The Christ Centred Cosmic Civilisation

Episode 76 - Elephants and Concrete Mixers: Bridging Science, Theology, and Social Constructs

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Can science and theology truly coexist, or are they destined to remain estranged domains of thought? This episode challenges conventional boundaries by questioning the perceived neutrality of science and the influence of theology on scientific debates. We unravel Mary Midgley's metaphor of an elephant and a concrete mixer to ponder whether these two giants are as unrelated as they seem. Through the lens of Rene Descartes' dichotomy and Helen Longino's values, we critically examine how personal beliefs and cultural contexts may shape scientific integrity, potentially leading to "bad science" as suggested by Robert Richardson in "Biology and Ideology."

The social construction of science takes center stage next, where we dissect weaker and stronger social constructionist views. Are scientific outcomes merely reflections of social pressures, or can they transcend these influences? As we navigate this complex terrain, we question the role of societal biases like sexism, racism, and elitism in shaping scientific progress. Can a more inclusive environment truly enhance scientific knowledge, or does it simply alter societal dynamics? Tune in as we reflect on the intricacies of balancing social evolution with scientific innovation, setting the stage for profound future discussions.

The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

Speaker 1:

Well, welcome to the Christ-centered cosmic civilization. And what I want to do is spend a little bit of time exploring the relationship between science and theology, which we've been dancing around really with alchemy and chemistry. But I'd like to just pause and spend two or three episodes looking at that more closely how religion or really we mean theology and science relate. Now I looked into this very deeply like 30 years ago or so, and I remember at the time I produced a paper called Relations Between an Elephant, elephant and a concrete mixer, and that title unusual title is taken from this essay by Mary Midgley in the Gospel and Contemporary Culture. In the second paragraph of that she says Quote we are used to the idea that religion is logically insecure and people who say this tend to have the unspoken feeling why can't religion be more like science? But should an elephant try to be like a concrete mixer? End quote. So that was that and it struck me that phrase how can an elephant, or why should an elephant be like a concrete mixer? So what I want to look at is that relationship between the elephant and the concrete mixer. I'm not going to say which is science and which is religion there, but I want to see whether these two things, science and religion, really are so unrelated as has often been assumed.

Speaker 1:

It was Rene Descartes who set theology and science so far apart by distinguishing strictly between res cogitans and res extensa. So those are things that exist in your mind and then things that exist in the physical world around you. And he said those are two totally different things. And then quote from Mary Midgley this meant that, with the help of his ontology, the visible world could be objectified without any religious scruples, and its objects could be objectified without any religious scruples, and its objects could be understood solely in terms of mathematics. And so I want to see if that division has been practically possible. So do we understand? What Descartes did was to say the things that are in your head, that you believe are completely unrelated to physical things in the world around you, don't require any theology or religion to understand them or relate to them. And that actually, just kind of the neutrality of mathematics or the impersonality of mathematics, or the mechanism of mathematics, is all that's required to understand things, physical things. Was he right? Is that true? Did it work? So in the first part of this, I'd like to look at the relationship between evidence and theories. And then in the second part, I'd like to go on to see something of how theology or theological positions lie under ongoing debates within the scientific community, ongoing debates within the scientific community. And then in the final part, I want to note how theology has formulated doctrine in accordance with various scientific theories, rightly or wrongly so.

Speaker 1:

In this first part evidence and theory I'm going to say that there are three basic approaches to this and in many ways the scientific community is exceptionally backward in getting to grips with the epistemological challenges of the modern time. Old style positivism can still be found in pockets, almost perfectly preserved like some mammoth in an iceberg, in faculties and journals of the scientific world, but not just there, but all across social media. Scientific will, but not just there, but all across social media, youtube, all sorts of things. We find this like a crazy unreflective confidence in science to do kind of what Descartes imagined it could do. To do kind of what Descartes imagined it could do. But the question of the value-free or autonomous character of science has been addressed by many philosophers of science and I'm going to identify three basic approaches.

Speaker 1:

Going to identify three basic approaches, but before I outline those three views, I think it might be helpful to note a distinction between what Helen Longino calls constitutive values and contextual values in science. So constitutive values describe the goals of science and the rules for achieving those goals, and that's about how to do the scientific method in a way that's acceptable to the discipline, so that the constitutive values of science are sort of you know what is science, how is it to be done, how is a laboratory to be run, how are experiments to be carried out such that they have integrity and that they can be repeated, and so on. So that's the constitutive values of science. But on the other hand, there are contextual values held by scientists. Contextual values describe the personal, social, cultural, ideological or even theological preferences and circumstances held by a particular scientist or community of scientists or setting for scientists. And there is a question about what is the relationship between the constitutive values of science and the contextual values of the scientists. So one view is to acknowledge that there are numerous cases of contextual values influencing scientific reasoning, but that these are examples of bad science. So, uh, and the idea then is science ought to have only the constitutive values, the rules of science should be applied and carried out and held to, and that contextual values, the personal values and setting and culture of individual scientists or communities. All of that must be excluded from science and that, whenever the contextual values can be found to be present, that is bad science. So there's this quote from Helen Longano.

