Science's crisis of faith

MIT physicist and novelist Alan P. Lightman has said too much for the priestly class to let him live. It is too bad, because Lightman can do the math and the metaphor at the same time. We need people like him. We need watchmen who are wide awake. Because if he is correct, the epistemological authority of our sciences could be eroding. Should it give way, public discourse and reason may well collapse, and civilization will be at the mercy of lawlessness.

Some may doubt the existence of a priestly class. First-world nations especially pride themselves in their technological ubiquity, public and private secondary and post-secondary educational opportunities, and free and democratic values. Nevertheless, someone has to commune with gods and communicate their demands to mortals. Someone has to decide what truth is and how it can be known. Someone has to demarcate what fundamental ideas will be allowed to shape the legal and political discourse of a culture.

The question is not whether a priestly class exists--every culture has to decide what it is and what it is not. The question is who makes the decision? Who is in control of the public square? French historian Georges Duby divides medieval society into those that prayed, those that fought, and those that worked. It doesn’t take long to sort out who is in the latter two classes. So who, then s in the former? Who are the priests? Here are a few characteristics that may help answer the question.

One trait that characterizes a priestly class is jargon. Priestly classes always have their own languages. Everyone is familiar with the monastics of the middle ages, chanting the psalms for hours at a time and saying mass at lip-lynching abracadabra speeds because it was in Latin. Medieval Latin was the JavaScript, C++, Python, XML, and Ruby on Rails of its time, invented by and for the priestly class. Today priestly discourse is in abstract mathematics. Consider the following comment by author and social philosopher George Steiner:

Science is becoming inaccessible to us. Who can understand the latest innovations in genetics, astrophysics and biology? Who can explain them to the profane? Knowledge no longer communicates; writers and philosophers in our day are incapable of enabling us to understand science. At the same time, the scope of imagination in science is dazzling. . . . I am concerned by what it means to be literate today. Is it possible to be literate if you do not understand non-linear equations?

Another demonstrable trait of a priestly class is a penchant for isolation and pageantry. Priests live ensconced in their temples and institutions. But when they emerge, they spin myths of fantastic speculation and drama. Priests use the most sophisticated technologies of the day to awe the public and further cement their offices as mouthpieces of the gods and the arbiters of all wisdom. It is the priestly class that brings fire from heaven to earth. (One best not forget that because they've been known to burn, torture, imprison, and silence men, women, children, nations, and peoples to maintain their power.)

There are others traits as well. For example, a priestly class demands sacrifice. It attracts members from and nurtures the future of the political bourgeois, whereas it needs and fears the military. It has an identifiable costume that sets it apart from others. And given enough time, it will undermine its own foundations.

Given these few characteristics, the argument can be made that the West’s priestly class is made up of practicing scientists. Take for example the half-a-lifetime of painful and expensive mathematical hazing it takes to even come abreast of what is current in the field, thus barring we plebians from real understanding. (We understand at the level of myth.) Or consider the role, and cost, of universities. Undergraduate education is a court of the gentiles; masters degrees the court of the women. Gown and mortarboard mark the initiates. And who can argue but the university system of our day, bloated and fat on the blood of the middle-class, regulates status, income, and mate-selection using impenetrable matrices to separate the sheep from the goats.

So then, having identified our priests, we return to our watchman, Dr. Alan P. Lightman. “The history of science,” he says, “can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.” Humanity has measured the heavens with the span of its calculus and dispelled the old gods of nature and chaos before the daylight of scientific certainty. Reason reigned--until now. Now “this long and appealing trend may be coming to an end.”

Read the second part of this article, Alan Lightman Sounds the Alarm, or read the whole thing as a document.

Christianity is like baseball

There is an article that has stayed with me for quite a while now. The article is "How Baseball Explains the Nature of Language" by Alva Noë. Noë is a philosopher of perception at UC Berkeley. He is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media, and he blogs on NPR's science blog 13:7 Cosmos and Culture, where this article was published.

Now I've been asking methodological questions about theology for over a decade now. What is theology? What makes theology good or bad? Does theology mean anything? Does it have purpose? Is it useful? What is appropriate to it and when could it be said to go off the tracks? Is it a craft or a science? How do you know if you are doing theology versus, say, sociology, psychology, political theory, writing protest songs, or abandoning oneself to phantasie under the illusion of piety? What are its basic moves, its tools, its core principles? How can one define its edges and sort out its territories? Is theology native to confession or imported (or worse) into/onto it?

Nearly all of these sorts of questions are simply assumed by surveys and the literature (though not by Barth who plows right in from the start), and so I've been forced to work backward into the questions, which is my usual and oh-so-efficient method. Nevertheless, I have made slow, imperceptible progress. My hypothesis is that theology is not akin to philosophy or a philosophical system, but resembles more a craft, something that is made by human beings and that also makes them back.

