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Religion & Law

: Thoughts in a Haystack

There's Bullocks In Philosophy, Too!

By John Pieret

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Nick Smyth has posted an article at 3 Quarks Daily, entitled "Science, Pseudoscience and Bollocks," that John Wilkins calls "infuriating but thought-provoking." I confess that I find it mostly confusing. Smyth wants to replace any talk about a demarcation between science and non-science/pseudoscience with a demarcation between "truth" and "bollocks."

According to Smyth, the current way of opposing creationism is deficient.

[M]any of us will continue to oppose religious/mystical/creationist "cranks" in the name of Science. One of our main lines of attack will be territorial: we will accuse them of being on the wrong side. Science is over here, we will say, and you are over there, and we all know what that means.
The most interesting thing about this manoeuvre is that almost no-one performing it?scientist, philosopher, or otherwise?will be in possession of a single defensible definition of "science". In other words, they won't know what they're talking about.

Smyth goes on to explain: "For any formal definition of science, it either excludes too much, or includes too much, or both." Smyth accurately enough recounts the failed efforts, particularly by Karl Popper, to come up with a definition of science that could reliably distinguish science and non-science in all cases. There may not be a foolproof philosophical "category" that corresponds to what we call "science."

In place of any such attempt, Smyth proposes:

Want to keep creationism out of schools? Point out that we shouldn't teach bollocks in schools, and that constitutional freedom of religion cannot imply that false things should be taught as if they were true things. Want to keep government funding away from creationists? Point out that the government shouldn't fund bollocks. I could go on, but Reisch, Pennock and others seem to think that once we abandon formal demarcation we are left with "no difference" between molecular biology and talking snakes. This is clearly absurd.
The only rational and intellectually honest thing to do is to forget about demarcation and to give authority to powerful, accurate and consistent explanatory programmes. In other words, we must recover the original sense of "science" as a diverse, evolving set of human activities that are only important because they produce systematic knowledge. Otherwise, that clever creationist is going to come along one day and point out that a central pillar of our rejection of his doctrines?the concept of "pseudoscience"?is bollocks.

In response, Richard B. Hoppe, at The Panda's Thumb, takes a different tack. Instead of attempting to define "science," which is potentially a much larger category, he looks to define, by certain shared characteristics, what "pseudoscience" is. I think this is a possibly fruitful approach that has had its adherents at least as far back as Paul R. Thagard's famous 1978 piece, "Why Astrology Is A Pseudoscience." Nick Matzke, in the comments at The Panda's Thumb both fleshes out the situation in the Kitzmiller case, given that Smyth disparages Judge Jones' decision, and points out that Smyth's stated fears, that creationists will suddenly discover the demarcation problem and accuse scientists of irrationality leading to dire consequences, are cases of "too late" and "it didn't help them much."

But to take on Smyth's arguments on his own terms, his dismissal of demarcation commits, I think, the error of assuming that, because we cannot know exact boundaries of any particular category, we cannot know what we are talking about.

Day and night imperceptibly merge into each other at dusk and dawn, but can we not tell night from day tolerably well despite the existence of twilight? Science, like most human activities, is a sorites heap. There are many of them. What is the exact dividing line between democracy and tyranny? Should we then stop talking about them and speak only of government and "bullocks government"? Must we decide that molehills are indistinguishable from mountains? In science, what is the definition of "species" that does not exclude too much, or include too much? (A shameless plug for Wilkins' new book.) What is the "bright line" between "variety" and "species"?

To say that, because there is no bright line definition to precisely separate one category from another, we cannot speak intelligibly about those categories would reduce us almost to complete inarticulateness.

The real question here is how precise our definition has to be to serve the purpose we want to fulfill and, of course, what our purpose is. Since Smyth himself raises the question of how we keep creationism (or other religious content) out of public school science classes, I'll concentrate on that, especially as it plays out in the United States, under its particular (if not peculiar) constitutional scheme. (Smyth is a Canadian and may not have understood that context but, if so, what justification does he have to pronounce on what Judge Jones wrote?)

First of all, I don't see how Smyth's alternative helps us at all in terms of keeping creationism out of public school science classes. His "solution" is as follows:

We can go back 150 years and recover our epistemological focus. We will discover that truth is what matters, and that all we need to say about creationism, astrology and the like is that they are extremely bad truth-tracking programmes. They are, in a word, bollocks.

Someone once famously asked "What is truth?" How are we, philosophically or legally, to answer that question? And what is the "proper" epistemology? Creationists, such as Answers in Genesis, have their own answer:

The 66 books of the Bible are the written Word of God. The Bible is divinely inspired and inerrant throughout. Its assertions are factually true in all the original autographs. It is the supreme authority in everything it teaches. Its authority is not limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes but includes its assertions in such fields as history and science. ...
By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record. Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information.

According to their epistemology, it is evolution that is "bullocks." And in a democracy, why shouldn't their definition of bullocks prevail if they are, as they are in many places in this country and around the world, in the majority?

The problem, then, has just been pushed back one step by Smyth. Instead of deciding what is science and what is non-science/pseudoscience, now we are required to decide which epistemology best produces "truth," a category even less capable of a bright line definition than "science."

Smyth seems to recognize this in the comments:

You're right that the ultimate success of the strategy I advocate depends on the establishment of some epistemological ground rules. Indeed, I have been whinging--annoyingly--about this on 3QD for years now: science requires philosophy, and this is one of the (many) reasons why.
Yet, I think this particular post is better read as an address to you, I, or any other "scientifically-minded" person. Do you believe that creationism is pseudoscience? If yes, then tell me what science actually is. Hey, it turns out you can't. Alternately, do you believe that creationism is false? Well, clearly you do. So, why not specify the grounds on which you think it is false?

But the issue before the court in Kitzmiller was not whether creationism is false -- which Smyth certainly must have known because the very sentence before the part of Judge Jones' decision that Smyth quoted is:

After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science.

The question Judge Jones was answering was more limited than the one Smyth wants to address: 'is ID sufficiently like science as it is presently practiced that its roots in and support for religion must be ignored in determining whether it violates the First Amendment separation of church and state?' Government teaching of science is a legitimate "secular purpose," even if the science contradicts some religious tenet. But the reverse is true as well and, if some scientific result supported a religious tenet or contradicted an atheist position, the state could legitimately teach that as science.

Thus Judge Jones was, by the nature of the case (not to mention the arguments of the parties), required to determine whether or not ID was within the parameters of science as presently practiced.

Ironically, the way that courts go about this task -- which they also do in deciding whether a person who claims to be an "expert" in science can testify to his/her "opinion" rather than be limited to testifying about "facts" as every other witness is -- has to do with the epistemology the "expert" uses and whether or not other "scientifically-minded" people (i.e. scientists) accept the "expert's" methods as within present-day scientific practice, even if they disagree with the conclusions the "expert" reaches.

In other words, the law applies the very criteria Smyth is groping for. And in what way is Smyth's proposal not a demarcation criteria, since it is the same as what Judge Jones ultimately applied?

This is long enough, so I'll close here. But I may come back to address other things I think Smyth got seriously wrong.
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Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on September 24, 2009 (boomark / email).