Speaker 1:

This traditional interpretation of the value freedom of science amounts to a claim that its constitutive and contextual features are clearly distinct from and independent of one another of one another. So in its strongest form, this view believes that science has its own internally generated momentum that moves the discipline forward regardless of or even unaffected by the contextual values held by its practitioners. You actually get this a lot in science fiction games and films, and the idea is science is so contextually independent that any alien race anywhere in the universe need only adopt the scientific method and would be led to exactly the same results. All alien races anywhere in the universe will end up with exactly the same scientific conclusions and products because science has its own momentum, rules, values, regardless. Robert Richardson is a good example of this sort of approach In his book which is called Biology and Ideology the Interpretation of Science and Values.

Speaker 1:

He argues that quote to reject a theory or hypothesis, one must show that it is false or not warranted. Showing that it is ideologically incorrect is not sufficient. Yeah, okay, we understand that. You can't just say I don't, my beliefs don't, I don't like that conclusion of this experiment because it's not what I believe, it doesn't fit with my values and that is obviously. That is not a sufficient reason to reject a theory or hypothesis necessarily. But he attempts to show that when science is ideologically motivated it will be bad science and there's no need to raise the problem of ideology critique. So you don't need to even get into whether that ideology is right or wrong. Just the fact of an ideology being used to assess a scientific theory is automatically wrong. So he says the role of ideology critique is to explain why the proponents of certain ideas cling to inadequately warranted hypotheses. So he says, in order to assess the truth or falsity of a theory or hypothesis, you don't need to get into ideology critique, you just need to examine it.

Speaker 1:

Whether this theory or proposal or idea is consistent with the constitutive values of science is consistent with the constitutive values of science. But you can critique ideologies. But that is not about assessing scientific truth. That is about examining people and showing why, for example, the ideas they have are inadequate because they don't correspond to true scientific knowledge. Now, since I wrote this, we've also of course had Richard Dawkins, who really is a kind of very strong example of this.

Speaker 1:

So the idea then is, if the method prescribed by the constitutive values of science is diligently followed, then the influence of contextual values can be weeded out, and you can just. And the idea then is, we're just dealing with factual truth, and falsity comes from false belief. You know, human beliefs, context, culture, all of that. That's the problem that needs to be excluded. Science is this kind of objective machine of truth. Now Helen Longano points out that Robert Richardson, in this book, biology and Ideology, doesn't deal with.

Speaker 1:

Quote those cases were the warrants themselves, that is, the methodological procedures or framing assumptions accepted within a field, are ideologically driven or value laden. So the idea then is what if the very methods of science are inevitably or importantly, ideologically driven or value-laden? The ideology perceived in her or his field wishes to dissect its role in theories, not in order to show them wrong, but to find the places where an alternative set of values might yield a different set of hypotheses. So the idea then is what of the occasions were two different hypotheses arising from two different sets of contextual values, both obey the constitutive values of science equally well. So it can be imagined like all the rule, all the constitutive values of science may be followed, and yet people coming from different contexts may get different theories, arrive at different conclusions, but they have followed all the constitutive values of science, all the constitutive values of science. What about those situations where there's like a perspective element to it, but all the rules are followed and science is rigorously performed? So that's something Helen points out. She says in this first model that the only thing that needs to be done is science needs to be done with no subjective elements in it, and she says, well that how that doesn't seem to work, because there are situations where all the science is done, all the rules are followed rigorously, and yet there still is different perspectives. How is that resolved?

Speaker 1:

So another view is what we'll call a social constructionist approach, and that holds that the processes by which scientific knowledge is achieved are social and hence ideological and interest laden, like the opposite view, that all scientific theories and hypotheses are the cultural, political, economic, personal values and perspectives and there's only them. Really Well, let me say this there's a weak form of this that argues that the allocation of research grants and the force of the marketplace steers science towards certain emphases. So the idea is you can detect the political and economic and cultural context and you can see that businesses want science to focus on certain topics towards certain goals and that the funding skews scientific research or political support or giving certain people positions, prestigious positions in a in a research facility changes the direction and character of the research and that is, that's all the way through it. So that's, that's a weak way of seeing it. It's weak in the sense that it's almost saying it's possible that it isn't always, that you could sort of minimise the harm of the social context of it by paying attention to how the market or money or politics and so on is influencing it. But there's a stronger form of this social constructionist view and that argues firstly that there is no transcendent or context-independent criterion of rational justification that renders some beliefs or hypotheses more credible than others, and B so A, let's just get these two things.