So if theology is a craft, then what structures and orders it? What are its tools? I've been around the block long enough to have heard a bit about Ludwig Wittgenstein's language games, and I own a copy of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations. But his work outstrips my abilities--and Noë's article enters the picture at exactly this point, meeting low-brow abilities like mine with exactly the sort of metaphor this citizen of Red Sox Nation can respond to: baseball.

A fundamental of Noë's argument is that context governs meaning. The phrase "home run" is meaningless outside of the context "baseball". Baseball creates a space in which meanings like home run, triple play, our grand slam can come to be and make sense. (Wittgenstein put it like this in the first proposition of the Tractatus: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist / The world is all that is the case. Think also of Heidegger’s Dasein—that we are thrown (Geworfenheit) into this world. Dasein ist geworfener Entwurf.) But what sort of activity is baseball?

Baseball is based on rules, but it far transcends them. Baseball includes all of these actions—throwing, hitting, catching, how to steal a base, how to bunt—and all of this new grammar—double-play, foul ball, home run. But it also includes a higher-order discussion of how it is best played and what makes for the best team and the best game. “Baseball people are concerned not just with how you play, but with the very question of how one ought to play baseball.” And it also brings with it an ethic: “When you are initiated into the baseball world, you learn to care about such things as stolen bases and pick-off attempts.”

Baseball is a human space. And this space is not just system, but a practice, a game, an activity which by definition is participatory, social, and makes as much as it is made. "To learn baseball," writes Noë, "is to come to be able to see and feel and be motivated in ways that are meaningless to strangers of the game. Baseball is more than a system of rules, it is a practice."

Noë says that there is a class of actions that human beings practice, a class based on rules, but that can’t help but transcends rules. A class that always has both first-order activities (what is done) and second-order activities (how we evaluate what is done). He calls these “baseball-like practices” and practices whose “ontologies are practice relative” and includes in these other social practices such as dance, art, law, speech, and language.

As a philosopher of language, Noë is taking linguistics to task. Linguists, he says, want desperately to be descriptive and evaluate only what is there. But they cannot do that, he maintains, because language is one of those class of actions that cannot be described from the outside. We live inside language; we can’t examine it from some removed and untouchable location. “We are so deeply embedded within and at home in the language world (compare: the baseball world) that we find it difficult to believe in the practice relativity of our convictions and commitments.” And because of that language is not only a first-order practice, like chemistry or geology, which can be comfortably described and dissected, but always and everywhere a second-order practice which can’t help but comment and critique itself.

And so I say that Christianity is a baseball-like practice whose ontology is practice-relative. It is a human practice, and that means a social, a political practice. It is based on rules (law), but those rules create a space of actions and activities and words and meanings and, almost instantly, the second-order discussion of how this should all work called theology. But going deeper than that, it is a revealed religion, which means it is based in language (Word) and, because language is a baseball-like practice, then by definition it must have grammar, it must have ethics, it must have theology.[1]

Coming the long way around, then, Christianity is a practice-specific, a baseball-like ontology that exists along the first-order—its practices (liturgy, public and private)—and the second-order—the ethics generated by and for those practices as well as the metaphysics, the theology that questions the fitness of the whole.

Well, I’ve thrashed around in this for a while. Such thrashing is not Noë’s fault. His article isn’t about Christianity, after all, but an intramural jab at linguistics. There is something lex orandi, lex credenda (the law of prayer is the law of belief) about it. And there is something of Plato’s Paradox of the Meno and previous discussions on this blog about the epochē that are here as well. I’m dissatisfied as this last point I’ve neglected altogether in this description. At any rate, I’d better post.

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[1] "I belong to a generation of furniture makers to whom woodworking initially presented itself as a lost art from a more authentic time. When I turned my first clear pine board into a crade, and for many years thereafter, I was beguiled by rediscovering the how of the craft. How do you sharpen a chisel? How do you cut a sliding dovetail? How do you make a chair comfortable? Eventually, though, I also began to wonder about the why. What is craft and why does it matter? Why do we make things? Or, more specifically, why do we choose the spiritually, emotionally, and physically demanding work of bringing new objects into the world with creativity and skill?

The answers I have found -- through considering the work of my own hands, through the practical education of a life in craft and through the shared experiences of others -- all seem to lead back to one fundamental truth: we practice contemporary craft as a process of self-transformation." ~ Peter Korn. Why We Make Things and Why It Matters. David R. Godine: 2015, 7. Korn goes on to mention Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Richard Sennett's The Craftsman, and Matthew Crawford's Shop Craft as Soulcraft.