Author: David Opderbeck

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Justice Law and Policy

Global Warming, Kyoto, and the EU Experience

I’m not a global warming skeptic. That is, I accept the general scientific consensus that there has been anthropogenic global warming over the past century.

I am, however, a skeptic of alarmist projections about the dangers of global warming. The consensus views reflected in the reports produced by the International Panel on Climate Change present a range of scenarios ranging from moderate to severe. No one is anywhere near certain that the “severe” scenarios will obtain. In particular, no one knows what sorts of technologies will develop over the next one hundred or so years to mitigate any negative effects of warming. Nevertheless, because we are supposed to be good stewards of the creation and because the negative effects of global warming are unpredictable, I believe it’s wise to take reasonable measures to reduce the emission of greenhouse gas pollutants.

Even more than my skepticism about alarmist predictions, however, I am skeptical of efforts like the Kyoto treaty to create an international greenhouse gas regulatory regime. The European Union’s effort to implement Kyoto, I think, is informative.

The biggest problem with the EU system is that the supply side is decentralized, which allows individual member states and their constituent industries to game the system. In the EU system, a central authority designates the industrial sectors that will be subject to the trading scheme, but each member state is free to allocate allowances from a national allowance budget to affected industries within their borders. As a result (a) supply doesn’t respond efficiently to demand; and (b) strong local industries can capture the national allocation process. (For a good summary of the EU experience, see this report.

This centralized demand / decentralized supply aspect of the EU system makes it very different than most of the cap and trade programs tried in the U.S. The U.S. experiments have been ones in which the same central authority identifies target industries and allocates the tradeable credits, establishing a more unified and efficient market. My understanding is that, while some of the U.S. experiments have succeeded in reducing target emissions, Phase I of the EU program under Kyoto has seen no net reductions in CO2 emissions.

A full-on implementation of Kyoto would make the EU decentralization problem look like child’s play — unless there were a central authority of sufficient strength to regulate both demand and supply of credits. I think the prospect of ceding national sovereignty to such a central authority is the heart of the issue concerning Kyoto or a Kyoto-like regime. Anyone who wants to propose a global cap and trade program must answer this question of sovereignty. I think it’s awfully difficult to argue that the precautionary principle as applied to the current science on global warming justifies devolving sovereignty to an unelected international body comprised of countries like China, Russia, and France.

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Quote of the Day — Power and Weakness

“We usually want to achieve power and overcome by power; God summons us to overcome by weakness.”

— Craig S. Keener, in the NIV Application Commentary to Revelation, commenting on Rev. 7:1-8.

Categories
Epistemology Science & Technology Theology

Intelligent Design and Positivism

I participate in an email list concerning intelligent design, on which there’s been an interesting discussion about whether ID presupposes a positivist epistemology. I think that it often does.

By “positivism” I mean a philosophical / epistemological position according to which knowledge is authentic only if it is measurable and empirically verifiable — i.e., only if it is derived from the scientific method. See a Wiki here. It seems to me that ID often accepts this assumption by proposing, at least implicitly, that the doctrine of creation is in some sense measurable and emprically verifiable. The presense of specified complex information, for example, is supposed to be a filter through which we can empirically verify the activity of a creator. If not for some concession to positivism, however, why would we even need such an empirical filter?

The Bible says “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19), which I take to mean that all of creation reflects God’s glory. God is revealed in all of creation, apart from any specific scientific test we might propose for deducing his activity in some aspect of creation. Indeed, the pursuit of such a particular scientific test is misguided. The test is simply everything that exists.

I think this is different than the question of evidential apologetics. I would disagree with many opponents of ID who suggest that the creation we observe is as compatible with atheism as it is with theism. I think this stance is correct only if we’re back to presupposing a postivitist epistemology. If we presuppose positivism, then I think its correct that the existence of God can’t be “proven” one way or the other. But if the sense of wonder, longing and awe we feel when we reflect on the creation around us is more than some kind of reductionist biological / evolutionary impulse — if, as C.S. Lewis might put it, our experience of the numinous points to a reality outside our ordinary perception — then the positivistic atheist is merely dulling his senses when he denies the creator. As Romans 1 puts it, “their thinking [becomes] futile and their foolish hearts [are] darkened” concerning the knowledge of God.

