Dawkins' Premise: Science based on empirical evidence is rational and inordinately disrespected. Religion based on belief is irrational and inordinately respected.
We have been discussing belief and knowledge, both proper and improper. Our focus has been to discuss this in relation to modern empirical science. In this post, I want to explore the question of how we know – the beginning of knowledge and belief for each individual.
Dawkins’ argument, at its crudest level, represents a dichotomy between reliable, well-grounded and verifiable knowledge on one hand, and uncertain, unverifiable fancies on the other. Dawkins tells us that scientists are careful to check all their measurements and theories against reality, experience, and experiment. Therefore, science provides reliable knowledge. Belief, particularly religious belief, is just a matter of feeling or opinion.
But for both groups, the atheistic naturalists and the theistic supernaturalists, there is the basic assumption that they possess the truth. Truth is the conformity between my mind, my intellect, and the thing known. For theists, truth includes God – their belief or knowledge of God conforms to the reality of God’s existence. For atheists, there is no God so any idea or mental construct of God is simply false.
We arrive here at a very fundamental, critical question. What is the connection between my mental construction and reality? Do I take as fundamental my mind or a reality external to my mind that my intellect can directly perceive?
If I answer that it is my mind, then I will never be able to escape from my mind. This was the fatal mistake of Descartes, Kant and other modern philosophers – such error led inexorably to positivism – which we will address more fully in a later post.
The other choice is to recognize that I have the capacity to grasp the external world directly. I know definitely and without possibility of error what is directly in front of me. This may seem obvious to the reader. It is very common-sensical you may say. But as I will show in a later post, the argument put forward by Dawkins that science is the only means of achieving authentic knowledge has as its historical basis very nonsensical philosophy.
For now, I assert that I can indeed have certain, reliable knowledge of the things, external to my mind, that are right in front of me.
The Epistemic Cycle
Consider a young child. Babies and toddlers do not sit still. They are constantly interacting with the environment. Reaching out to things, picking things up, shaking them, throwing them, putting them into the mouth. In such manner, they become aware of the world around them, building up knowledge. The fact that babies and very young children are active not passive gives us a clue that the best way to learn about the world is to act on it and see what happens.
As time goes by, they build up knowledge of a range of familiar things. They learn to recognize these things on sight. They don’t need to go back through the whole process again. Occasionally, they may be mistaken, but they learn how to correct their errors by further interactions with the object.
At the lowest level, the baby learns that there are certain objects in the world with particular properties. His rattle makes a nice noise, it can be thrown about but is not good to eat. Then maybe he is given another rattle of a different shape and color. He recognizes that the two rattles have some properties in common but in other ways they are different. He realizes that he can think about rattles in general, abstracting from any particular rattle. In this way he has formed the concept of rattle. He will make mistakes; perhaps he sees something that looks like his rattle, but when he shakes it nothing happens; it is not a rattle but another sort of toy. In this way the baby builds up a series of concepts that enables him to classify the objects and the people around him. This cycle of guessing followed by checking and then another round of guessing and checking is called the epistemic cycle.
This process goes on as the baby grows up, through higher and higher epistemic cycles. Very soon, particularly as the ability to speak develops, the process becomes a social one. He learns the word for rattle, and indeed the development of the concept of rattle is helped and crystallized by the word. Our language develops in response to our apprehension of reality. Concepts are developed and refined as the learning process proceeds; the concept of swan is revised when we see one that is black.
It is possible that after some time the cycle runs into a dead end; it is clearly not correct and yet it is not obvious how it should be changed. It may then be necessary to go back several stages in the cycle, and try again. It is a requirement of a successful concept of the object that it will eventually be reached from a large number of different starting points. It is a very flexible and ultimately stable process.
This has important philosophical implications, and provides the justification for the starting point already affirmed, namely that the mind directly apprehends an objective external world.
First there is the problem of innate ideas. Are we born with some ideas about the world? If so, is there any reason why they should be correct? If they are not correct, will they not irretrievably distort all subsequent knowledge? On the other hand, if we do not have some innate ideas about the world, how can we ever get started?
