I wrote the other day about what might be a rising tide of anti-science and more generally anti-rationalist feeling around the world. No sooner had I done so than the ten declared candidates for the Republican presidential nomination got together to display their superficial virtues before an audience. The panel being asked who among them did not “believe in” the theory of evolution, three raised their hands. One wonders about the honesty of some of the others.
The three courageously confessed that they prefer to live in a world of their own imagining to one in which, slowly and with great difficulty and only with the sustained application of genius, we come to understand the nature of things. Anyone who wishes to have such a person in charge of the nation is free to vote for him, of course, but I think I’ll pass.
The search for answers to questions about the nature of things traces back, at least in the West, to the Ionian philosophers. They had one rule: Nothing was explained by appealing to the supernatural. No god of this phenomenon, another one for that. Natural explanations for natural phenomena. This was to be accomplished by reasoning. It turned out that there was a set of prior and very hard questions that had to be answered first, questions about how best to go about finding candidate answers and how best to critique those candidates. It took two thousand years to begin to get on top of those prior questions. (Translated to a political context, we have yet to find truly good answers for them, as the present campaign makes only too clear.) The result has been the emergence of modern science, with its exacting demands for data, calculability, consistency, prediction, and replicability.
Not to “believe in” the theory of evolution is pretty well equivalent to not “believing in” the theory of gravity. That is to say, in each case we have at hand a framework for explaining a great range of related phenomena that are otherwise mysterious and unpredictable, and if this framework, which we call a theory, isn’t the final truth of the matter it is a very good approximation. Declare that you don’t “believe in” the theory of gravity, and you remain stuck to the surface of the Earth nonetheless. It’s posturing if it isn’t merely stupid.
A theory, properly understood as scientists use the word, does not call for anyone’s belief. A “theory” of fairies, or trolls, or harmonic convergences might invite belief, but a scientific theory invites only conditional acceptance or, failing that, refutation. Announcing that one believes in a given theory does nothing to improve it, nor does disbelief go any way to weaken its foundations. A workable understanding of nature is arrived at by hard thought and demonstration, not by plebiscite or endorsement. open.britannica.com
No comments:
Post a Comment