Category: Science & Technology

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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.)

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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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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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Science & Technology

From the ASA List: Consenus, Authority, and Global Warming

There has been an interesting discussion lately on the ASA list about global warming. As a preface, I should note that I’m not really a global warming skeptic. Based on the evidence I’ve been able to evaluate, I think global warming is a real problem that is significantly caused by human activity. (I am deeply skeptical, however, of the Kyoto treaty). The ASA list discussion morphed into a general discussion of the authority of consensus in peer reviewed scientific literature. Here, I become a bit more hesitant:

A commenter on the ASA list said: “… who are the final arbiters of controversies in scientific debates? I think we need to educate the public about scientific methodology and the need to rely on the scientific publication process as part of authoritative opinion. Without that, there’s no resolution.”

These are my thoughts:

Perhaps its because of my background that I’m not quite ready to apply the word “authoritative” to the scientific publication process or the general progress of professional science. Early in my legal career, I worked on big product liability litigation — asbestos, DES, Prozac, and breast implants — on behalf of pharma companies and other manufacturers. As a result, I think I have some hands-on experience with how the scientific process works in a politically charged context.

We have recently seen reports of how the peer review and publication process with respect to pharmaceuticals has been influenced by the industry in response to regulatory and product liability concerns. Many of the published studies concerning the safety and efficacy of compounds that become blockbuster drugs are directly funded by the pharma companies, the academic centers that produce the research are heavily funded by industry, and the journal peer reviewers often have ties to the industry. This doesn’t mean the science is all bad, but it does mean that it isn’t beyond criticism or even authoritative simply because it has passed peer review. Indeed, although when I was working on the Prozac cases the literature consistently denied any causal link between SSRI-class antidepressants and suicidal thoughts, in recent years the contrarian position has caught the FDA’s attention, at least as to the use of these drugs in adolescents. The evidence presented in the recent Vioxx cases also demonstrates pretty convincingly how the publication and peer review process and the scientific consensus can be captured by special interests.

This illustrates that, while courts must give heavy weight to scientific consensus, there is always room to challenge the consensus (this is what the controversial Daubert v. Merrill Dow case on the admissibility of expert scientific testimony is all about). At the end of the day, a court’s decision is supposed to be based on evidence and reason, not on any expert’s purported authority. Experts assist the court and the jury, but they do not decide the matter. I think this is exactly as it should be in the courts in a free and democratic society. It is also, I think, as it should be in the political process in a free and democratic society. The “final arbiter,” ultimately, is and must be the people, not any one community, scientific or not.

Of course, with respect to global warming, the big money interests are the contrarians, so perhaps that gives us even more reason to trust the literature in this particular instance. However, I think a general principle of “just trust the literature” ultimately is anti-intellectual and dangerous.

Let me further illustrate this with an example from a field that, at least to me, is far more impenetrable than climate science: theoretical physics. Recently I read Lee Smolin’s interesting book “The Trouble With Physics.” Smolin decries the “consensus” among cosmologists that string theory must be correct. Smolin’s chapters entitled “How Do You Fight Sociology,” “What is Science,” and “How Science Really Works’ are well worth the price of the book. Here is how Smolin describes the sociology of the string theory community:

1. Tremendous self-confidence, leading to a sense of entitlement and of belonging to an elite group of experts.
2. An unusually monolithic community, with a strong sense of consensus, whether driven by the evidence or not, and an unusual univormity of views on open questions. These views seem related to the existence of a hierarchical structure in which the ideas of a few leaders dictate the viewpoint, strategy, and direction of the field.
3. In some cases, a sense of identification with the group, akin to identification with a religious faith or political platform.
4. A strong sense of the boundary between the group and other experts.
5. A disregard for and disinterest in the ideas, opinions, and work of experts who are not part of the group, and a perference for talking only with other members of the community.
6. A tendency to interpret evidence optimistically, to believe exaggerated or incorrect statements of results, and to disregard the possibility that the theory might be wrong. This is coupled with a tendency to believe results are true because they are “widely believed,” even if one has not checked (or even seen) the proof oneself.
7. A lack of appreciation for the extent to which a research program ought to involve risk.

