LAURELS & LIMITS OF SCIENCE

Like it or not, science is the hotbed, the arbiter, and the repository of knowledge.  We need to bear this mind as we ponder the roots of our belief. Many of the new atheists Dan Seeger discusses in his essay (Friends Journal January 2010) are scientists with convictions rooted in a profound incoherence shared by many Friends.  They believe that any reasonable belief must be something known, and hence proven or provable.  No human being behaves in a manner that accords with this conviction.  That is why it is incoherent.  Many, including prominent Quaker scientists such as Arthur Eddington and Kenneth Boulding, share this conviction.  That is why it is worth examining.

     Notice that the conviction itself has no scientific value.  The belief that untestable beliefs are unreasonable is not itself knowledge, since the words “reasonable” and “unreasonable” express value judgments rather than measurements or observations.  Consider an alternative conviction – namely, that it is entirely reasonable to have a robust sense of reality even though unable to define or explain reality.  The convictions are incompatible, but neither is provable.  The scientistic conviction is profoundly skeptical while the alternative conviction is profoundly pragmatic.  Their contrast becomes clearer (though not decidable) through a closer look at divergent conceptions of doubt and experience.

     To test your conception of doubt, think of what you take to be the opposite of doubt. The opposite of doubt is certainty, but does that mean actual doubt or possible doubt?  A scientifically minded person will point out (it is quite true) that many things that are not doubted could be doubted, and should be.  From the scientist’s point of view, a reasonable person will conceive of doubt and certainty as involving the presence or absence of possible doubt rather than of actual doubt.  Descartes made this conception of doubt  the lynch-pin of his philosophy when he pretended (he admitted pretending) to regard everything that he could doubt as really doubtful.  He further held that only what survived this examination could be known or be reasonable.  This conception of doubt and reason has remained deeply embedded in Western thought right up to the present day.  It is central to the power of science and to  the thinking of scientistic atheists, as well as to skepticism in general.

    In the 1920's Arthur Eddington used this conception to shake confidence in ordinary pre-scientific thinking.  He contended, on the basis of atomic physics, that what appears to be a solid oak plank is “really” mostly empty space.  The moral is that Friends should be careful not to take for granted common ordinary notions – surely a useful caution.  But oak planks really are solid, aren’t they?  You do not doubt that, do you?

     One of the most-quoted remarks of George Fox is, “And this I knew experimentally,” (Journal, ed. Nickalls, p. 11).  Since scientists also know things experimentally, Kenneth Boulding and others have urged Friends to consider George Fox as thinking scientifically.  But science and mysticism are experimental in different ways, and emphasis on experience is insufficient reason for conceiving Quakerism as a sort of science of the soul,

     It is true that science relies on experiments, but it is equally true that experience, such as the “openings” of George Fox, plays only a very minor role in science.  Specifically, such experience can suggest hypotheses but never provide proof.  Experiments in science are designed to test hypotheses, and the great experiments in the history of science have often refuted hypotheses rather than confirmed them.  The famous Michelson-Morley experiment, for example, refuted the widely held hypothesis that light travels through a “luminferous ether.”  What a scientist knows is known through testing hypotheses experimentally.  What Fox knew experimentally he knew by direct acquaintance rather than by testing hypotheses.  In both cases we speak of something being known experimentally, but the word “experimentally” has radically different meanings in the two cases, as does the word “know.” 

     We all now know about the interaction of tectonic plates that causes earthquakes, mountains, and continental drift.  No one had any idea about these things 100 years ago, but today no informed person doubts them.  This advance is a remarkable scientific achievement.  Using the language of Fox, we can say that the hypothesis was a great “opening” to the geologist who first put it forward.  But it is not through any such experience that you or I, or even that brilliant geologist, knows about tectonic plates.  None of us has had direct experience with tectonic plates.  Scientific knowledge comes through a certain sort of marshaling of hypothesis and evidence, never through direct experience.

     Fox’s openings and scientific knowledge are utterly different phenomena.  They may both settle doubts, but in entirely different ways.

     It is because of its reliance on objective evidence that scientific knowledge has a coercive dimension.  Continental drift may be an hypothesis, but those who doubt it need either education or psychiatric help.  Society is not gentle about knowledge.  Whatever is knowledge for anyone is knowledge for everyone, and we are not left free to doubt it.  Fox described his experience but does not suppose that it is the same as someone else’s.  Nor does his experience come with a definition or analysis of the experienced reality.  Fox’s experience, in contrast to scientific knowledge, influences us persuasively rather than coercively.  It works on us through example rather than proof. 

     Science provides analysis and explanation of realities we are acquainted with.  Science presupposes acquaintance with reality but does not provide it.  Acquaintance with reality does not count as knowledge in the scientific sense.  When George Fox speaks of “knowing” experimentally, he is not claiming knowledge in the scientific sense, any more than he is speaking of experimental testing. 

     Philosophical and theological doctrines generally follow a scientific model, that of analysis and explanation.  They are not pure descriptions, and are not meant to be.  George Fox sometimes writes in a philosophical mode, but the powerful part of his writing describes personal encounters with spiritual reality.

     What I draw from these considerations are the following (philosophical) ideas:

1.  Being acquainted with reality is something entirely different from understanding it.

2.  By being acquainted with reality, I can come to respect it without understanding it.  This is perfectly reasonable, although unscientific.

3.  It is possible to believe in matter without being a materialist, to believe in mind (ideas) without being an idealist, and to believe in spiritual reality without being a spiritualist.  Such beliefs are perfectly reasonable, although unscientific.  So is it not equally reasonable to praise or thank God, or pray to God, without having to embrace theism, or even deism?

4.  Scientific thinking is the arbiter neither for “openings” nor for reasonableness.

5.  The hypothetical element in scientific thinking infuses possible doubt into such thinking.  Knowledge and certainty not only belong to different categories, as Wittgenstein said, but are incompatible.  Anything known lies within the domain of inquiry, and thus cannot be certain; anything certain lies outside the domain of inquiry, and hence cannot be known (verified).  There is no “certain knowledge.” 

6.  Acquaintance with reality is not hypothetical, and excludes actual doubt.

7.  Neither theists nor atheists, nor even agnostics, can exclude doubt, since they reason in the scientific mode – nor (for the same reason) can they reasonably impugn acquaintance with reality.

Newton Garver

January 19, 2010