Therefore, to a mind not entirely bound by a presupposition against the knowledge of God, the “ordinary” processes of creation seem reducible to physical laws and chance. It is only as grace begins to melt that futility and darkness that the evidences we can provide in support of the faith start to make sense. (Unlike very strict Calvinist presuppositionalists, I believe common grace plays an important role here and that glimpses of the numinous aren’t limited to the elect.) But it seems to me that the sorts of evidences we can provide are not taken from the positivist’s toolbox in the form of particular mathematical filters and proofs. They are rather the witness of all of creation, seen through the spectacles of faith. (For a good essay exploring some of these themes, see Michael Hanby, Reclaiming Creation in a Darwinian World, Theology Today 62(2006): 476-83).

Categories
Academic Spirituality

A Scholar's Prayer

Creator of all things, true source of light and wisdom,
origin of all being,
graciously let a ray of your light penetrate
the darkness of my understanding.
Take from me the double darkness
in which I have been born,
an obscurity of sin and ignorance.
Give me a keen understanding,
a retentive memory, and
the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally.
Grant me the talent of being exact
in my explanations and the ability to express myself
with thoroughness and charm.
Point out the beginning,
direct the progress,
and help in the completion.
I ask this through Christ our Lord.
Amen.

— Thomas Aquinas

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Photo Blog Photography and Music

My Street as Stonehenge


DSC00973

Originally uploaded by dopderbeck1.

This is a picture taken this morning of the sunrise falling between two trees and perfectly aligned with my street. I wonder if the farmer who laid out this street years ago though this day had some astronomical significance? Hmmm…..

Categories
Epistemology Science & Technology

Polanyi on Positivism and the Freedom of Science

Here is Polanyi in his essay “The Nature of Scientific Convictions” on why positivism should not provide the basis for the autonomy of science:

the freedom of science cannot be defended today on the basis of a positivist conception of science, which involves a positivist program for the ordering of society. Totalitarianism is a much truer embodiment of such a program than is the free society; as, indeed, consistent positivism must destroy the free society. A complete causal interpretation of man and human affairs disintegrates all rational grounds for men’s convictions and actions. It leaves you with a picture of human affairs construed in terms of appetites checked only by fear. All you have to explain then in order to understand history, and with it politics, law, science, music, etc., is why at certain moments the appetite of one group gets the upper hand over its rivals. (Reprinted in Scientific Thought and Social Reality, at p. 64.)

Categories
Epistemology Science & Technology

Polanyi on Scientific Materialism

I’ve finally made some time to read Michael Polanyi in more detail. Here is Polanyi on scientific materialism, from the essay “Science and the Modern Crisis” in Scientific Thought and Social Reality (he is speaking here particularly about Marxism):

When our intellect convinces us, backed by the authority of science, that our morality is pointless, and teaches us that we can achieve everything to which morality aspires merely by letting loose our animal forces – then our morality is converted into scientific bestiality. That is the picture of the modern fanatic, the modern party man; aloof, and supremely confident of possessing a superior knowledge of reality; cruel and unscrupulous; merciless torture and death.

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Comments and Registration Policy

My old Through a Glass Darkly site was overrun by comment spam. For that and other reasons, I’ve migrated to this WordPress site. I do not plan to moderate comments, but I do want to take advantage of WordPress’ commenter registration feature. I know this can be a pain, but in the long run, I think it builds a better discussion community. If you wish to leave a comment, I will ask that you register and log in. If you wish, you can leave a brief comment to this entry, which will allow you to complete the relatively painless registration form.

I hope to add some upgrades to this site in coming weeks. One very cool feature of WordPress is the ability to add “Pages” with supplementary content. I invite you to visit the “About” page for information concerning my philosophy for this site, and the “Scholarship” page for information about my legal scholarship. Other pages are coming soon.

