Jerry Coyne put up a post on his website the other day raking Stanley Fish (of the New York Times) over the coals for his shabby piece of work on quoting chapter and verse: “Citing Chapter and Verse: Which Scripture is the Right One?” However, Jerry has been putting up posts so quickly that this one is in danger of being forgotten, and since I wanted to speak about Stanley Fish as well, I thought it wise to remind you of Jerry’s contribution to the demolition of The Opinionator, as Fish is rather grandiosely styled. It’s better to have good opinions, if you’re going to use that as a byline!
Anyway, to get down to business. Fish is trying to establish an equivalence between references to sacred texts like the Bible or the Qu’ran and references to scientific literature by those who have not taken the trouble, or are not competent, to verify the claims being made. (He may in fact be trying to do more than that, but that’s enough to go on, and I don’t want to attribute to him claims that he wouldn’t want to make.) His point of departure is to take Dawkins’ casual, and deliberately confrontational use of the conventional saying about giving chapter and verse for a claim being made — which is often done in religious or theological contexts. Jesus said so — here — therefore … Here is Dawkins saying it.
(Notice, by the way, since I will raise it later, where the element of trust or faith comes in.) Now, what Dawkins is saying here is that by referring to peer-reviewed literature, there is some assurance that what is being claimed is true. Obviously, this is not a knock-down argument, for the research may actually have been falsified, and the chain of reviewers could have been implicated in a coverup of the falsification, or, like Marc Hauser’s research assistants, although suspecting scientific malfeasance, may have been reluctant to stretch their necks out in such a way as to ruin their chances of a scientific career. So, not everything written in scientific papers and books is guaranteed to be true. It may be wrong. In fact, a survey of articles in medical journals turns up many which are simply mistaken. In some cases it may turn out that an entire theory is wrong, and in that case the evidence needs to be revisited, and new explanations provided. This happened, for example, in the case of Lamarck’s theory of evolution by the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which was shown to be mistaken. In fact, Dawkins has told a story about a scientist whom he greatly admired, approaching someone who had just provided a disproof of what that scientist had believed, saying, “I’ve been wrong these many years. Thank you for showing me where I had gone wrong.” That is the spirit of true science, where chapter and verse are not enough, and only evidence will do.
But, of course, this is just where Stanley Fish goes wrong, because the scientist, or the person who presents scientific findings in order to justify his opinion about how things are in the world, can always go behind the written text to the experimental or empirical confirmation of the claims made within the text, and this is something that cannot be done in the case of sacred texts. For the purposes of theology, the sacred text is the final word. What it says in the text is, by definition, held to be true, and there is no way to get behind the text to something else.
And notice, this is not just, as Jerry says, that “because we can’t justify the method of scientific inquiry by a priori logic, it is no more valid than methods of religious inquiry.” Nor was it ever (as this suggests) really an act of faith, as Fish claims, that reality could be understood by scientific enquiry. Jerry says:
Yes, it was originally an act of faith to assume that there was an external reality that could be comprehended by naturalistic processes, but it is no longer an act of faith: it is an act of confidence.
I don’t think that’s the way it was. It wasn’t an act of faith at all. It was an hypothesis. Thales, the earliest of the ancient Greek natural philosophers, who believed that the world was composed of water, didn’t make an act of faith. It was an hypothesis for which he attempted to provide reasons. He was wrong, of course, but that doesn’t make his theory into an act of faith. And that’s where Stanley Fish goes completely awry. He thinks both scientists and religious believers need to make an act of faith, but what was different about Thales metaphysical belief that the world was composed of water, and the religious belief that the world was created by divine fiat, is that Thales could have provided evidence (reasons) for accepting his theory, and he would have been prepared to accept evidence to the contrary. But the religious believer, whose beliefs are based on sacred text is locked into the confines of the text. If he wants to believe something else, he has to give a plausible case, within the text itself, for understanding the text differently.
