now i’m just an unfrozen caveman, but …
I’m sometimes startled at how confused and confusing the world is. Sometimes, I’m confused by how stunningly confused people are.
As one example, I was rubbernecking the articles at The Institute for Creation Research for something like two hours last weekend. It’s just so hard to look away! So magnificently twisted and grotesquely broken it all is!* ICR.org is a train wreck of straw men, misrepresentations and uncited claims. But that almost doesn’t matter; the whole discussion is moot immediately anyway because the basic claim of a “supernatural” explanation is perforce unscientific.
I know it’s a waste of time to poke around in the wreckage, and I won’t be saying anything here I haven’t probably said before, but … There’s this spectacularly warped bit where they insist that what they’re doing is “real” science, and that the secular scientific world is inventing fanciful magical forces to explain away the obvious. In this article, an organic chemist raises the homochirality problem in biological chemistry: how do proteins in organisms “know” the “right” form to take, if two equally likely forms emerge normally, outside of an organism? The answer, of course, is that God made it that way. Apparently, to say “we don’t know” is to be unscientific:
I find it interesting that when creationists start talking about God’s supernatural creation, evolutionists usually counter by saying that everything must be explained by natural science and divine intervention is not science. I find this remark extremely amusing. When we show them that the laws of natural science cannot explain the existence of chirality, evolutionists say that the process happened a long time ago by some unknown method that they cannot explain. Now who’s relying on a supernatural explanation? Although they would never call it divine intervention, they certainly are relying on faith and not on scientific facts. Evolution just hopes you don’t know chemistry.
*goggle*
Seriously, every time I read that, I have to put my eyes back in my head. Does the English language work differently for this guy? What part of “as secular scientists, we cannot explain this” means “we are relying on a supernatural explanation”? And which part of “as a Creationist, I believe that a supernatural being designed it this way” means “this is scientific fact”?** This fellow is apparently writing from the inside of a fun house mirror.
The inversion is partly accomplished by leaving out the scientist’s “yet”—he should have written that the process happened “by some unknown method that they cannot explain yet.” The omission is telling: science is a progressive precipitate of the Enlightenment, always moving forward, always uncovering new explanations and new mysteries. By contrast, his world—the dogmatic Creationist world—is in stasis. The Bible is the ultimate authority in all things, and the Bible will not be changing any time soon. As a result, creationism in practice appears to be about stopping when you run up against a mystery. If something is so difficult to explain, so improbable, then well, God must’ve just made it that way. The End. We can stop being curious now. Homochirality? Pfft. Surely supernatural. Just like the planets’ motions, and lightning. By ignoring science’s forward momentum, he reduces science to a static volume of statements about the world, and can then compare those to the Bible’s set of statements about the world. Now, the Bible wins, because it has an “explanation” for everything, whereas science does not.
I suppose that’s where the folks writing on that site are so deeply confused. Unlike the Bible, a tome of stories which justify its behavioral injunctions, science is not, at its core, a set of beliefs, or a series of stories. It has led us to embrace a set of beliefs about the world, but that set is dynamic and could be overthrown any day. Science is, at its core, a practice. Dogmatic religion is a set of beliefs.
Truthfully, I guess I can’t blame Creationists for wanting to appropriate science, reduce it to a belief system and make it a child of, rather than parent of, their God. I imagine that the current Creationist resurgence is reactionary, responding in kind to overly zealous, close-minded and sometimes mean-spirited secularists who are also confused—in the other direction. I think secularists’ justified disdain for irrational dogma should not be extended to all of God and spirituality. If irrational clinging to the stories in the Bible is childish, honoring the practices taught therein is not. Further, to reduce the experience of consciousness and the contemplative investigation of being to materialism is to disrespect a rather significant human effort and—I believe—a necessary and, yes, irreducible investigation of our condition.
To confuse science for a set of beliefs is no worse than to confuse spirituality with a set of beliefs. People who see them as static stories about the world are wrong.
So I have a radical proposal for both overzealous Creationists and overzealous secularists: stop treating science and religion as sets of static beliefs. Instead, treat them both as practices. They’re both primarily methods of investigation. I think that if you do that, there’s suddenly no more conflict.
Faith, then, is no longer faith that Moses parted the Red Sea, or faith that God literally created the world six thousand years ago. Faith is not about whether the big bang happened 13.6 billion years ago or faith that all life descended from some common ancestor. Faith becomes faith in the practice, in the moment: choosing to do the ethical thing, despite the difficulty; choosing to accept the data, despite its conflict with your hypothesis.
One unfortunate difference is that most religious institutions are heavily invested in the persistence of their stories. Intellectually honest scientists shouldn’t have such investment.
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the verb confuse appears to have evolved from the Latin verb confundere “to pour together”, through French as an adjective, into Middle English. Chaucer is quoted: “I am so confus, that I may not seye.” Then it is found as a verb circa 1550 with the literal sense “mix or mingle things so as to render the elements indistinguishable.”
Sounds about right.
** Nevermind the problematic words “supernatural” and “fact.” “Supernatural” refers to something outside of nature, which is meaningless in scientific discourse (or in any discourse, if you ask me). “Fact,” along with “proof”, are consistently misused by just about everyone—they have very narrow definitions and an actual instance of either is exceedingly rare, with proofs only occurring in the arid realm of mathematics.
March 27th, 2009 at 7:30 am
Your statement that the bible isn’t likely to change needs revision. It changes every time the church decides to conform it to the current dogma. The Saint James version was “revised” (i.e. reinterpreted) in my lifetime.
To the creationist I say that “God” may well have chosen matter/energy/time and evolution as His/Her modus operandus. So it is not either/or.
You are so right in my opinion that both science and religion are or should be engaged as methodologies rather than as sets of beliefs.