Thanks for your readership and support. I look forward to continuing the discussion here at the new TGD.

Categories
Epistemology Science & Technology

Science and Interpretation

Phillip Clayton’s fascinating article The Fall from Objectivity: How Interpretation Entered into the (Scientific) World…And What It Means for Religion on Metanexus discusses the different types of hermeneutics involved in natural science, social science, literary criticism, and religion. Clayton notes that

just as the positivists were declaring empirical verifiability to be the only criterion of meaning, Toulmin, Hanson and Kuhn were already urging the incommensurability of competing paradigms; just as the human genome project was laying bare the very building blocks of the human machine, the 30,000+ genes that alone must code for all inherited human structures and behaviors, leading biologists were already describing the irreducible role of epigenetic factors and top-down causation in regulating genetic expression; and just as sociology and economics were setting undreamed-of standards for quantitative precision in social science, anthropology and the interpretive sciences were already declaring “no exit” from the hermeneutical blocks to objective knowledge of the Other. To the innocent observer, it certainly appears that the project of omni-reduction to scientific explanation collapsed, perhaps permanently, at what should have been its moment of greatest victory.

Yet, Clayton argues, identity theorists have gone too far in reducing all scientific truth claims (indeed all truth claims) to mere interpretation. Clayton observes:

But where the Identity Theorist sees an identity, I see a series of distinct types of human inquiry. Yes, interpretation is ubiquitous; but the role it plays varies. The human subject is always involved, but it’s not always involved in the same way. Here’s the core difference, which I owe to Anthony Giddens: the natural scientist is engaged in a process of interpreting a field of data, of seeing it as a certain way; and she partially constructs the world she sees. But the human scientist – the psychologist, sociologist or anthropologist – is involved not just in this single hermeneutic but in a “double hermeneutic.” In these three “human sciences” at least, both the inquirer and the object of inquiry are interpreting subjects. Here questions of interpretation are inescapable in an even more radical fashion than in the natural sciences, since the subject being interpreted is also imposing her own meaning on the situation.

I’m not sure I fully agree with Clayton’s conclusion, but it’s a fascinating essay.

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About Through a Glass Darkly

Imagine we are a small tribe living in a woodland clearing near the end of the last ice age. The long frozen dark is slowly cracking, melting in bits and puddles, flecks of light playing here and there on crocus tips. We drink from those tiny pools, frigid fresh water that tastes like life. Sometimes we forget the still-dark parts of the wood, the hidden predators, the rumors of other people living in cold, dank caves without fresh water. Sometimes we wander deep into the brambles, chasing after tales of richer lakes hidden in the dark, finding ourselves scratched and snagged.

Most nights we gather near the hearth and tell stories. Our best stories are about the end of winter. The storyteller holds a polished stone, etched with the image of a verdant shore flowing with game into a vast water extending, it seems, forever. We can see ourselves, dimly, reflected in the stone, ghosts with a scene of eternity etched on our hearts. We lack words to capture everything this means to us.

We are like so many other stories from so many other lands.

“‘When Aslan said you could never go back to Narnia, he meant the Narnia you were thinking of. But that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia which has always been there and always will be there: just as our own world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world. You need not mourn over Narnia, Lucy. All of the old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been drawn into the real Narnia through the Door. And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream.'” (from The Last Battle, 1956)

Through a Glass Darkly is about living in the shadow, the copy, the reflection in a polished stone. It is the “already / not yet,” the “Alpha and Omega,” the “was, and is, and is to come.” It is the part of the story we know and the part still to be written. It is the pilgrimage, the journey, the waiting, the hope. It is a small, broken man writing a letter to his friends in an ancient tongue:
βλέπομεν γὰρ ἄρτι δι’ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι τότε δὲ πρόσωπον πρὸς πρόσωπον ἄρτι γινώσκω ἐκ μέρους τότε δὲ ἐπιγνώσομαι καθὼς καὶ ἐπεγνώσθην — “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” 1 Cor. 13:12 (KJV).