(The Trouble With Physics, at 284.) Does this sound familiar? To some extent, I think each of these points could apply to some people in the environmentalist community (and dare I say it, I think they also can apply in many ways to some people in evolutionary biology).

In the chapter “How Science Really Works,” Smolin makes the following observation about university hiring and peer review:

There are certain features of research universities that discourage change. The first is peer review, the system in which decisions about scientists are made by other scientists. Just like tenure, peer review has benefits that explain why it’s universially believed to be essential for the practice of good science. But there are costs, and we need to be aware of them….. An unintended by-product of peer review is that it can easily become a mechanism for older scientists to enforce direction on younger scientists. This is so obvious that I’m surprised at how rarely it is discussed. The system is set up so that we older scientists can reward those we judge worthy with good careers and punish those we judge unworthy with banishment from the community of science. This might be fine if there were clear standards and a clear methodology to ensure our objectivity, but, at least in the part of the academy where I work, there is neither.

(The Trouble With Physics, at p. 333) (I should be clear that Smolin seems to be speaking of “peer review” primarily in terms of departmental hiring decisons, but I think he intends to cover everything from hiring to what constitutes an acceptable reasearch agenda for publication).

At the conclusion of his book, Smolin says the following: “To put it more bluntly: If you are someone whose first reaction when challenged on your scientific beliefs is ‘What does X think?’ or ‘How can you say that? Everybody knows that …., ‘ then you are in danger of no longer being a scientist.” (The Trouble With Physics, at p. 354).

Smolin certainly has a personal axe to grind, since his research agenda swims against the consensus in his field (he rejects string theory and promotes somthing called quantum loop gravity). But, IMHO, his observations are trenchant, particularly when I factor them into my personal experience with a politically charged scientific consensus that directly impacts public policy.

A final point, given the ASA’s faith perspective: IMHO, it’s dangerous to speak in terms of “authority” when dealing with scientific consensus because we must recognize that the scientific community, like every other human community, is deeply affected by sin. I don’t think this implies an anti-science attidude, or YEC thinking or any such thing. It is simply an appropriately Christian epistemic and social realism. The scientific community is a human community, which means it is not entirely objective and free from distorted interests and misplaced priorities.

So I would say this: yes, we must take seriously the consensus of working scientists in any given field as reflected in the peer reviewed literature. However, we must also retain the rational and political freedom to evaluate consensus claims on the merits, being always mindful that the authority of all human communities, including communities of science, is necessarily limited by social dynamics and sin. Because of this, it’s irresponsible to ignore contrarian views, even if they are not a significant part of the peer reviewed literature. This is particularly true where the science in question is critical to public policy and democratic debate. If the contrarian view is clearly wrong, that should be demonstrable based on the rational strength of the consensus view, without resort to arguments from authority.

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Science & Technology Theology

Information and Design

I’ve been having an interesting conversation in an email forum with some relatively well-known ID advocates. The question under discussion is whether “information” is an ontological category separate from matter. One person suggested that transferring computer data from one hard drive to another shows that information is separate from matter; another mentioned one person telling a story to another. Here are some thoughts I had (for convenience I use the names “Ed” and “Dave” here):

But the information on Ed’s PC does not exist apart from the hard drives on which it is stored. And while it is true that the amount of information was essentially (though probably not perfectly) conserved in the transfer, that’s because it was a relatively small amount of information transferred a relatively short distance over a relatively short period of time into an identical medium. The amount of information would not have been perfectly conserved, for example, if it had been sent over the internet, because the necessary compression technology is lossy to some degree.

The information in Dave’s “story” is a good example of why information cannot be thought of as an ontological category. Stories are always bound by time, language and culture. It is impossible for you to tell me a story that perfectly and losslessly transmits to me all the information you are trying to encode in the story because I am not you. Some information is always lost because of the imprecision of language, the differences in our personal cultural and historical experiences, etc. This lossiness becomes greater as time increases — as our struggles to understand many of the ancient Bible stories about origins bears out.

