Clarifying the degree...

After reading my own post from yesterday, it occurred to me that while I essentially said what I meant, I may have unwittingly undermined the degree to which I am challenging science. There is one reading of that post which focuses on the example of retarded innovation as the key to what I am on about, as if perhaps I am just bemoaning my own inability to keep pace with technology or perhaps that I have a bit of the Luddite or Ruskinite romanticism in me.

While I challenge those characterizations of what I said (as I continue to stand by the challenge to innovation as a good in and of itself), here I only want to make it clear that such was not the extent of what I am on about. While the process of experiential learning that is the foundation of our notions of the "scientific method" are unlikely to change, the characterization of those experiences are likely to be greatly altered in a theological setting. I can only offer one example from the history of science off the top of my head. The early debates over what exactly Newton was expounding in his theory of gravitation are instructive, I think, to see where historically the church failed to recognize the seriousness of the task at hand. Where Newton himself (devoutly and scholarly religious albeit non-trinitarian) recognized the threat of heresy, via materialism, in the precise interpretation of the gravitational force, the church failed to grasp the danger. I would be careful here with diction since it is not my view that the church is at such a point on the defensive. Rather, it was the failure to appropriate such learning into the church's initiation into truth, or rather it was the church's small-minded rejection of the notion that such things might teach us further about how to be faithful, that led to the defensive. The failure was, I think, the result of the church's desire to remain powerful by remaining within the framework that it had already mastered (sociopolitically), over and above its humility in remaining faithful.

In fact, the issue at hand was whether gravity was to be understood as a passive property of all matter (which is more or less the view we have inherited to this day) or whether it was to be understood as a dynamic act of God. Many will see the latter as a sort of deus ex machina because that's simply not the sort of hypothesis scientists make, nevermind that Newton favored this view and indeed feared the waywardness the former would engender. Newton foresaw scientific materialism and consciously rejected it. Well, you say, Newton was after all just the proto-modern scientist. He laid the foundation but was quite all there. We've since advanced beyond his superstition. Perhaps. Or maybe there is simply a rival description and rationality for what happens "physically". It seems to me that it is not greater leap to credit God with action at a distance than it is to impute a universal property to all matter that somehow links it with other matter (I am, of course, ignoring modern understandings, and misunderstandings, of gravitational force because philosophically they are the heirs of this early materialism. It is precisely the pursuit of a particular type of question, that of how this latter materialist understanding "works" in nature that we have our modern theory). But surely now, you say, I am engaging in quackery.

Maybe, but I am not in the least convinced. Where Newton saw no rational departure in contemplating the explanation of gravity as property versus action (and settling on the latter), I think we must be careful to consider that the materialism inherent in the rationale of modern science is not intrinsic to the subject matter, but is perhaps rather a property of the kinds of questions and answers that apprentices to science are taught to ask and offer.

This is all just to make the clarification that my critique of science is not fundamentally just about the ethical practice of science or the ethical use of its results. Instead I am fundamentally calling into question the material presumption of scientific enquiry. The notion that scientific practice has an ethical dimension is a wrongheaded way to approach it. A fundamental objection exists in my approach which is that science does not by virtue of method have access to knowledge. Rather, science (as we know it) is devoted to effectiveness. This devotion leads to a dualism between knowledge and ethics, what is and what ought.

An alternative I think is to reject the notion of knowledge being a collection of cognitive "facts", and rather that science's aim must be to refine our participation in creation. As such, scientific knowledge cannot be something attained by the individual because it must presuppose participation in some community life. Newton recognized that care must be taken in conceptualizing each advance in experiential knowledge lest it be misunderstood and lead us astray. The advance that Newton was thinking of was the generality of his gravitational formula. Remember, though, that it was a simple formula that yielded overwhelmingly correct predictions that then led to this debate over the understanding if its term: gravity.

So then, I think we have to admit the possibility that we may have misunderstood the data before our eyes. It is not just a question of pursuing the ethics of science but about pursuing a faithful understanding of why creation behaves as it does.

As a delightful piece of creative writing about creation, consider this quote from Chesterton:

"Because children have abounding vitality, because they
are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated
and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up
person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people
are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is
strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says
every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening,
"Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that
makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately,
but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the
eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old,
and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may
not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE."
-GK Chesterton