There is one way in
which a scientist can allow the Bible and science to actively interact,
without any concern about damaging science. The Bible makes many
statements about how and when things happened, whether it be dealing with the
history of Jerusalem, or of life on
earth. These are ultimately testable statements, which often can suggest
specific hypotheses. For example a hypothesis about the archeology of an
ancient city can be tested by research. As Popper and others have
pointed out, it doesn’t matter where a hypothesis came from – the important
thing is what we do with the hypothesis. After the hypothesis is
developed, it must now be tested using rigorous scientific procedures of data
collection, analysis of samples, and sound reasoning from data to
interpretation. If this is done well, and with a mind open to follow
where the evidence leads, the result should be able to stand the test of peer
review by presenting papers at scientific meetings and by
publication.
It will be generally
assumed that in this process the Bible-based hypothesis will always
lose. That is not the issue that I am addressing. I am simply
pointing out that there is a way that interaction between the Bible and
science can occur, that does not attempt to explain the supernatural, and does
not do violence to science. I assume we all want to know what really
happened in history, whether or not it matches our own philosophical
preferences. If so, then the process I have described is perfectly valid
science. In the end there may be some surprises for all of
us.
Leonard
Brand
Professor of Biology
and Paleontology
Loma Linda University
Loma
Linda, CA 92350
lbrand@ns.llu.edu
-----Original
Message-----
From:
paleonet-owner@nhm.ac.uk [mailto:paleonet-owner@nhm.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Bill Chaisson/Deirdre
Cunningham
Sent: Wednesday,
March 09, 2005 5:28 AM
To:
paleonet@nhm.ac.uk
Subject:
RE: paleonet cautions on biblical interpretation, from faith and
skepticism
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.
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.
*"The Philosophy of Karl Popper",
in Art, Science & Human
Progress, ed. R.B. McConnell (Universe Books,
1983)
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
William
P. Chaisson
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Department of Earth and
Environmental Sciences
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY
14627
607-387-3892