What happens, then, to the information lost in the telling of the story? Is there any way to extract it from you without loss? Can we calculate the amount of information lost? I don’t think Shannon Entropy really works here, unless you buy into the concept of memetics, which I don’t. If you want to apply Shannon Entropy to cultural transmission, it seems to me you’re buying into an evolutionary view of culture that ultimately contradicts any meaningful Christian perspective.

Further, the “story” example illustrates that true “information” involves transmission, reception, and change. As Gregory Bateson put it, information is “a difference that makes a difference.” The data on Ed’s hard drive really is reducible entirely to matter until it makes some difference — by making his computer work, say, or by issuing in a document that human beings can read and act on. And until Dave tells me the story and it alters how I think, act, etc., the story is nothing but a neural pattern in Dave’s brain. It seems better to me to say that information is not an ontic entity; it is rather a term we use to describe change in ontic entities.

I’ve never understood ID to be primarily based on an essentially Platonic metaphysics of information. If it is, it seems to me that ID has an extraordinarily tough row to hoe. But I also don’t see why this is necessary. We could just as well say that certain patterns of producing change reflect the activity of purposeful, self-aware agents — such as the pattern of the “story” you might tell me, the patterns of the computer programs on Ed’s hard drive — or maybe the patterns of the physical laws, DNA, etc.

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Science & Technology Theology

Intelligent Design, Evolution, and Randomness

An entry on Evolution News and Views criticizing a lecture by Francis Collins caught my eye. I’ve previously offered some of my own criticism of Collins’ new book. However, the ENV criticism, I think, was unfair, and reflects a serious theological problem with some “strong” ID arguments.

On the ENV site, Logan Gage argues that Darwinism is fundamentally incompatible with theism, because Darwinian evolution is “unguided and unplanned”:

If Darwinian evolution–by definition–is “unguided” and “unplanned,” then Collins’s view seems logically incoherent. How can a process be both “guided” and “unguided” (or “planned” and “unplanned”) at the same time? Either evolution is “unguided” as the Darwinists contend, or it is guided in some way—which means that the Darwinian view of evolution must be false.

For the notion that Darwinian evolution is “unguided” and “unplanned,” Logan cites a letter sent to the Kansas State Board of Education by some Nobel laureates, which states that “evolution is “the result of an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.” Logan argues that Collins’ “theistic evolution” position is incompatible with the popular view of Darwinism identified in the Nobel letter.

Logan’s criticism is unfair because, to the extent the Nobel laureates meant “unguided” and “unplanned” in a metaphysical sense, their position is not a scientific view about evolution, nor is it what someone like Collins means by “evolution.”

Whether God guided and planned evolution (if and to the extend evolution happened, a question I’m not addressing here) is a metaphysical question that is not addressed by evolutionary science. When evolutionary science speaks of planning, guidance and randomness, it means that the natural processes involved suggest no statistical correlation with any influences external to those natural processes. Even within that context, evolution is not “random” in the sense that anything at all can and does happen — evolution happens within a framework of deeper natural laws, including the laws of genetics and inheritance. As some evolutionary theorists, such a Simon Conway Morris (a Christian) observe, the operation of these laws can give rise to remarkable regularities, including the convergence of different pathways on a relatively small number of sensory organs and body plans.

I would agree with Logan, then, that if the Nobel laureates were using “unguided” and “unplanned” in a metaphysical sense, they were stepping far beyond the bounds of evolutionary science, and were suggesting something that is utterly incompatible with theism. It isn’t clear to me whether that was the sense intended. It certainly is not the sense in which someone like Francis Collins uses terms like “random” in relation to evolution.

