Yesterday
Andrew Sullivan excerpted
this TNR piece by Steven Pinker about Science and the Humanities and criticisms of "Scientism". The whole piece is worth reading but I thought the bit Sullivan excerpted was interesting for a tangential reason:
Quote:
In this conception, science is of a piece with philosophy, reason, and Enlightenment humanism. It is distinguished by an explicit commitment to two ideals, and it is these that scientism seeks to export to the rest of intellectual life.
The first is that the world is intelligible. The phenomena we experience may be explained by principles that are more general than the phenomena themselves. These principles may in turn be explained by more fundamental principles, and so on. In making sense of our world, there should be few occasions in which we are forced to concede “It just is” or “It’s magic” or “Because I said so.”
The second ideal is that the acquisition of knowledge is hard. The world does not go out of its way to reveal its workings, and even if it did, our minds are prone to illusions, fallacies, and superstitions. Most of the traditional causes of belief—faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, the invigorating glow of subjective certainty—are generators of error and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge. To understand the world, we must cultivate work-arounds for our cognitive limitations, including skepticism, open debate, formal precision, and empirical tests, often requiring feats of ingenuity.
What I found interesting is that these two principles (Intelligibility, Epistemic Humility) have close analogues in religious thinking.
In speaking of intelligibility, Pinker emphasizes the expectation of
explaining phenomena. It's the causal structure or "how" of the universe that is intelligible via scientific methodology. Religious traditions also presuppose the intelligibility of reality, whether cosmologically or in terms of a historicity, but the emphasis is on the idea that there is a
meaning that can be understood, the answer to why we exist, or what the purpose of existence is. It is attempting to find an ultimate frame of reference from which to understand what it all means.
Which isn't to say that religious people can't be interested in science or in understanding how the universe works, but Pinker is contrasting science with a kind of magical thinking he associates with religion, and I think in so doing he's misconstruing what religious thought is about at its best.
And the second principle, that acquisition of knowledge is difficult, is similar. I'm Christian so I'll use Christian examples, but this idea is fairly universal. In Christian terms, this idea is expressed mostly about knowledge
of God, which doesn't just mean knowledge about God as an object, but knowledge that is Divine and comes from the Divine. In Christian terms, we say that the acquisition of this knowledge requires a certain "Purity of Heart", and that otherwise no one can "see" God.
- Acquiring scientific knowledge is hard because we have to train and discipline our minds to overcome our natural cognitive biases
- Acquiring spiritual knowledge is hard because we have to train and discipline our personality, ego, and moral intuitions to overcome our natural selfishness.
In both cases a certain kind of detachment is necessary, and a certain humility about our own limitations. So for me I don't see the two principles as being only valid for science or rationalism but they are closely harmonious with religious principles as well, and I think they are quite useful in both domains.