RE: paleonet cautions on biblical interpretation, from faith and skepticism

[Bill Chaisson/Deirdre Cunningham <chaisson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: paleonet cautions on biblical interpretation, from fai

Prof. Smolka must have had a great deal of fun reconciling 21st century secular culture with that of Christian fundamentalists and frankly I agreed with nearly every word of it.  Except about the Bible being liberal; read Leviticus again, please.

As I understanding Prof. Smolka's reasoning, he feels that if Christian fundamentalists would simply embrace the philosophical perspective of the late Sir Karl Popper, then we could all live quite happily together.  Well, we always have hope, I guess.

Last night I happened to read a Richard Bradford Trust lecture (delivered Mar 4, 1977) by Peter Medawar.  I quote:

In Popper's view the generative act in scientific discovery or in the solution of a problem is the formulation of an hypothesis, i.e., an imaginative conjecture about what the truth of the matter might be.  An hypothesis is a sort of draft law or guess about what the world-or some particularly interesting part of it-may be like ....

In outcome science is not a collection of facts or of unquestionable generalisations, but a logically connected network of hypotheses which represent our current opinion about what the real world is like.

Most of the day-to-day business of science consists not of hunting for facts as an inductivist might suppose, but of testing hypotheses, that is, seeing if they stand up to the test of real life .... Acts undertaken to test a hypothesis are referred to as 'experiments'.

What is being tested in an experiment is the logical implications of the hypothesis, i.e. the logical consequences of accepting a hypothesis.  A well designed and technically successful experiment will yield results of two different kinds: the experimental results may square with the hypothesis, or they may be inconsistent with it.

... No matter how often the hypothesis is confirmed-no matter how many apples fall downwards instead of upwards-the hypothesis embodying the Newtonian gravitational scheme cannot be said to have been proven to be true.  Any hypothesis is still sub judice and may conceivably be supplanted by a different hypothesis later on.*

Since religious fundamentalists cannot conceive of some information as hypothetical, let alone something that could be rejected on some grounds, there is essentially no conversation to be had between strict Popperians and the rigidly religious.  Unless it proceeds from the following.

Medawar again:

Suppose we put to ourselves the general question of what distinguishes statements which belong to the world of science and commonsense (we need make no distinction between the two) from metaphysical or fanciful statements?

Popper's answer would be that statements belonging to the world of discourse of science and commonsense are in principle falsifiable and it must be possible in principle to envisage what steps we could take to test the statement and so maybe to find it wanting.

Popper does not go on to say ... that the criterion of falsifiability-in-principle distinguishes scientific or commonsensical statements from metaphysics or nonsense.  On the contrary: the line of demarcation is between the statements belonging to the world of science and commonsense and statements belonging to some other world of discourse; so far from being nonsensical, metaphysical statements may lie on the pathway towards truth and may sometimes be conducive to the discovery of the truth.*

In other words you can identify  a scientific statement by the fact that it is falsifiable, but you can not use falsifiability to place it above a metaphysical statement.  In an aside, which I omitted, Medawar notes that it is the logical positivists that insist that metaphysics is a blind alley, not Popper.

It is my understanding that religious fundamentalists (of all stripes) are essentially logical positivists in the obverse.  That is, they place metaphysical statements above those of science on their own merits.  Of course, their merits are judged by their source (the Bible) rather than their falsifiability.

I found Prof. Smolka's missive to be filled with a great deal of good will in sense that he seemed to be saying that Biblical statements are so open-ended from a logical standpoint that if they were subjected to Popperian-type tests in an easy-going manner, they would most assuredly pass most of the time.

Well, I still find most of Leviticus to be pretty upsetting.  But then most of that is about property and domestic relations (which it doesn't really distinguish between) and not about Nature per se, so ... never mind.

Bill

*"The Philosophy of Karl Popper", in Art, Science & Human Progress, ed. R.B. McConnell (Universe Books, 1983)

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William P. Chaisson
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY  14627
607-387-3892