If “random,” “unguided” and “unplanned” with regard to evolution are understood simply to mean “uncorellated with any external causes,” I don’t see how this is inconsistent with a theistic understanding of creation. As I sit here in New York typing this today, it is raining lightly outside. Meteorologists can explain this weather pattern fully in naturalistic terms. It is an “unguided,” “unplanned,” and “random” pattern, in the sense that there is no way to correlate the pattern with any external causes. It is of course an orderly pattern, based on deeper natural laws, which makes it explainable and to some extent predictable. But it can be explained solely through the apparently unguided process of natural laws.

I say “apparently unguided” because, as a Christian, I don’t believe for a moment that this weather pattern is “random” or “unguided” in a metaphysical sense. I believe in a God who is sovereign over all creation, upon whom all creation depends, and in whom all creation is held together. God didn’t merely wind up the processes that led to the rain in New York today and let them go off randomly on their own — He is above and in and through them completely as sovereign creator and sustainer. The fact that I can’t directly perceive or correlate God’s will and action in this regard with the rain I observe doesn’t mean God is elided or elidable.

In fact, this is exactly what I expect within the rich framework of the Christian doctrine of creation. I don’t expect God ordinarily to manifest Himself in miraculous ways that contradict the deep natural laws He established and sustains. Indeed, the very orderliness and normality of the everyday working of creation is one of the principal reasons I can make reliable observations and rational judgments, and is a central expression of God’s wisdom and beauty.

Given that I think and feel this way about the rain in New York, why should I think or feel differently about the natural processes through which living organisms change over time? There is no theological reason to think God should act or manifest Himself differently with respect to living organisms in relation to natural laws than He does with respect to processes such as the weather. In fact, there are very good reasons to suspect He would not make such a distinction — the reasons of orderliness and beauty mentioned above.

Does this mean I settle the issue in favor of theistic evolution? No. There are, I think, hermeneutical questions about how to understand the language in Genesis 1 and 2 concerning God’s creation of the animals and of human beings. Does the phrase “after their kinds” require separate creation and a fixity of species? Does creation of Adam from the “dust of the earth” and creation of Eve from Adam’s “rib” require a separate, special creation of human beings? These are reasonable questions. There are also, I believe, reasonable questions about whether Darwinism completely succeeds scientifically on its own merits. There is very convincing genetic and fossil evidence, in my opinion, for gradual organismal change over time and the relatedness of different species. The mechanisms posited for such change — such as natural selection and genetic drift — however, often seem like hand waving to me. But I think it’s important to be clear about the issues, and the broad theological issue of God sovereignly directing creation is not one of them.

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Science & Technology Theology

Terry Eagleton Reviews Dawkins

LIterary and cultural studies prof Terry Eagleton savages Richard Dawksins’ new book in this LBR review. A brief sample:

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case?

….

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

Priceless.

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Books and Film Science & Technology

Francis Collins and Design

I recently read Francis Collins’ new book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief in God. There is much to admire in this book, but also much that is frustrating. In this post, I’ll focus on just one aspect of the book: how Collins handles cosmological and biological design arguments.

It’s difficult to understand the distinction Collins makes between cosmological/moral and biological design argments. On the one hand, he says the appearance of fine tuning, the emergence of mind and reason in humans, and the human moral sense are not explainable only by naturalistic causes, and support belief in a creator-God. On the other hand, he says that arguments from the appearance in design in biology are merely worthless God-of-the-gaps arguments.

I can’t see the principled distinction here. In fact, the argument from human mind, reason and the moral sense is a type of biological gap argument.

I suppose the cosmological/moral arguments can be seen as teleological. The point is not so much that there are gaps in our understanding of how naturalistic processes alone could result in the finely-tuned cosmological constant or in the emergence of human mind and morality, but that, even if we were to understand all those naturalistic processes completely, the extraordinarily low probability of how they played out suggests an intelligent purpose beyond mere chance. But the same could be said of biological design arguments such as the argument from irreducible complexity. And even the probabilistic-teleological argument itself is a sort of gap argument — we can’t conceive of how something of such a low probability could have occurred in nature, so we fill in our inability to grasp that happenstance with God.

