Empiricism – eyebeleave

Yes, you guessed it – another Sunday, another rant against the “Faith and Reason” column of the “Our Faith on Sunday” newsletter.¹ This time the topic being butchered is the relationship between science and faith – a topic close to my heart, brain and mind.

To make matters worse, the column actually starts with an encouraging statement (“Could this be the first one that’s not utterly muddled?,” I ask myself while reading the opening lines.):

“[R]eason and faith can never truly be in opposition[, and] neither can science and religion[, since] the truths they seek are, once discovered, perfectly reconcilable.”

But then the column’s unidentified author returns to form and veers off into the morasses of confusion:

“[I]t cannot be too often repeated that the truths each seeks are in different orders of knowledge.”

Actually, it ought never to be repeated again! What a heretically dualist worldview lurks behind this sentence! As a Christian I believe in one Truth – God. The Truth that expresses the workings of the universe as much as it does the inner life of the Trinity. All truth, regardless of its object, is a manifestation of the Truth and, as such, is of equal standing. To suggest that truths pertaining to events accessible via the scientific method, reason, faith or religion are of different natures or orders is to place one’s world view alongside Gnostic dualism – a world view that divorces nature from God, joy from charity, beauty from experience and truth from reason.

“It is altogether outside the scope of natural science to enquire into the origin of the universe, because its origin is super-natural.”

This is neither self-evident (why couldn’t the universe have existed ab æterno?) nor does it follow from the scientific method’s principles and constraints (empirical data being pursuable, repeatability being a meaningful goal and evidence-theory consistency being seekable). Science is perfectly capable of enquiring into the origins of the universe and I would like to argue that it’s findings enrich me as a Christian in spelling out the workings of the existence that I believe God created. By this I don’t mean to suggest that science has fully explained the origins of the universe (what happened before the big bang, or even during the Planck epoch at its very beginning? where did the laws governing the quantum states of matter and the expansion following the initial singularity come from?), or even that I believe that it will. To go from there to asserting that “it is altogether outside the scope of natural science to enquire into the origin of the universe” is a fallacious leap and one that I categorically decline.

“Science treats of natural phenomena, i.e. things that fall under the purview of human sense perception (with or without the aid of scientific instruments). But the origin of the universe is a question about the origin of natural phenomena in general.

Let me pick up here on two misconceptions that bubble under the surface of the above two quotes. First, that somehow science is more dependent on sensory perception than religion is. How is it that I first learned about God, Jesus, the life of the Saints, the teachings of the Church, the love shown to me by my family, friends, strangers? How is it that St. Peter came to be a follower of Jesus or St. Francis develop his love for the poor? Did this take place in some supernatural, a-sensory world of ideas, or was it by sight, hearing and touch that the Gospel first reached me and continues to affect me? To deny the necessity (without saying sufficiency!) of sensory perception for the development of faith is to deny the Bible’s insistence on God seeing “that it was good” throughout the process of creation (cf. Genesis 1:10). Second, the above also suggests a very narrow, naïve view of science – a science that is constrained by sensory perception (albeit aided by “scientific instruments”). To my mind this is at best a mediaeval view, conjuring up images of astronomers looking through telescopes. Contemporary science is certainly reliant on evidence, but to claim that this is only on the basis of human sensory perception with or without the aid of instrumentation is somewhat naïve. What human sensory perception is being aided in the case of measurements of the universe’s background radiation?

“Now it is only in transcending the order of phenomena by human reasoning that we can hope to give a satisfactory answer to the question.”

What is the column’s author referring to here? Theoretical physics? He might as well be (although I don’t think that was their intention). Isn’t it a “transcending of phenomena by human reasoning” that is the bread and butter of theoretical physics? How are M-theory or the initial postulating of the Higgs Boson bound by phenomena? They are open to verification and potential consistency or inconsistency with empirical data, but no one would deny their scientific nature even during the very long stretches of time when no evidence is available either in agreement or contradiction with them.

Not to be just destructive, let me propose my alternative to the above science-religion positioning (while keeping its first sentence) and open myself too to criticism. For the sake of greater specificity, let me attempt to do so from a Christian, rather than a generic religious perspective:

“Reason and faith can never truly be in opposition, and neither can science and religion, since the truths they seek are, once discovered, perfectly reconcilable. Here science seeks to predict the events of the material world by striving for consistency between theory and empirical data. Such theories often start in unstructured, intuitive ways, before being developed with formal rigor and confronted with data gathered using means of measurement that both aid repeatability and extend far beyond what is within the reach of human senses. Christianity supplements the scientific view with the truths revealed in the person of Jesus – the God who became man – and by those revealed to the people of Israel before him. While some of these are extra-empirical, others are not, and their understanding is furthered by the application of the same reason that is also applied to science.”