Speaker 1:

So the first part of this strong social constructionist view, because that weaker view is trying to say we can see that there is a way of doing science that isn't influenced by economics and politics and social status and personal ambition and things like that, and that we should try to make that happen. But if we push harder the social constructionist view, there's a stronger form of it that says, no, there isn't any transcendent or perfect view of science. There is no way to assess that this bit of science, this is real science, whereas this other one is kind of fake or corrupted science, that there is no way to do that. Uh, or to say, well, these people are acting selfishly, but these ones are acting altruistically, because when you push into it, these things tend to dissolve, when you imagine, oh no, I can sift out all the corrupt or false or fake or wrong influences and no, there isn't any way to do that.

Speaker 1:

All science is contextual and is filled with beliefs and hypotheses and you can't actually assess which are more credible than others. This is this stronger view says this. And the second thing is to say this that the explanation why a given set of beliefs is found in a given context depends on features of the context and not on intrinsic properties of the beliefs. So in other words, it's saying all beliefs are fixed in a social context and that even if I say, oh no, I believe that it's possible to root out subjective corruption. The reason I say that is because I'm in a social context, I've got personal beliefs, I've got faith. So you know, there aren't all. The beliefs are formed by, created by, shaped by even beliefs about trying to have a kind of pure form of science. All of it is social, all of it is cultural. In other words, it's the application of Durkheim's thesis to the sciences.

Speaker 1:

Quote the classification of things reproduces the classification of men reproduces the classification of men. You know that. In other words, we perceive the world according to ourselves, we classify the world according to us, that humans are the measure of everything. We always are, we're always seeing it from our human perspective. Everything, everything is that and there's no way to attain this view of science. That is kind of cosmic, that in science fiction there's an idea that science is a kind of objective cosmic machine of truth and that alien races all over the, in any galaxy, anywhere, can just operate this objective cosmic truth machine and arrive at the same results. But this view, much more strongly, is to say no, like the whole, even science itself is socially constructed and it's always operated like humans operating it produced human style results and perspectives. Results and perspectives, whereas I guess a Klingon or a Centauri or something operating, it would get Centauri and Klingon flavored results. So here's a quotation.

Speaker 1:

Some social constructionists argue that all outcomes in the sciences are negotiated and that social interests are involved in the negotiation of technical outcomes such as the description of experimental results, of experimental results. So the idea then is we never simply are able to see or say scientific results in an absolutely pure, like objective way, in that everything we're doing is like I like that phrase negotiated and social interests are involved in the negotiation of technical outcomes, like what are the kinds of results we were hoping for, looking for, why did we select one set of data rather than another? Everything that we're doing has a social setting and that there are social expectations and pressures and opportunities in the scientific, the way we're doing science and the way experiments are handled. So we've looked at the view that science can be purified in inverted commas from anything social. We've looked at the possibility that science is utterly and completely social and that everything is in that sense humanly subjective in science.

Speaker 1:

But there's a third approach and that's an attempt to combine these two. And that's an attempt to combine these two. So this view is to say that. So the idea here is to say, look, science is impacted by social pressures and there are like bigoted beliefs or racist, sexist, materialist, greedy interests at work, say, in the scientific community, and that affects scientific results and therefore harms scientific results. The idea is, and therefore what we need to do, is acknowledge the effect of these social, cultural, ideological forces and attempt to exclude them, correct them, and then we can have better science, better results. So it's to acknowledge the social forces and the idea is but we can create better social and ideological forces that will lead to better science and ideological forces that will lead to better science.

Speaker 1:

So this is an attempt to kind of combine them and say, yeah, there is an ideal, but the ideal isn't completely free of a social setting. You just have to get the right social setting to produce the best science. But in a way, is that feasible? To have it both ways? In a sense, see I, science either science is context dependent, in which case the new scientific community formed by this like revolution or reform of the culture and social forces in science.

Speaker 1:

And to say, look, so let's say we think science is sexist or racist, or elitist, and so we bring in new practices that are an attempt to exclude racism, sexism, elitism, whatever. We might have good social reasons to do that, but will it necessarily improve the science? It might be a different kind of science or a different kind of scientific community, but does it improve the actual science? To do that, that's a much more complicated thing. Or so, if it is socially produced? But let's think of it the other way, say, if science is controlled only by constitutive values, in which case an inclusive, say policy or a reform of the social conditions of science and scientific education and so on, a reform of the social conditions of science and scientific education and so on, it might be socially and politically desirable, but how will that affect the kind of science done?

Speaker 1:

So it's not totally like the idea of combining these two things and saying, yes, science is socially contextual, but what we need to do is produce a better social context to produce better science. You might say, yeah, ok, but what? How does what kind of society will actually produce better science? It might be a better society, better political circumstance, better, better, uh, beliefs for human flourishing, or something that will that. But will it be better science just because the people doing it, um, are, say, more socially compassionate? Does that produce better science, and that that's the complicated thing. Does it produce better science? Well, we're gonna get, we, we, we have quite strong convictions about all that, as as we explore in this podcast, but that's where we are, so let's leave it. I think that's probably enough for this. First, uh, go at getting into some of these issues and next time, um, in the next podcast. Well, let's look more at evidence and theory.