Dialogue and Critical Realism: Part A
This continues my series on “method” in theology and science. Here I begin to discuss “critical realism.” It will take a few more posts, but I’ll suggest that while critical realism is a helpful framework, it also entails limitations as a result of separating science “and” theology.
Many proponents of “dialogue” models between science and religion identify themselves as “critical realists,” and this may be the dominant paradigm in the contemporary “religion and science” literature.[1] A critical realist approach recognizes that all human knowing is mediated through human thought and language forms, including both scientific and theological knowing – and thus it is “critical.”[2] Nevertheless, critical realists assert that there is a reality extrinsic to human thought and language that is capable of sustained investigation, and that human beings are capable of making progress towards fuller understanding of that extrinsic reality.[3] The theological realities that theologians attempt to investigate and the natural realities that scientists attempt to investigate must each be approached with tools appropriate to their respective domains.[4] As Alister McGrath argues, “[b]oth the scientific and religious communities can be thought of as attempting to wrestle with the ambiguities of experience, and offering what are accepted as the ‘best possible explanations’ for what is observed.”[5]
McGrath develops his model of critical realism in science and theology in significant part from the philosophical contributions of Roy Bhaskar and Michael Polanyi.[6] For critical realists in the tradition of Bhaskar, society is both a preexisting given and a product of human activity.[7] Individuals do not create society, but they do continually reproduce and transform society.[8] Society is neither a reified structure that exists apart from human activity nor an entirely voluntary creation of individuals.[9] Bhaskar likens this “transformational model of social activity” to a sculptor who creates something out of the materials and tools available to her.[10] The result is that society emerges from, but is not reducible to, the choices of individuals.[11] Society is “a complex totality subject to change both in its components and their interrelations.”[12]
Critical realists recognize that knowledge has both social and physical dimensions.[13] There is a reality external to human perception, language, and cognition.[14] Human perception, language, and cognition, however, limit our direct epistemic access to reality.[15] Human perception of reality is a “transitive” dimension because it is subject to change based on human language, history, and culture.[16] Reality itself, however, is “intransitive.”[17] According to Roy Bhaskar, reality is stratified and can be conceived as three layered: empirical (observable by human), actual (existing in time and space), and real (“transfactual and enduring more than our perception of it”).[18]
Bhaskar thus emphasized the social aspects of human knowing—of information—without reducing all of reality to a human construction. An important aspect of Bhaskar’s social theory of knowledge is his rejection of “methodological individualism”—the notion that societies are reducible to individuals.[19] A “social atomism” in which the analysis of societies can be reduced to the preferences of individuals will never adequately explain social action.[20] But neither is society merely the result of collective pressures on individuals, or a simple dialectic between these two poles.[21] Rather, society has a dual character: social groups provide the ground through which individuals reproduce and sometimes transform society.[22] A level of reality can emerge from a more basic level without being reducible to the more basic level.[23]
Like Bhaskar, Michael Polanyi sought to mitigate the destructive tendencies of positivism without destroying the normativity of science. One of Polanyi’s primary concerns was the danger of authoritarian control over science extant in the then communist East. [24] Polanyi was keen to demonstrate that science is an inherently social enterprise just like any other human project, and that as a social enterprise science must be subject to democratic control.[25] Also like Bhaskar, Polanyi recognized that reality is stratified.[26] Each level of reality operates under the ‘marginal control’ of higher levels, but the higher levels are not reducible to the lower.[27]
Polanyi recognized that positivism fails because it relies on some unverifiable foundations. As Polanyi noted, “It is indeed logically impossible for the human mind to divest itself of all uncritically acquired foundations. For our minds cannot unfold at all except by embracing a definite idiom of beliefs, which will determine the scope of our entire subsequent fiducial development.”[28] The notion of positivism itself, then, depends on an idiomatic structure that is neither verifiable nor self-evident.
Polanyi also emphasized the communal nature of scientific practice and the “tacit” knowledge involved in such communal information transfers. As he noted, “[t]he transmission of beliefs in society is mostly not by precept, but by example . . . [t]he whole practice of research and verification is transmitted by example and its standards are upheld by a continuous interplay with criticism within the scientific community.”[29] Thus, scientific knowledge is a set of socially constructed analogical models that are developed through practices acquired and implemented in unique social networks.
Finally, Polanyi realized that the social networks through which scientific practices are transferred, like all social networks, incorporate elements of social control. One of the principal means of control over scientific information networks is peer review. Polanyi observed that scientific journal referees “are the chief Influentials, the unofficial governors of the scientific community. By their advice they can either delay or accelerate the growth of a new line of research.”[30] Nevertheless, within this social matrix, science can make genuine progress in understanding.
Similarly, theology, critical realists argue, seeks to interpret experienced reality within the context of a traditioned community.[31] In this respect, many critical realists are sympathetic to Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of the role of community and tradition in the shaping of philosophical inquiry.[32] For Christians, of course, the central experienced reality that requires theological interpretation is the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ, and the interpretive community is the Church.[33] Christian theology and doctrine develop as the Christian community reflects on this central experience. Just as in the natural sciences, massive paradigm shifts in the understanding of theology and doctrine should be rare, but some degree of revision must always remain a possibility because the reality that lies behind the experience is only ever partially understood.
[1] See, e.g., McGrath, Science & Religion, at pp. 78-79, 82-82. McGrath identifies Thomas Torrance, Ian Barbour, Arthur Peacocke, and John Polkinghorne, as well as himself, as critical realists. Id., at p. 82-83.