¹ The previous ones having protested against the abuse of “cf.,” the perversion of philosophy and a plagiaristic ignorance of infinity.

I don’t usually chase popularity, but what I saw after my previous post was published gave me cause for reflection. Of the 94 posts on this blog, “An atheist creed” has certainly had the best first 24 hours, with more than 100 views during that period alone. It was also my most popular post by far, reaching 10 “+1s” within a couple of hours. On Twitter and Google+ too it was received well, which suggested that I had picked a good topic. Not only that, but on Google+ it also lead to a conversation that made me append an update to the original post.

And then three of the original +1s were revoked, still leaving a respectable seven but clearly signaling disagreement with the update’s content. After a day of trying to work out what might have lead to someone changing their mind (and if you are one of the three who did, I’d love to hear from you), I have decided to expand on what I said, with the hope of being more explicit than the update’s 100 or so words allowed.

While the initial post attempted a summary of Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” and arrived at the conclusion that his position is one of unacknowledged belief, for the explicit variant of which he chides those who hold religious ones. At the end of the post I then admitted that, while I respect agnostic positions and hold a Christian one, I fail to see the honesty of atheism. After an enriching exchange on Google+ I then returned to the post and added an update in which I quote one of my atheist friends as saying that their atheism is a belief in there being nothing else out there beyond what we experience. Since this was the first time I have encountered atheism as a creed (my post’s title originally having been intended as a dig at Dawkins), I was surprised and felt like I needed to take a fresh look at it.

I suspect, although I am not sure (and, please, do correct me if I am wrong), that the following may have been the root of the discontent with the post’s update: “the nature of [religious or atheist] belief and [their] relation to evidence and rationality are, to my mind, equivalent.” While the original post was decidedly negative about atheism, the update may have looked like I have softened my stance and like I may even have devalued my own Christian beliefs. Let me therefore be more explicit about these two possible interpretations.

First, everything I have said in the post before the update still stands as is. The atheism presented by Dawkins, and many other militant, aggressive atheists like him, is to my mind rationally feeble and delusional. It claims to be a purely rational, evidence-derived position, while it cannot possibly be. This lack of honesty about the nature of such atheism is fundamentally harmful to those who hold it, since it endows them with an illusory sense of superiority that dramatically (and demonstrably) inhibits their capacity for dialogue.

Why do I claim that their position cannot be evidence derived? For a more detailed answer see this previous post, but in a nutshell it is this: All empirical evidence that I can ever have is in the form of my own experiences and not directly of entities beyond myself. I experience images, sounds, sensations of texture, pressure, temperature, etc. but in all of this I am only conscious of aspects of myself. When I have the experience of seeing an apple, my evidence is not of some external entity – the “apple” as separate from events in my stream of consciousness – but of an image formed in my consciousness. No amount of reference to others, method, measurement or anything else can possibly result in anything other than events that I can with certainty place anywhere other than my own consciousness. This is the nature of experience that has been well understood by philosophers for some centuries now (very clearly by Hume and Locke and to different extents also by many others in preceding centuries).

The only exclusively empirical position is to restrict oneself to making statements only about oneself. Anything else requires belief. A belief in a physical world that causes the experiences we have access to, or even a belief that there is nothing beyond oneself (or some of the more esoteric beliefs typically posited for the sake of exploring the nature of knowledge, like the idea that we are all brains in vats, being fed signals that give rise to the experience we have). A belief that the physical world is all there is or that there is something or someone else beyond it. Beliefs about what it is that lies beyond the physical world. All of these beliefs have the same relationship to empirical evidence – i.e., none! Empirical evidence can contribute to greater or lesser confidence being attributed to one theory or another that explains it, but its scope is only that of the empirical. Evidence cannot point one way or another when it comes to what is beyond it – whether it be nothing or something.

It is with this in mind that I said, and repeat, that an atheist creed has the same empirical and rational status as a religious creed (including my Christian one). The position that is rationally inferior is an atheism that considers itself to be derived from evidence and devoid of the necessity of forming beliefs beyond its scope.

Finally, let me also emphasize that this position is fully compatible with how Christianity understands its own beliefs – as a gift from God (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §153-154):

“Believing is possible only by grace and the interior helps of the Holy Spirit. But it is no less true that believing is an authentically human act. Trusting in God and cleaving to the truths he has revealed are contrary neither to human freedom nor to human reason. Even in human relations it is not contrary to our dignity to believe what other persons tell us […] or to trust their promises […] to share a communion of life with one another.”

My belief in God is empirically and rationally equivalent to another’s belief that there is nothing beyond the physical world and I look forward to learning from my atheist friends what it is like to hold the beliefs they do. Open, honest and charitable dialogue can only be enriching to all who partake in it and I am pleased that I can now count some atheists among those who appreciate it as much as I do.

Tag: Empiricism

Not my “Faith on Sunday”

Rational and evidential equivalence