JTS: Intro to Phil
Session 4: Briefing Note

GEM 03:10:29

“Modernity”: Knowledge, Faith and Skepticism

SECTION CONTENTS

Introduction

1. The Discontents of Modernity

2. The Rise of Modernity

3. The Epistemological Clash

Appendix: Evolutionary Cosmological Timeline

For Discussion or Reflection

References & Readings

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INTRODUCTION: We now live in what is by general consensus called the “Post-modern” era. This naturally invites the question as to why modernity has been unsatisfactory. In turn, this surfaces issues relating to the dominance of epistemology in Western thinking over the past several centuries, and the associated questions of faith, reason and radical doubt; i.e. skepticism. So in this session and the next, we will take a look at the rise and fall of the modernist paradigm of progress and scientifically based enlightenment.  In so doing, we will also highlight the prospects for a renewed programme of Christocentric prophetic intellectual and cultural leadership, such as transformed western culture in the first several centuries of the Christian era, and a gain in the aftermath of the reformation of five centuries ago.  

1.         The Discontents of Modernity

Perhaps, a good place to begin is a recent exchange in one of our local newspapers, which aptly but sadly illustrates how philosophy often underlies popular discourse.

In this case, local media pundit Michael Dingwall has publicly rebuked Rev. Clinton Chisholm, a leading Christian Apologist in the Caribbean[1]:

We both know that what we call “God” is man-made; the reverend gentleman is just having difficulty accepting the fact.  There was history before his God came and there will be plenty of it after man sees the light and discards his God . . . .

[Chisholm] states that the Christian God created man with free will and in exercising this free will he sinned.  I don’t see how he could make such a statement.  How can we be free to make choices, and at the same time be punished for making the one that seems the better of the two?  What kind of freedom is that?  It seems that the original purpose of the Christian God was for mankind to remain forever ignorant, serving him blindly . . . Man may have been created with free will, but he certainly did not have freedom to use that will.[2]

This bold assertion of atheism illustrates the confident pugnacity of the secularist/atheistic vision of the world, which sees the world through the eyes of a materialistic, progressive, evolutionary, Naturalistic “Science” that “explains” everything from hydrogen to humans. Such men therefore often deride the evangelical concept of a Creator-Redeemer God who speaks in the pages of the Bible as a dangerous myth used to support the power agendas of certain “backward,” religiously motivated interest groups.  

However, in light of such an atheistic, evolutionary progressive worldview, “moral values” are at best seen as relative to individuals, communities and cultures; they lack any rationally or morally compelling universal scope. For, if we are free to make choices, we should have the right do that which “seems the better” to us, perhaps after a bit of reflection.  Unfortunately, the deceptive effects of moral blindness, selfishness and out of control passions are too often glided over with a sarcastic remark or two that make it seem that it is those who are concerned about the need for moral restraints who are living in Plato’s Cave!

 Consequently, we can easily see why contemporary society struggles to find a way to consistently justify moral restraints in the face of the ever-present nihilistic/Machiavellian challenge that what counts is not so-called “morals” (much less stewardship of our world and communities under God) but rather power to do as one pleases.  For, we must never ever forget that in the past 100 years, over 100 millions have needlessly died in various attempts to achieve secularist utopias. 

In short, sadly, the mass slaughters of the last century in the name of progress, the ruthless exploitation of the powerless, and the horrifying despoiling of the natural environment emerge as natural outcomes of the modernist, progressivist worldview when it is unrestrained by moral considerations. Thus, we see how post-modernity emerges as thinkers and societies grapple with the discontents and disasters of modernity.

These forces, events and trends clearly call out for a philosophical assessment and an informed response.

2.         The Rise of Modernity and the Skeptical-Scientific Spirit

Now, the roots of the modernist spirit and worldview lie in Rene Descartes’ pessimism about knowledge. For, that C17 thinker struggled with radical doubts in the face of the disintegration of the unities of the medieval world of scholarship -- under the impact of: (1) the renaissance, (2) the age of discoveries, (3) the reformation, (4) the resulting wars over religion and (5) the associated rise of modern science:

It is now some years since I detected how many were the false beliefs that I had from my earliest youth admitted as true, and how doubtful was everything I had since constructed on this basis . . .  [So I] must once for all seriously undertake to rid myself of all the opinions which I formerly accepted, and commence to build anew from the foundations, if I wanted to establish any firm and permanent structures in the sciences . . . . reason already persuades me that I ought no less carefully to withhold my assent from matters which are not entirely certain and indubitable than from those which appear to me to be manifestly false, if I am able to find in each one some reason to doubt, this will suffice to justify my rejecting the whole.[3]

 Thus, notwithstanding the infinite regress of doubts implied by Descartes’ words, we find stated the energizing principle of the radical skepticism that has haunted the world of thought ever since 1640.  For, since most things are not accessible to Mathematical certainty, doubt reigns as the champion by default and faith in the absence of certainty appears to be naïve and/or dubious, at best.