Now, that’s a vital distinction between belief in revelation and belief in empirical theory and theory confirmation. There is no “act of faith” involved at any stage. Thales didn’t say that he had faith that the world was made of water; he thought it was made of water. And that’s the difference between revelation and discovery. And it wasn’t long before other Greek philosophers offered different theories about the basic stuff that lay beneath the world as it appears to us, the kind of stuff that could explain the why of the appearance. Religious proof-texting is a very different process. It’s true, of course, that the Greek philosophers couldn’t prove their theories. They didn’t have the equipment necessary for investigating the basic structure of things, though at least some of them had an inkling of this — Democritus, for instance, who thought that the universe was composed of atoms too small to be seen. This wasn’t an act of faith on his part. It was a reasonable conclusion based on the project of early physics: to determine the composition of the stuff which underlay everything and explained the diversity of the things that we see.
But Stanley Fish gets it all backwards and upside down. Here’s what he says:
We still cite chapter and verse — we still operate on trust — but the scripture has changed (at least in this country) and is now identified with the most up-to-date research conducted by credentialed and secular investigators.
This is nonsense. We don’t operate on trust at all. There is, of course, the level at which those who only know scientific conclusions by report need to be able to trust the sources of information, need to trust that the science has been done correctly, and is peer-reviewed correctly. But that’s not the level that Fish is talking about. He’s speaking, as Jerry does too, of the “act of faith” necessary to set off on the scientific project, but that, as I shall now claim, is established by the regularity and order of the world and our experience of it. If there weren’t sufficient regularity in the way things worked we wouldn’t be here. That’s why science actually working, as Stephen Hawking has said it does – ”Science will win, because it works” — is so important, because we are already familiar with the regularity, and that is what science sets out to explain. No faith is necessary, as Thales discovered, because it is what is right there that needs to be explained, not at a metaphysical, but at a physical level.
And at this level – at the coal face of science – we don’t need to make an act of faith, or operate on trust, because we can see, by their repetition, that things occur and recur in regular patterns. The question of what underlies those observed patterns is what interests us, and this is what science sets out to discover, and it all began with that basic theoretical question asked by Thales. What is it about the universe that enables it to act in regularly recurring ways? And this was not an act of faith, but a theoretical project. To bring science and faith together in the way that he does, Fish simply misunderstands the foundations of science. The difference between science and faith is brought out very clearly by Susan Haack, in her book, Defending Science — Within Reason, where she points out that for religion, according to Adolf Grünbaum, “it apparently doesn’t matter at all how the world is.” (284, my italics) But it is with how the world is that science is concerned in the first place. Science wants to know how the world is; it wants to know the why of the how. Religion, on the other hand, only asks the why question, regardless of the how, and thinks that that is a Big Question. But the why question, without the how, is irrelevant, because it isn’t an answer; it doesn’t tell us how it works; and that is what science is all about. As Haack says, speaking of the philosophical theologian Richard Swinburne: “Swinburne would offer the same explanation whatever laws scientists discovered.” (loc. cit.) And that’s the difference between an act of faith and an hypothesis. And that, by the way, is why God was never an explanation. It was just another way of saying that things are as they are. And it is precisely because he isn’t citing chapter and verse, that Dawkins’ claim that he can, makes sense.
None of this, of course, is meant to minimise the extent of the cultural bifurcation that has taken place between science and religion over the last two hundred years or so. Some people, like Alister McGrath and John Haught, want to claim that there is no conflict here, but even they must know that that is true only for reasonably “sophisticated” believers like them. There is a whole world out there in which the cultural divide between religion and science is a gulf simply too vast to be bridged, and which, to a very large extent, as Susan Jacoby says, though not entirely, parallels levels of education attained. How to bridge that gap is a social and political problem and a problem with education (and the rights of children, in my view), but it is not, as such, one that can be settled by argument, so I won’t even try. What is important is to see that, as Dawkins points out, there is a vast difference between citing scripture and giving chapter and verse for scientific confirmation, that the first engages matters of trust and faith, and that the latter raises questions about matters of fact and experience. There is no scientific scripture, and faith is not the evidence of things not seen.
Interesting arguments and perspectives as always, Eric.
And while I generally agree with much of it, I’m not sure that there isn’t some small justification for arguing that science still has an element of faith to it. As Norbert Wiener – one of the progenitors of the science of cybernetics – put it:
I have said that science is impossible without faith. By this I do not mean that the faith on which science depends is religious in nature or involves the acceptance of any of the dogmas of the ordinary religious creeds, yet without faith that nature is subject to law there can be no science. No amount of demonstration can ever prove that nature is subject to law. [The Human Use of Human Beings; pg 193]
Really somewhat problematic, I think, to argue, as many do, that all of the concomitants of faith in the religious are necessarily always those found in other spheres – which tends to discolour or obscure the common features, notably this definition:
1. Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.
