How Arguing About the Nature of Inquiry in the Historical Sciences has Brought me Back to the Faith
You will recall my strong and often repeated affirmation of
the quote attributed to Max Planck: ‘Experiments are the only means of
knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagnination.’
For some time I have been having a discussion with Marco and
Andy Cooper about what qualifies as science in the historical sciences- in disciplines like biology, geology,
astronomy, where you cannot do an experiment, how exactly do we obtain
knowledge? Knowledge, that is, of the how,
as opposed to the what; for it is
very easy to catalogue stars or beetles. [‘All science is either physics or
stamp collecting’ (Ernest Rutherford)]
We are agreed that basically what we do is rely on experiments that have been done for us. We postulate a model for how something occurs that
suggests that we should never observe a particular phenomena in nature, and if
we do observe that particular phenomena, that model is falsified, in the same
way as a model that suggests we will not obtain a particular result in an
experiment will be falsified if we do the experiment and obtain that result. We
are agreed on the additional proviso that the model does not contradict any of
the physical laws we have determined with the experiments we can do in the here
and now; and where I differ from Marco is on an insistence that this lack of
contradiction be made explicit in terms of a mechanism: a story that is not
entirely implausible that explains exactly how this observation distant in
space or time can be explained using the physics and chemistry we have nutted
out here on Earth.
A distinction that we have come up with is between primary
and secondary utility. If our model predicts that we should observe something
that we have not yet observed, and we look for it, and find it, then it is
scientifically useful. It has primary utility. Everything else our model is
good for is its secondary utility. If it provides us with a good job, or helps
maintain the stability of the Overlord’s rule, or makes us feel comfortable and
happy, or is a great plot element in action adventure films, it has some
secondary utility. The realisation that Marco has had for a long time and has
dawned on me more slowly is that a great deal of what we teach as science in
the historical sciences is taught for its secondary utility rather than it
primary utility.
The models of anthropogenic global warming make terrible
predictions; but there is a lot of money in it, and it dovetails beautifully
with the statist agendas of all kinds of powerful lobbies, so it trundles along
unstoppably. The models of abiogenesis we have are laughable and have predicted
nothing, but the alternative of special creation is anathema, so we defend to
the death our ‘science of the gaps’ against the ‘God of the gaps’. In the tiny
and specialised hothouse of cometary science where Marco and Andrew live and
breathe and have their being, the ‘contact binary’ model for the formation of
bilobed comets, incredibly implausible to begin with, becomes less plausible
with every example that is observed; but it allows the valuable fiction that
comets are unchanged relics of the cloud from which the Solar System formed to
continue, so its flaws are excused or ignored.
This realisation of the narrow limits of primary utility
threw me back on my resolution a few years ago to only believe what I could not
disbelieve. Quoting myself:
“What do I mean by ‘believe’ or ‘disbelieve’? I favour the
definition provided by the 19th century American philosopher Charles Sanders
Peirce: ‘A belief is a habit, i.e., a readiness or disposition to respond in
certain kind of ways on certain kinds of occasions.’
With this definition, it should become evident that there
are some things that cannot be disbelieved. We cannot disbelieve F = GMm/r2, in
that we cannot habitually behave as if it were not true: each time we behave as
if it were not true, we are likely to injure ourselves, and if we attempt to
make it a habit we are sure to break before the universe does.
In the same time as we cannot disbelieve F = GMm/r2, we
cannot disbelieve that life is better than death. Believing this, which means
acting upon it, we cease to exist.
I think the idea that death is better than life is one of a
small number of beliefs that, believed in a Peircean way, will destroy any
functioning society, and so collectively cannot be believed. The antithesis of
these beliefs is what C. S. Lewis called the “Tao”: the nugget of ethics common
to every ethical system we know about.”
Outside the narrow limits of primary utility there is a vast
sea of habits that are necessary for individuals and societies to stick to the ‘Tao’.
These habits cannot be justified by experiment; they have predictive value only
over a scale of millennia in terms of the fitness of the societies that
practice them. I had argued before that Max Planck’s quote leaves us free to
choose our own poetry: the facts of science do not force us to pick the
pessimism of Housman over the joy of Manley Hopkins. I have been feeling useless, adrift in idea
space, for some time, and I looked up from the realisation of the narrow limits
of primary utility brought about by this discussion to realise that my
intellectual quarrels with the Catholic Faith had somehow evaporated while I
was not trying to be Catholic anymore. I recalled the quote ‘truth cannot contradict truth’ and remembered again that the Church teaches nowhere anything
in contradiction to the certain knowledge of the experimental sciences, And I realised that I did not really have a
free choice of poetry: I had a duty to chose the poetry that could best serve
the overwhelming secondary utility of protecting and advancing the ‘Tao’. Against
the abyss of relativism, against the apocalyptic rage convulsing Dar-al-Islam,
I see only one thing standing firm in the world. So I am resolved, by the grace of God, to
display consistently a readiness or disposition to respond in Catholic ways on as many occasions as possible.