I also don’t understand Collins’ criticism of some ID / design / OEC arguments on the basis that they present an inept designer who was forced to repeatedly intervene in the creation. The same can be said of any TE view that retains any concept of God as a sovereign creator. If God sovereignly superintended ordinary evolution, then he repeatedly and constantly “intervened” (and still “intervenes”) in the creation, making myriad trial-and-error adjustments, arguably at great cost in terms of “wasted” organisms.

The answer to this criticism of TE, of course, is that God is perfectly good, wise and knowing as well as perfectly sovereign, that his direction of evolution was fully in accordance with His goodness, wisdom, foreknowledge, and that it accomplished exactly the purposes He intended, even if we as humans don’t always fully understand them. But that same answer applies to Collins’ criticism of the “meddling” ID God. There’s no reason to assume God was “fixing” some kind of “mistake” if He intervened in the creation apart from the working of natural laws. His intevention is equally consistent with a perfectly good, wise, previously known and established plan by a sovereign creator-God. (Likewise, the same criticism and answer applies to criticisms of the Atonement — why did God have to “fix” human sin by becoming incarnate and dying on a cross?) (The other answer to this criticism is open theism, which Collins doesn’t seem to espouse. But again, that would equally be an answer in the case of an ID / OEC paradigm).

So what am I missing?

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Books and Film Science & Technology Theology

Book Review — David Snoke, A Biblical Case for an Old Earth

In this book, David Snoke, a professor of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh, presents a case for a “day-age” view of Genesis 1. Snoke’s twin goals are to establish that the “day-age” view is a valid alternative for Christians who hold to Biblical inerrancy and to argue for a concordist understanding of the Genesis texts and modern science. He succeeds admirably at the first goal, but is less persuasive concerning the second.

The book is organized into nine chapters and includes an appendix with a “literal” translation of Genesis 1-12. The first two chapters identify Snoke’s underlying assumptions and recite the scientific evidence for an old earth. Snoke does an excellent job of explaining why and when extra-Biblical evidence can be used to interpret the Bible, and provides a calm, concise summary of the physical evidence against the young earth view. These chapters are particularly useful and admirable because they avoid the argumentative tone that so often creeps into this sort of discussion.

After laying this groundwork, Snoke responds to two key objections against the old earth view: the problem of death before the fall and the relationship between the creation week and the Sabbath. His insights concerning animal death before the fall are particularly helpful. In particular, he suggests that the wild, untamed aspects of creation, including things such as carnivorous animals, may have served before the Fall as a reminder to Adam and Eve of God’s power, and as a sort of warning about life outside the protected confines of Eden. Just as Aslan in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books is not a “tame Lion,” he notes, these aspects of creation that don’t seem “nice” to us remind us that God is also a “dangerous” God.

After presenting his Biblical case for an old earth, Snoke turns to the case for a concordist view of science and scripture. He defines “science” as “nothing but a way to organize and analyze the things of the world around us,” and concludes that since the Bible also makes observations about the physical world, there should be areas of overlap where “things in the Bible are open to scientific investigation.”

Many readers will take issue with this definition of “science,” as well as with the expectation that the Biblical text is presented in an objective, narrative form that can be correlated with modern scientific propositions. Many readers also will question why Snoke discounts Darwinian evolution based on an a priori reading of the creation story concerning Adam and Eve, while remaining willing to consider alternative interpretations of related texts that superficially seem to suggest a recent creation. Nevertheless, on the question of the age of the earth, this is a fair and well-balanced book that deserves a wide reading, particularly in the evangelical community.

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Science & Technology

Free Will and the Brain

In an earlier discussion with Ahab, we got into the question whether morality is determined by how the brain evolved. Ahab essentially was making the materialist argument that what we as human beings are is reducible to our physical structure and the operation of our physiology according to established physical laws. In the materialist’s view, we are simply “wet computers” that operate according to very complicated, but theoretically discernible, programming. There is no room, then, for free will, and notions such as “morality” are antiquated ways of describing what are really in essence physical processes. Stephen Barr’s excellent book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith provides an strong critique of this view from a scientific perspective.

Continue reading “Free Will and the Brain”