists who chose to so fundamentally ignore the real nature of what they were doing, imposing their preferred philosophical and ideological preferences to come up with a story line while pretending that they weren't an intrinsic part of that process.***
That first being, which I also believe is likely the beginning of life on Earth, is entirely the product of human imagination, in this case, entirely uninformed by evidence from nature but the product of cultural assumptions. I share those assumptions but I'm unwilling to suspend my disbelief to pretend that the organism any human being can imagine it to have been is a real organism. It isn't, I would assert it can't be and it certainly can't be known if it is real.
The probability of any human being correctly sifting out the truth from among the known AND THE UNKNOWN range of possible forms it could have taken, based on the biology of organisms hundreds of millions and billions of years after it would have had to have lived. is so small a likelihood as to outstrip the number of scientists pretending to do that by an enormous factor. Their likelihood of success is not much higher than that of whoever wrote the description of the beginning of life in Genesis, it's only that the time scale on which that is known to have happened and the interrelation of species, today, has ruled out a literal understanding of that narrative. And the number and range of assertions made about that original organism seems to grow instead of to coalesce into an orthodox consensus.
I am entirely confident that if we were able to know the conditions under which life first arose and how it arose, in the one and only way it, in fact, did, that all of the contemporary narratives of that would fall as certainly and dramatically as any traditional, non-scientific interpretation of Genesis.
Let me repeat that it is a hard fact of nature that LIFE BEGAN IN THE ONE AND ONLY WAY THAT IT DID ARISE. That one way is the only one that really matters if the truth is what you are after, all other seeming possibilities and probabilities are, in fact not the way it happened.
I think their scientific assertions about that will certainly tell us more about those who make up those beings than they will about the original organism. In a lot of cases, I think they will tell us no more than which school the scientists work at and who their graduate faculty were.
* While science shows on cable or broadcast TV, popular science books and magazine articles or blog posts pretending to deal with science often carries the tacit audience pleasing message "No Math Required" mathematics is the language of science. Measurement is largely what science is all about.
** I'm sure the clever among the atheists could apply their intelligence to that statement and bring up the evidence of simple arithmetic in those wonderful animals trained to use human speech. Well, they're using human speech they were trained to use by humans. What that could tell us about the minds of animals who haven't been trained by humans to use human speech is unknowable because their training by humans in a human activity is an unavoidable contamination of the process. It is also an unavoidable component of any human observation of animals in the wild who, we hope, are unaware of us observing them, their knowledge of our observation possibly altering how they would behave if they were not so aware. The only evidence we have is that measurement is, intrinsically, a human invention. There is no setting aside that fact in order to achieve an inhuman objectivity, a view of the universe which is separable from the mind of the human observers. This is especially the case when the human observers are following humanly invented procedures, methods and customary conventions in doing something like science or making decisions in the legal system. We're in it, old bean, for any pretense we like to make that we aren't, no matter how we really, really wish to pretend that we aren't possibly mucking it up with our unintended pollutions.
*** In all of the early, atheist, enthusiasts for The Origin of Species, their ideological intentions became obvious, immediately. Galton, Huxley and, most explicitly of all, Haeckel, immediately used the Darwinian narrative to promote a materialistic and atheistic view of, not only science, but of all of life. It was most telling to me when I read that other famous atheist, Karl Marx, who originally was enthusiastic in telling his colleague Engles, that, despite its being contained in the vulgar British mode of thought, Darwin's theory was useful to their own dialectical materialism. Only later did he revise his enthusiasm and note that what Darwin had done was impose a narrative imbued with the British class system on all of nature, and at variance with Darwin's own model of thought, Malthusian economics. In studying the history of one of the earliest proposed applications of natural selection, eugenics, I have come to the conclusion that his natural selection comprises an ideological pollution of science, one which is so ingrained in the culture of biological science that it is impossible for almost all biologists to even understand it is there. In that they recapitulate what Weizenbaum noted is inevitable in science, they mistake their intentional acts and willful beliefs for truth, pretending that their narrative is far more than it can be.
It isn't possible to divorce science from non-scientific factors. To pretend that is to insist on something that isn't possible. The intelligent design of science, itself, isn't, itself, scientific, at best it is a philosophical attempt at MINIMIZING extraneous or obscuring factors so we might at least get it somewhat right about some things. Of course, the worst of those include human wishful thinking and denial of what we don't want to be true. But the wishful thought that we can have anything but a human view of things and a denial of the fact that, we being humans, we can't have that particular wish object, is just as much a hindrance to finding reliable truth as any other obscuring factors.
Reasoning well is hard.
ReplyDeleteReasoning to a conclusion you prefer is easy. Easier still if you ignore the complexity of the subject and dismiss it as beneath your contempt and a waste of your time. Then you don't have to reason at all.
And even the most reasonable people make errors in their reasoning; because, as I said, reasoning is hard.
One of the key factors in reasoning and judgment is reduction. The more you reduce a matter, the less likely you are to fully understand it. Holmes' judgment in the Carrie Buck case, for example, reduced Ms. Buck to a non-entity. We consider such reasoning unjust now because it failed to take account of the value of compassion and wisdom (to use terms Weizenbaum would employ). Most justice in the courts is done by balancing the law (which can be harsh) against the human story (which can be "messy," as my Pastoral Care professor in seminary always reminded us).
I quite agree with the quoted material, especially the analogy to the theater: we suspend skepticism at some point in order to move forward (read Descartes' Discourse on the Method if you don't think he faced this very issue head on). If we don't to that, we simply can't function. But by doing that, we accept as true things which may not be true, and we multiply error.
On the other hand, reason is not the sum and total of human existence; back to compassion and wisdom. Without those, we are no longer human; we are less than human. Even the animals show compassion (unless our observation of it distorts their actions; but more likely our determination that animals are "beasts" and so incapable of compassion (a product of "soul" for much of Western history; now simply an "emotion" which only humans have, for unexplained reasons) is the distortion.
So much depends on where we start our reasoning; which is always in philosophy or theology; and usually a bit of both. That, to me, is the irreducible condition we can only examine and partially know; and to deny it is the worst sin against reason we can commit.
Faith is not a sin against reason, either; as Weizenbaum says, without accepting on trust some postulates, we are incapable of knowing anything. But unless we return to examine those postulates from time to time, even the postulate that reason is a useful tool.....