[2] See id.
[3] Id.
[4] See 2 Alister McGrath, A Scientific Theology: Reality at 226 (2002).
[5] Alister McGrath, The Foundations of Dialogue in Science & Religion (Blackwell 1988).
[6] 2 Alister McGrath, A Scientific Theology: Reality at 226 (2002).
[7] See generally Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (Routledge 3d ed. 1998) (1979).
[8] Id. at 36.
[9] Id. at 39 (stating that “society must be regarded as an ensemble of structures, practices and conventions which individuals reproduce or transform, but which would not exist unless they did so.”).
[10] Id. at 37.
[11] Id. at 37–44.
[12] Id. at 41. In many respects, critical realism’s transformational model of society sounds like the New Chicago School’s model of law and norms. The difference is that for cyberlaw scholars in the New Chicago School tradition, the architectural “code” that makes up online spaces is entirely socially constructed—whether code-infrastructure is “open” or “closed” is entirely contingent on the individuals who participate in the digital commons. See Part II, supra. In contrast, in the critical realist view, “culture,” “code” and “infrastructure” are not entirely the voluntary creations of autonomous individuals. Bhakar’s treatment of language and grammar is intriguing here. The rules of grammar, Bhaskar observes, are not infinitely malleable—they impose real, given limits on our speech. Bhaskar, supra note 65 at 36. The rules of grammar, however, do not determine what we say; meaning is not reducible to the rules of grammar. Id.
[13] Roy Bhaskar, a germinal critical realist philosopher, states that
Any adequate philosophy of science must find a way of grappling with this central paradox of science: that men in their social activity produce knowledge which is a social product much like any other, which is no more independent of its production and the men who produce it than motor cars, armchairs or books, which has its own craftsmen, technicians, publicists, standards and skills and which is no less subject to change than any other commodity. This is one side of ‘knowledge’. The other is that knowledge is ‘of’ things which are not produced by men at all: the specific gravity of mercury, the process of electrolysis, the mechanism of light propagation. None of these ‘objects of knowledge’ depend on human activity. If men ceased to exist sound would continue to travel and heavy bodies fall to the earth in exactly the same way, though ex hypothesi there would be no-one to know it.
Bhaskar, at 21.
[14] See Critical Realism: Essential Readings ix–xiii (Margaret Archer, et al. eds., 1998) (noting that “critical realism claims to be able to combine and reconcile ontological realism, epistemological relativism, and judgmental rationality.”) (emphasis in original).
[15] Bhaskar, at 21.
[16] Id.
[17] Id.
[18] Id. at 21–62.
[19] Id.
[20] Id.
[21] Id.
[22] Id.
[23] Id. at 113 (stating that “the operations of the higher level cannot be accounted for solely by the laws governing the lower-order level in which we might say the higher-order level is ‘rooted’ and from which we might say it was ‘emergent.’”).
[24] Polanyi explains this concern at the beginning of one of his key works, The Tacit Dimension. Describing the denial of independent science under communism, Polanyi says “I was struck by the fact that this denial of the very existence of independent scientific thought came from a socialist theory which derived its tremendous persuasive power from its claim to scientific certainty. The scientific outlook appeared to have produced a mechanical conception of man and history in which there was no place for science itself.” Id. at 3. Polanyi’s views, of course, were not entirely unique; they fit nicely into a constellation of contemporary philosophers of science who deconstructed the positivism that emerged following the collapse of Baconian science, including figures such as Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and to some extent Paul Feyerabend. See, e.g., Kuhn; Imre Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (Cambridge Univ. Press 1978); Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (Verso 3d ed. 1993) (1975).
[25] Polanyi, at p. 3.
[26] Polanyi.
[27] Id. For a discussion of how Polanyi’s thought might relate to Bhaskar’s on this point, see 2 Alister McGrath, A Scientific Theology: Reality at 226 (2002). Interestingly, the stratification of reality can also be observed in Thomas Aquinas’ approach to law. See William S. Brewbaker II, Thomas Aquinas and the Metaphysics of Law, 58 Ala. L. Rev. 575, 600–02 (2007). It is noted that “Thomas assumes that a single scientific method is insufficient to enable investigation of all types of reality, and this assumption affects his account of law.” Id. at 600.
[28] Michael Polanyi, Scientific Thought and Social Reality 76 (Fred Schwartz ed., International University Press 1974).
[29] Id. at 61.
[30] Id. at 20. Polanyi stated that:
The referees advising scientific journals may also encourage those lines of research which they consider to be particularly promising, while discouraging other lines of which they have a low opinion. The dominant powers in this respect are, however, exercised by referees advising on scientific appointments, on the allocation of special subsidies, and on the award of distinctions. Advice on these points, which often involve major issues of the policy of science, is usually asked from and tendered by a small number of senior scientists who are universally recognized as being the most eminent in a particular branch. They are the chief Influentials, the unofficial governors of the scientific community. By their advice they can either delay or accelerate the growth of a new line of research.
Id. Cf. Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Happens Next (Houghton Mifflin Company 2006).
[31] McGrath, The Foundations of Science & Religion, at pp. 160-64.
[32] See id., citing Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Duckworth 1988).
[33] See T.F. Torrance, Reality & Evangelical Theology: The Realism of Christian Revelation (InterVarsity Press 1999), at pp. 84-120.