For one example, even Einstein tended to reject quantum mechanics largely through an act of faith because he refused to believe that “God plays dice with the universe” – something that Wiener also seems sympathetic to, although I don’t know enough about him or his philosophy or quantum mechanics itself to say for sure.
And for another, the noted biologist Richard Lewontin argued that far too many in the science field – he particularly criticized Dawkins, Sagan, Lewis Thomas and E.O. Wilson – rely on so many “just-so” stories when the logic and the assumptions are little more than “acts of faith” unsupported by any solid evidence.
But the facts of the matter, apparently, are that precepts and principles such as “nature is subject to law” and even “causality” and various other assumptions are more than just a little problematic, yet which we accept largely on faith even though we have absolutely no idea what the ramifications might be if those principles did not hold in all cases. Ran across an interesting poem – The Prelude III – by Wordsworth the other day which, while justifying some use of the salt shaker, still seems apropos:
Science appears but what in truth she is,
Not as our glory and our absolute boast,
But as a succedaneum, and a prop
To our infirmity….
…. that false secondary power
By which we multiply distinctions, then
Deem that our puny boundaries are things
That we perceive, and not that we have made.
I’ve said several times that I’m perfectly happy to give up my faith in science the day it stops working.
Or to quote the T-shirt: “Science WORKS, bitches!”
Steersman, I get the point, and I accept it as far as it goes, but I simply don’t see why we should suppose that there is any kind of a “leap” of faith, or an appeal to faith of any kind, here. It’s certainly true that induction does not provide logical proof, so there is always a measure of play between observing the co-occurrence of different phenomena and the claim of causal relationship between them. But this doesn’t mean that we act on faith when we begin notice that some regularities are dependable and possibly causally connected. Our lives would be impossible without making assumptions like that, not leaps of faith, but finding out that certain things work and some just don’t.
If you like, it’s more like a change of paradigm, from thinking of the world as in some sense conscious like us, and therefore agential, and ordered by purposes, as most polytheistic systems seem to assume, to thinking of the world as a network of causal relationships, connexions which are completely non-agential and impersonal. But it’s not faith. It’s like a new Gestalt, something like the shifting of the famous duck-rabbit in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. But the underlying regularity was already observed, and did not take an act of faith. So it is not faith that things behave in a lawlike manner, but finding out that that is how it works.
Certainly, insofar as these repeatedly perceived connexions are the silted strata of experience, and often insecure, and thus are, as we discover them, things that in some sense we have made, it would be wrong to suppose that they are not also, in some sense, things that we also perceive. There is no conflict between the two as Wordsworth suggests.
Of course, the process of discovery then becomes, once we are more precisely aware of more and more complex patterns and regularities, a creative endeavour to discover ever more refined theories, hypotheses that need to be confirmed by experience, and some of these may be hostages to fortune, but that still does not make them acts of faith, because until they are confirmed they are not in any sense acts of cognition at all.
When Darwin was thinking of the different species of animals and plants, and their relationship with enivronment and the distribution of environments, he had a theory, an hypothesis, about how all these different features were related, and then he industriously sought evidence, picking it up wherever he could find it, writing to hundreds of people, asking them for specimens, observations, experiences with breeding animals, plants, etc. etc. No act of faith, because he already knew there were regularities, but he thought he had a much more complex explanation for the regularities that he and everyone else could simply observe, and he set out to find out if his hypothesis would hold up under the stress of examination. But there is nothing here that is faith-like, and suggesting that there is supposes that there is a closer relationship between what religious believers are doing and what scientists are doing, and there just isn’t. Reading the first volume of Browne’s Darwin biography made this very clear. There were regularities, that is, lawlike behaviour, and the question to be asked and answered was why? And while that was a complex, a very complex question, there is nothing at all here that looks a bit like faith. Faith is confidence that something is so in the absence of any perceived regularities at all, and it is, as religious believers will point out, much more like a relationship of personal trust than it is like the claim that something is true. It is also a belief that something is true, but this comes of trusting the bearer of the message; that’s why religions talk about revelation and scientists talk about experimentation.
