PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE
Like science, philosophy is a truth seeking enquiry that seeks to find answers to questions by a process of investigation and argument, developing new theories about the world and the nature of our experience of it, giving a rational support for each claim. However, unlike science, the questions that philosophy asks cannot be answered by means of practical experiment. Philosophical investigation is mental rather than experimental. No experiment or observation will tell us why we should be good or what "rights" are. They are outside the methods of science but are nevertheless capable of rational enquiry. They are philosophical questions.
In A Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking concludes that scientists have been too occupied developing theories that describe the what of the universe to ask the question why. Philosophers, the people whose business it is to ask why, have not been able to keep up with the advance of science. Science has become too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or for anyone apart from a few specialists. (Some of the greatest philosophers have been mathematicians – Plato, Leibniz, Descartes, Spinoza, Pascal, Russell).
One of the most painful circumstances of recent advances in science is that each one of them makes us know less than we thought we did.
If physics, typified by the cosmologists, expresses a certain humility, then biology, typified by the Darwinists, appears to be suffering from a certain ideological overconfidence and hubris.
In considering whether the scientific worldview undermines the sense in which some things - whether it be a glorious vista, a work of art, or human life itself -might be called sacred, Dawkins admits that certain experiences do provoke feelings of awe in him. He puts this down to a poetic imagination, which he sees as a manifestation of human nature, rather than a religious experience. Dawkins reveals scientific hubris when he concludes that: ‘As scientists, and biological scientists, it's up to us to explain [feelings of awe], and I expect that one day we shall.'
He does not doubt that such a biological explanation is possible, or even that it could be partial. There is no acknowledgement of insights into the sacred from other spheres of human knowledge, be it in the music of a Beethoven, the art of a Titian, the poetry of a Blake, or the philosophy of a Kant. All explanations of sacredness are or will be subsumed within the meta-narrative of Darwinian biology.
Philosophy easily identifies ideological overconfidence here. With Socrates, philosophy began as a reaction against scientific overconfidence.
Biology, particularly in its more youthful neo-Darwinian guise, suffers from an amnesia when it comes to the history of science. It forgets that science has been here before and has frequently had to undergo a process of reassessing itself as a result. The modern cosmologist is more cautious in being aware of this.
‘We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life have not been put to rest.’ (Wittgenstein)
This was Nietzsche’s point concerning the death of God. 'Must we ourselves not become gods?' We are now masters of the world, but Nietzsche suggests that the responsibility is too great for us, as we stray unawares into infinite space. From a scientific point of view, the death of God is a triumph. Nietzsche implies that it is a tragedy.
If science can explain everything, why have morality, values or spirit at all? If nature and history can be understood by mechanisms, rules and laws, then purpose, imagination and life must come to be extinguished.
Of course, in practice, we all must adopt some set of values which we superimpose on the world, even scientists. It is impossible to live otherwise. We can even say that inventing our morality rather than inheriting it is part of our emancipation from God, in becoming gods.
The trouble is that within modern society, technique has replaced morality so that life is organised around the sole goal of technological progress. The problem is that technology only nourishes us in certain ways. It can entertain us, but not make us happy. It can heal us, but not make us whole. It can feed us, but only in body. It offers defences, but does not make us feel secure. Technology is so good at this entertaining, healing, feeding and defending that it is easy to believe, or hope, that it can, or one day will, solve all other human ills too. Some say it might even makes us immortal - an apparent deification of humanity.
What is missing is meaning. Modern humanism finds it hard to address the questions of morality, values and spirit. Following the scientific rationalism it holds in high regard, it tends to boil it all down to a discussion of mechanisms, rules and laws. This may create an illusion of meaning and a sense of purpose. But meaninglessness keeps rearing its head because, well, mechanisms, rules and laws are actually not very meaningful.
So philosophy is as concerned with the limits of reason as much as it is with being able to support arguments with reasons. Philosophy checks hubris and allows room for the non-rational dimension of life.
Our cognitive resources are limited. We each of us can only absorb and process only so much data and information, we have only so much time to do it. Human beings require belief, faith, trust, custom, habit, tradition, ritual, routine. Examine what you do each day, going for a train, switching a computer on etc. You don’t examine whether the reasons for the decision you make are sufficient.
Philosophy questions whether it is really rational for us — given our limited cognitive resources — to take the scientific model of rationality as the ideal for our cognitive behaviour within social life. We should be careful to not conflate scientific, philosophical and religious rationality.
It is possible to rely on authority for good reasons. We are all, philosophers and scientists included, finite beings with limited cognitive resources, faced with particular tasks in a particular social environment. Scientists, therefore, have neither the time nor the resources to check every scientific theory and method in their field or even all those which form the basis of their own research. Without trust in others, individual scientists would not be able to pursue their projects. The wealth of information to check and justify rationally is beyond the cognitive resources of any individual. This applies to all of us. Most of us take certain things to be true or false in our particular fields but we cannot retrace the original source of these beliefs by using our memory or notes.
Authority is, of course, also of importance in the religious context, and by paying attention to the social dimension of religious practice we can also see why it is justified.