In this skeptical intellectual context, scientific thinking soon became the model for a way forward: a rational, step by step process for describing, explaining, predicting and controlling the natural – and increasingly the human – world.  For, through the sciences and associated technologies, humanity has developed a proven means of building reliably useful – even if not absolutely certain – knowledge of the Laws of Nature.  So, a spirit of optimism reigned (until the twentieth century):

• The scientific vision was that through rational, empirical approaches, our understanding of the world was ever increasing as superstitions and speculations gave way to sciences and technologies that harnessed the forces and materials of nature for the benefits of man.
  
  
• The apparent universality of scientific laws -- they appear to be without exception -- led to the conclusion that anything which broke or claimed to break the lockstep uniformity of nature was doubtful at best.
  
  
• In particular, the notion of a miracle-working, supernatural Creator and Redeemer of a fallen human race appeared to be just so much superstitious nonsense. In response, it was confidently asserted that “we are ascended apes, not fallen angels.”
  

• Specifically, evolutionary mechanisms were deployed to explain how, starting from a “cosmic egg,” the universe has unfolded from hydrogen to humans, and may yet go beyond us. Indeed, that is the ultimate dream of progress. 

• So, cosmic evolution gave rise to the first stars, which on their death gave rise to the heavier elements that are embedded in the planets that formed; leading to chemical evolution and the emergence of self-replicating molecular complexes: life. Genetic mutation and natural selection then led to the biodiversity of our planet, ultimately including humans.

• Once primitive man had evolved, socio-cultural evolutionary forces acting over millennia then led to our current global civilization: from stone- to bronze- to iron- to silicon- based technologies and societies.

• But, in the end, the second law of thermodynamics will prevail: over time the energy in the universe is progressively degraded, and eventually the cosmos will die a “heat death.” In that stasis, there will be no high grade energy to harness for further evolution and the cosmos as we have known it will come to an end. 

3.         The Epistemological clash: doubt, faith, reason and knowledge

Clearly, epistemological issues are central to the critical assessment of the modernist picture of the world. 

First, is the Descartes project feasible?

No. For, as suggested above, it leads to an infinite regress of doubts: “I doubt my existence. But, to doubt is to think, and to think is to exist” implicitly assumes the continuity of an I that can think, remember and perceive veridically. Is that indubitably certain, given the uncertainties of our senses, memory and perceptions[4]?

Obviously not, and so, we see the corrective force of the principle of conservation of beliefs:

It makes good sense to stick with your current body of beliefs --  and to have  confidence that your basic belief forming mechanisms are generally reliable -- unless there are compelling reasons to accept a radical alternative.

Furthermore, Science itself is neither as progressive nor as certain as its more enthusiastic proponents suggest. From the 1880’s to the 1930’s for instance, the classical view of Physics that had been steadily built up since the 1660’s collapsed: a mounting body of empirical evidence contradicted the hitherto well established laws of Physics; under situations of the very small and/or the very fast and/or very large. This led to the rise of Quantum mechanics to explain the strange behaviour of matter and energy at molecular scales and smaller, and of Relativity Theory to explain the behaviour of bodies traveling at about 1/10 the speed of light and faster (as well as the gross structure of the cosmos in light of discoveries about how gravity warps space and time).

As a result, Philosophy of Science has undergone a considerable ferment across the last century[5]:

• In the 1920’s, the Logical Positivists proposed to use Science as the gold standard of knowledge. They proposed that meaningful propositions are either analytic (their truth necessarily follows from their meaning[6]), or synthetic (they require an empirical investigation to be verified; and so assert things to be so about the external world[7]). The verifiability criterion was then used to distinguish such “meaningful” claims from other assertions which are deemed meaningless – such as “God exists and lives in Heaven.”  As Ayer put it: “a sentence will be factually . . . significant to a given person if, and only if, he knows how to [observationally] verify the proposition that it purports to express.”

• However, this claim was immediately challenged, on the grounds that a great many people in fact find that many claims that fail the verifiability test are meaningful; that is, the implied definition of “meaningful” fails the common sense test.  Further investigation also showed it to be self-refuting: it is neither analytic nor subject to empirical test, so it shreds itself. It still occasionally shows up in the work or teaching of those whose epistemology is not current, though.

• In the 1960’s, Thomas Kuhn published his landmark The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he documented that Science tends to progress in two distinct modalities, “normal” science and crises that may lead to revolutions. The core concept is the paradigm, in effect the example set by a great success which reveals a new way of viewing the world and solving its scientific puzzles. But over time, anomalies that resist explanation may build up until a critical mass triggers a crisis in which competing ideas of how to proceed are championed by various factions.