Reblogged this on Secularity and commented:
faith
I think confirmation theory makes science the best true explanation for the natural world. We all have confirmation theory intuitively built in, it’s called learning. Obviously this learning mechanism can easily go wrong, hence superstition and religion.
And I am in the same position at Richard Dawkins when it comes to climate change. It has become a political issue, and there are strong believers either side, and I find myself unable to strongly agree or strongly disagree because of the complexity of climate science. Rather than put my faith or trust in scientific consensus, I hold true to my scepticism and withhold judgement until I feel I understand the evidence is sufficient for one side or the other.
Lets hope, Egbert, that by the time you`ve come to a conclusion we are not all toast.
There is a lot that we can say about these issues to try to clarify things. Our popular speech about faith, evidence, belief, claims, etc… is a hopeless muddle. That’s one of the things that can make epistemology and philosophy of science helpful. I’d really have to dig into this before I have anything to say, but I don’t think Jerry Coyne’s attitude is very illuminating.
That said, Stanley Fish is simply one of the worst intellectuals out there. His enormous ego gives him the confidence to comment on many topics that he simply doesn’t understand. Why is anyone wasting time responding to his poorly-argued scribblings?
Egbert (#5),
Obviously this learning mechanism can easily go wrong, hence superstition and religion.
Yes, quite agree. Although I think that that “going wrong” is, quite unfortunately, not exclusive just to “superstition and religion”, that it manifests itself in virtually all fields including science.
In which regard, you might be interested in reading Massimo Pigliucci’s Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk. But, for example, he argues that some of history and “theories” such as communism and psychology, and even sociobiology, qualify as pseudoscience since they, and their assertions, are not easily, if at all, falsifiable or disprovable. And likewise, to some extent anyway, with ideas like string theory where the “falsifiablility” is more a consequence of the limitations of our measuring systems. But unfortunately, many in those fields are rather dogmatic about their commitment – almost religious one might argue – to those “theories”; you might also find Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics an interesting exposition of that in the context of string theory.
As for why that might be the case, it certainly seems that, as Daniel Lafave suggested, epistemology and the philosophy of science have some interesting perspectives on the problem. Although I also tend to think that, reading between the lines of Eric’s earlier reference to the “famous duck-rabbit in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations”, that the neurochemistry of thought also plays a significant role. And apropos of which it seems that various visual, auditory and cognitive illusions, particularly the Necker Cube and the Spinning Dancer ones in the first category, suggest that frequently what we see and think we see and what we think is the case in any given situation is not necessarily always the case.
Egbert (#6),
Rather than put my faith or trust in scientific consensus, I hold true to my skepticism and withhold judgement until I feel I understand the evidence is sufficient for one side or the other.
A sensible argument as consensus is, quite frequently, simply wrong; something that many people seem to forget in spite of the somewhat common “meme” of “conventional wisdom”. But, as you suggested, considering the complexity of the evidence, it is not always easy to acquire enough evidence and understanding to make a rational, much less the correct, choice. Seems we are obliged at some point to base our decisions and course of action on some degree of faith – so to speak.
However, FWIW, my impression is that we are rapidly approaching a serious tipping point and that the relatively small increases in average world temperatures are masking or obscuring the massive increases in the CO2 levels, and their consequences, that have taken place over the last 100 years. While I’m not entirely sure of the accuracy of this model, it seems that the case of some ice cubes in a bowl of water in a low temperature oven is, more or less, directly analogous. As long as there is some air circulation and as long as the ice isn’t entirely melted, the water temperature remains close to 0 degrees Centigrade and the oven temperature is not substantially higher. But once the ice is gone the physics suggests that water and air temperatures will rise rather precipitously, at least in comparison to the previous changes.
Eric, quite often the “why” question is really a “how” question in disguise. When your child asks “Why is the sky blue?” that question can be translated as “How is the sky blue?”. And one then goes on to explain light absorption by dust, the wavelength of light and the other physical phenomenon that tells one “how” the sky is blue. I know the phrase has a peculiar sound to the ear, but perhaps philosophers should try it.
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