To function properly, we do not ask for reasons for everything we do. We believe and do a number of things every day which would be impossible if the norms of rationality were set at the highest level. The reason for this is that we are finite beings with limited cognitive resources (or intelligence) and time at our disposal.
Evidentialists require that people be rational in what they believe and ask themselves what good reasons they have for every belief they have and action they perform in their everyday life, in their neighborhood, about politics, economy, science, religion, cooking, travelling, their own memories, and so forth. To be rational on this account is to be skeptical about everyone and everything until the opposite has been established.
Which goes to show that it is not really rational for us to be rational in this evidential sense. The constant questioning of our beliefs and demand for evidence and good reasons is not an intelligent way to govern life. We have neither the time nor the cognitive resources needed. We are finite beings with limited cognitive resources. Time, memory, intelligence and so on are too precious to be wasted critically evaluating all our beliefs and actions. The possibility of wasting an entire lifetime searching for evidence to justify belief or action is the point of the story of Buridan’s ass.
Jean Buridan was the pupil of William of Occam's.
Buridan’s ass illustrates the danger of over-rationalizing choice. The ass in question, finding itself placed midway between two haystacks, can see no reason to favour one stack over the other and so does nothing and starves to death. The hapless beast's mistake is to suppose that there being no reason to do one thing rather than another makes it irrational to choose and hence rational to do nothing. In fact, of course, it is rational to do something, even if that something cannot be determined by rational choice.
'The most rational thing for us to do is to continue to believe what we already believe about God, life, and love until we find good reasons to believe something else. I call this model of rationality presumptionism, because it is based on the claim that our beliefs should be presumed to be intellectually innocent until proven guilty. The initial attitude toward our beliefs should be one of trust, not distrust.' (Stenmark 2004 ch 5).
There is a presumption that the antonyms rational and irrational exhaust all possibilities. Not so, there is also the arational or the non-rational, outside of the realm of rational experience but not irrational on that account.
Mary Midgley has done much to unpick how and where the overextended scientific worldview goes wrong. She believes that human beings simply cannot understand the world without resorting to myths or visions: not to do so would be as plausible as claiming to enjoy a life that had absolutely no meaning or value. So the question is how conscious, and therefore critiÂcal, someone is of the myths or visions they are deploying. 'If we ignore them, we travel blindly inside myths and visions which are largely provided by other people. This makes it much harder to know where we are going,' she writes in Science as Salvation: a Modem Myth and Its Meaning. In relation to DNA, for example, the fear is that a more-or-less unreflective assumpÂtion that 'DNA is life' might blind all kinds of genetic experimentation to adverse outcomes, physical and moral, simply because it does not have the resources to engage with what it is doing in a meaningful way.
The advantage that a more reflective worldview has is that it places centre stage the fact that human beings are often ignorant. Recalling Socrates' central conviction, it recognises that although we are higher than the beasts of the field, we are also less than gods - the thing that scientism and even naturalism finds hard to admit. Religion, though, at its best, provides a framework within which to negotiate the human predicament. Socratic philosophy, as we have seen and as we will develop, offers related checks and balances. Both stress the need to undergo some kind of profound reflection to highlight inherent limits. An all-powerful scientific worldview minimises this element by seeing in science a way of transcending limits altogether.
The continued advance of science and technology opens up new areas for philosophical investigation and speculation. The new sciences of artificial intelligence and robotics have led to renewed philosophical speculation on what exactly intelligence is, what consciousness is, what it is to be human, and so on.
(imagine if we have a transporter that is able to send our genetic code to another place. Imagine if we could email ourselves as an attachment. As our mind and body are reconstituted in this other place, we dissolve in the place we are. So far, so good. Who has a problem with this? But imagine if the process goes wrong. We are reconstituted in another place, but still exist in our current place. Why does this make us feel uncomfortable? Who now is the real me?)
It is said that a little learning is a dangerous thing, because the learned forget that their learning is little. A humanism of humility, not hubris, is what agnosticism struggles to put centre stage, in the belief that it nurtures right thinking.
Meaning is nothing if not subjective. This is the fundamental reason that the scientific worldview, for all it unpicks, does not do, nor deliver, meaning of itself. It sits on the wrong side of the subject/object, fact/value, material/spiritual divide. The Faustian pact with which our world flirts is trusting the results of science and its method above all others for fixing truths. The paradox is that this culture of certainty produces anxiety because, at the end of the day, to be certain is to be in denial. Thus we live more healthily but not more happily; we live more magnificently but not more meaningfully; we live with more knowledge but not more wisdom.
Secular philosophies suggest that meaning can be found within this frame nonetheless. One possibility is to argue that the big questions of life are overblown or mistaken. The moral imperative of how one should live should be rephrased to the more manageable one of how one might become more cultivated, more ethical or simply less demanding of life. The task of knowing thyself is mitigated by the commonsensical comment that most of the time, in most situations, one probably knows oneself enough to get on with matters in hand. When climactic moments come, like death, one should just accept them, not question them.
The philosophical tradition that began with Socrates offers a way that is practical as well as contemplative. Here was a man who though claiming to know nothing could never have been accused of having a black hole at the heart of his life..