• A revolution results if there is a paradigm shift as a new paradigm triumphs, such as happened in Physics between 1880 and 1930. But, because the ways of viewing the world are incommensurate, there is no common rational framework in which one judges how to make the shift, the required judgement comes from radical perceptual changes at the individual level, and a shift in the balance of power in the scientific community at the discipline level.

• This has led to the rise of a radical relativist movement in philosophy of science, which sometimes reduces science to the politics of the community of scientists. This movement draws strength from the relativist trend in Western culture at large, and reinforces it. (Richard Rorty and Paul Feyerabend are good examples.) Sometimes, when one views the notorious quarrels that have marred the history of science across the centuries, one is tempted to accept this view!

• Another perspective is Karl Popper’s concept of Conjectures and Refutations (Harper and Row, 1963): in effect that at a given time, the state of science is open-ended; with conjectures – theories -- about the real world that have been proposed and are always under test; for one counter-example is enough to overthrow a generalisation. If a theory is such that it is not capable of empirical refutation, it is unscientific. And, a theory that has stood the test so far is not so much verified as probably true as it is as yet unrefuted and possibly true. (But, this does not capture the confidence scientists have that many of the more mature theories really do say something that is at least approximately true: such as the planets orbiting the sun.)

• In some cases, there are multiple paradigms operating at any given time in a science, and one of these may be dominant. Thus, it is possible for scientists to cluster around divergent paradigms, leading to a lack of general consensus. This notoriously happened with Economics and Psychology across much of the 20^th Century. Currently, Evolutionary Biology is racked by a three-way quarrel: (1) the dominant Neo-Darwinians, (2) the Punctuated Equilibria advocates, (3) The small but forceful Intelligent Design movement.

• Others have argued that in fact theories operate at differing levels, and micro theories are held far more loosely than are broad research programmes/traditions; so the concept of revolution should be reserved for dramatic shifts in the latter.  At this macro level, deeply held visions, traditions and values strongly shape how scientists think and work, and so are resistant to change.  When change does come, it is by a radical reorientation of the scientific world-view in that discipline, i.e. a paradigm shift. This perhaps is the best summary of the radical shift in Physics that happened between 1880 and 1930.    

Consequently, the scientific picture of the world is not as certain or unified as we may have been led to believe while doing School Science courses, or even in College.  However, the powerful impacts of science in our world lend scientific claims great credibility, often to the point where “that’s unscientific” is tantamount to the claim that something is irrational.

3.         Faith, Science, Philosophy and Theology

But, notoriously, Theology is not scientific, and its “partner in crime”, morality, is also a matter of what ought to be rather than what is the case. Are these properly suspected of being significantly irrational and/or subjective only, as some suggest?

Philosophical analysis, in light of the recent history of the Philosophy of Science, gives us a way to evaluate such a claim:

• Doubts, uncertainties and disputes naturally attend any human intellectual endeavour, so that there are limits to what can be proven beyond all reasonable dispute, and there are many things that must be addressed through a judgement of what is more or less reasonable or prudent to believe and act on.

• Scientific thinking is clearly based on the logic of explanation/ abduction, and is simply incapable of proof beyond reasonable dispute. For, while our theories, hypotheses and models may explain observed phenomena and may successfully predict further events, the empirical support thereby secured is not demonstrative. Thus, such knowledge claims are provisional and interpretive, owing much to what the community of scientists collectively holds to be plausible in light of their worldviews.

• However, that we may not know perfectly does not imply that we cannot know usefully and even with a high degree of confidence. And so, scientific findings are routinely embedded in technology and in medicine, reflecting our trust in it. In many cases, such as risky but powerful life-saving medical treatments, we trust the findings with our lives.

• As “trust” and “confidence” imply, scientific reasoning also deeply embeds faith. Going further, it is evident that we cannot reason without taking some things as trustworthy without further demonstration, the starting points for our thinking: our basic beliefs. For instance, we are forced to generally trust our ability to accurately perceive the world, and our ability to remember, as well as to communicate and to reason.  Thus, the proper underlying question is not faith vs reason, but which “faith” – better, which worldview – is more reasonable in light of the relevant comparative difficulties.

• All of this is quite familiar in theological contexts: theologians seek to develop reasonable explanations, weigh alternative frameworks and models, and in some cases directly use scientific ands even mathematical tools and techniques that fit in the general rubric of scientific methods.  For instance, consider the Synoptic Problem, which seeks a reasonable explanation for the apparent dependency of Matthew and Luke on Mark, and the further commonalities and divergencies between the two longer Gospels. From this, we see suggestions that there was an early Hebrew proto-Matthew, following Papias’ statement reported by Eusebius. We see the proposal that Mark was consulted as a source by the other evangelists, who also had access to sources Q in common, and M and L separately.[8]

• So, the explicit role that faith plays in the theistic worldview is not that of a suspicious “extra”; it is a reflection of a basic fact of life: we must make forced, momentous choices on assumptions and alternatives that bristle with difficulties.  The issue is to hold a reasonable faith, then, and as we have seen, to reject the theistic positions root and branch may come at a stiff metaphysical price.