These difficulties are overcome by the extreme flexibility and self-correcting nature of the epistemic cycle. Almost any idea, however wrong-headed, suffices to get the cycle going, and once it is going the erroneous elements will soon be eliminated. The cycle can be started anywhere, and it will in the end lead to the same result. It does not even matter in a fundamental way how the cycle is operated; because of its self-correcting nature almost random actions will in the end lead to the same result, although of course that will take longer than intelligent and coordinated actions. Thus it does not matter whether we have innate ideas or not, or what they are. As long as we have the urge to learn by interacting with the world we are set on a process of continual learning that automatically progresses to higher and higher levels.
This process is not without its dangers, particularly if we come to believe that there is a one-to-one correspondence between language and reality. This is not so bad for simple objects, although some languages are richer than others. The danger becomes acute at the higher levels of abstraction, when we use words like mind, space and time. Such words have a long history and do not have sharp and easily defined meanings, but are only defined in the context of definite philosophical or scientific beliefs.
This process is never-ending, as we explore the richness and complexity of reality. We can be sure of some of our knowledge, but there are also legitimate areas of disagreement. A concept or a scientific theory may have been quite well tested against a range of experiences but may later fail, and then we have to think again. The whole process also presupposes a willingness to revise our ideas in the face of contrary evidence. If we stick to our beliefs regardless, the whole fruitful growth of our knowledge is impossible. It is not surprising that there are still strong areas of disagreement, but we have available the means to resolve them.
The concept of epistemic cycles applies at every level of knowledge: from the initial efforts of the child to the work of the scientist, philosopher and theologian. While ultimately the process leads to the attainment of objective truth, it becomes progressively more difficult with the degree of abstraction of the subject matter. The child soon finds out if he is mistaken, and the scientist can subject his theories to sharp tests, often requiring precise numerical agreement. If a philosopher makes a false move, all his system is fatally flawed, and in the end will prove untenable, but in the absence of sharp tests it may be a long time before this is apparent. The system may have much to commend it, and when the first difficulties appear it may be possible to develop the system to account for them, thus postponing the final reckoning.
This is still truer for systems of religious belief, which can survive for millennia. The final challenge comes partly from within, but more often from without, as another system of beliefs proves able to account for all that is good in the original system, and much else besides. Individuals may find it very difficult to change, but the next generation is able to take a more objective view and so eventually the old beliefs die away and become a historical memory.
This is exactly Dawkins’ contention - science provides an account of the world as good if not better than does religious belief. He views the scientific view as a simpler explanation and thus, the more appropriate one. He contends that science can not only answer all the major questions traditionally answered by religion but that its answers are more consistent with reality. His description of religion is, of course, heavily influenced by the religious tradition of the West – a tradition formed, molded, and shaped by Christianity – especially Catholic Christianity. The problem is that his view, image, perception of religion – especially Christianity – and even more specifically Catholicism – is false. He consistently misstates the philosophical and theological principles underpinning the religious tradition of the West. I will address this more completely in a later post.
At any rate whether we are discussing modern science, philosophy, or theology, it is important to recognize that throughout this account we have tacitly presupposed that we live in a real world. This is the essential assumption underlying the epistemic cycle, for it describes our interaction with reality. It is justified by the result. If there were no objective reality the cycle would not work, still less would it yield results that are agreed among many people. If we were trapped in our own minds, building concepts and ideas into acceptable patterns, there would be no reason why my pattern should be any truer than yours. Indeed I would have no reason to even speak about you, for the concept of another person would on this view be simply yet another construction of my own mind. I am trapped within my own self, a solipsist. The epistemic cycle would not work because there would be no objective standard that would enable us to distinguish the false from the true. Its success would be wholly inexplicable; if there is no objective external world then why can we improve our ideas by systematically correcting our mistakes?
The recognition of individual facts is but the first step in knowledge, the second is the classification of facts, the recognition of the general in the particular. This is a spontaneous unconscious act, a basic characteristic of human thinking. It is not an inference from sensations; it is the immediate grasping by the mind of a facet of reality.
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