• Morality is closely linked, not least because it is the context for one of the arguments that points to God. But also, it is an easily checked fact that across time and cultures, people have an astonishing degree of agreement as touching core moral issues. For instance, as C. S. Lewis and others have pointed out, we quarrel by implicitly appealing to a general sense of fair play, and those who are subjected to such claims do not usually bat them aside as a lion would dismiss the plea of a gazelle; but rather reason within this assumption.

• Thus, we see why the Golden Rule – “do as you would be done by” [cf. Matt 7:12, Lev. 19:15 – 18] – keeps on cropping up in ethical contexts, across time and culture: there are Buddhist phrasings, Confucian versions, Islamic ways to put it, and many other forms. Indeed, Kant proposed a version of it as the keystone categorical imperative: live by the principles that you could recommend to everyone, or equivalently do not use people merely as means to your own ends.

• Extending this, we soon arrive at the principle of sustainable development: development initiatives are sustainable if they help this generation (especially the poor, powerless and voiceless) to ever more adequately meet its current needs, while not compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.  For, what we are doing here is to highlight the importance of treating the powerless as we would wish to be treated, and our posterity, given the impacts of our actions and examples on the community and the environment, local and global.

• Of course, the issue soon arises that sometimes Environmentalists exaggerate or even manipulate our perception of the scientific facts at stake in determining consequences. That is unsurprising, given that it is in the nature of science to have diverse and even contradictory opinions and judgements.

• From this, we come to a derivative of Pascal’s Wager: the precautionary principle. If the consequences of an action are potentially sufficiently damaging to be irreparable, and the scientific and economic evidence and judgements are in rough balance, then policy should err on the side of caution and safety.

In short, philosophical analysis shows that scientific thinking is not privileged in a way that other fields of study are not. In particular, scientific work is prone to disagreements, and even to quarrels among competing paradigms. In general such thinking embeds a necessary open-endedness, and a willingness to trust uncertain hypotheses, leading to a history of minor and dramatic changes as the consensus of the relevant community evolves. This is quite similar to the way other fields of study work, including theology and ethics; and so the methods used have a significant degree of overlap.

CONCLUSIONS: It is evident that the modernist tendency to denigrate theistic perspectives and associated moral concerns has had a devastating impact over the past 100 years, when attempts have been made to institute progress-oriented utopias.  On examination of the closely linked concept that scientific methods are privileged, it turns out that this is not so, and that the moral concerns characteristically raised by theists are directly relevant to making and living by wise choices in the community and wider world.  Major ethical principles, such as the Golden Rule/ Categorical Imperative; while  originating in theological contexts, have a general rationality that is objective and widely relevant.  In the case of Science, integrity in performing and reporting research and the findings of that research are vital, if the field is to be worthy of the trust of the public and policy makers alike. In public policy, the implications of the Golden Rule directly speak into the soundness across time of policy alternatives, as well as the impact of examples set by decision-makers and implementing agencies. Finally, a version of Pascal’s Wager emerges as a powerful tool for guiding decision makers in making prudent choices.  

APPENDIX:
Evolutionary Cosmology Timeline for the Universe

The following timeline is commonly taught in Colleges, High Schools and even Primary School, as well as on the media, as a scientifically established framework for our past.

Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Universe and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_timeline for typical sources. BYA, MYA and TYA stand for: billions, millions and thousands of years ago, respectively. With a refreshing honesty, Wikipedia notes of the first of these timelines, that:

Since human observations cover a very short time interval and relatively short distance, making detailed predictions about the distant future or distant past is difficult. Humans can only observe a fraction of the total universe, and the observations cover a very short time interval. It is possible that our current understanding of physics contains errors that are only noticable on a very large time scale or very large astronomical scale. See also:

• Creation of the Universe for more on creation scenarios other than the Big Bang
• End of the Universe for theories about possible final fates for the Universe

Points to ponder . . .

1. On balance, has science served to bring progress or harm to the world?

2. Has the project of scientific enlightenment under an evolutionary materialist view of the world allowed moral concerns to play an adequate role in life and community?

3. Is radical doubt an appropriate paradigm for progress and enlightenment?

4.  In light of the above, how should we respond to the needs and trends in the Caribbean?

References & Readings

Morris, Tom. Philosophy for Dummies. NY: Hungry Minds, 1999.

Stanford online Enc. of Phil: http://plato.stanford.edu/