The Christ Centred Cosmic Civilisation
Rod Dreher wrote “to order the world rightly as Christians requires regarding all things as pointing to Christ”
Christ is the One in Whom in all things consist and humanity is not the measure of all things. If a defining characteristic of the modern world is disorder then the most fundamental act of resistance is to discover and life according to the deep, divine order of the heavens and the earth.
In this series we want to look at the big model of the universe that the Bible and Christian history provides.
It is a mind and heart expanding vision of reality.
It is not confined to the limits of our bodily senses - but tries to embrace levels fo reality that are not normally accessible or tangible to our exiled life on earth.
We live on this side of the cosmic curtain - and therefore the highest and greatest dimensions of reality are hidden to us… yet these dimensions exist and are the most fundamental framework for the whole of the heavens and the earth.
Throughout this series we want to pick away at all the threads of reality to see how they all join together - how they all find common meaning and reason in the great divine logic - the One who is the Logos, the LORD Jesus Christ - the greatest that both heaven and earth has to offer.
Colossians 1:15-23
The Christ Centred Cosmic Civilisation
Episode 78 - Reimagining Reality How Beliefs Shape Our Worldview
What if science isn't as independent from religion as we've been led to believe? Explore the fascinating connections between science and Christian background beliefs on the Christ-Centered Cosmic Civilization podcast. This episode embarks on a journey through history, revealing how even the great minds like Kant and Descartes were influenced by a Christian cultural framework. We confront the modern notion that science must be value-free and separate from theology, questioning whether such a separation is truly possible or even desirable.
Paul Feyerabend, a maverick philosopher, serves as our guide in examining the radical nature of science. Through his eyes, we see how scientific revolutions of the 15th and 16th centuries were born from courageous curiosity and defiance of norms, likened to the defiance of dogma within the medieval Catholic Church. Feyerabend's critique of contemporary scientific institutions highlights a pressing need for creativity and a pioneering spirit that challenges the established order. By supporting even controversial perspectives like those of Christian creationists, he underscores the value of questioning and rebellion in scientific progress.
How do our background beliefs shape the way we interpret reality? We dive into this compelling question, considering the powerful influence of personal, social, and cultural contexts on our perceptions. Through thought-provoking examples, we see how expectations can alter our understanding of the world, prompting us to reflect on whether true objectivity is possible. As the episode unfolds, we uncover the potential for evolving both individual and societal perspectives, demonstrating that while deeply rooted, our background beliefs are open to transformation. Join us for a thought-provoking exploration of how shifting perspectives can lead to new ways of seeing and understanding the world.
The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore
Well, welcome to the Christ-Centered Cosmic Civilization podcast. And right now we're in the middle of an investigation really into scientific method and trying to show how important background beliefs are in the scientific method, in the scientific method, and it's something we've kind of spoken about at different times throughout many episodes. But this is an attempt to address that quite directly. And the reason we're doing that is because what we ultimately want to show is that science as a whole, the scientific project as a whole, has the Christ-centered cosmic civilization as its background belief. That science is only possible once our thought is centered on Christ ruling over the cosmos, holding it all together, giving it reality, rationality, reliability. All of that is the background belief that makes science possible. And then we can go down to smaller scale background beliefs like localized ones, national, regional, cultural ones and so on. Christ and that, the post-enlightenment idea that it's possible to say something like I don't bother with theology, I'm just going to get on with science. We can understand historically why people did that. Because they may, for example, have been so frustrated with the wars of religion. This is the, this is what is often said. That the wars of religion frustrated or frightened people was let's for those that didn't understand those wars of religion or didn't care about them in any way or despaired of them. They might say, okay, I want to just get on with science and I can do that without taking any sides in theological wars or religious wars. I'm just going to apply the method that doesn't require me to take one side or the other Protestants versus Catholics or Christians versus Muslims or whatever it is. I can just get on with science. And science is value free, religion free, theology free. So that's the idea that already starts to emerge at the end of the 17th century, but it becomes very, very strong in the 18th century. But we can see that in a way, they're all operating in this entirely vigorously strong Christian culture. Atheism itself is a Christian heresy. It's utterly dependent on a Jesus-centered theology. We'll come to that in future episodes when we do a deep dive on atheism and the history of atheism. But we look back at those like the Kantian stuff or Descartes, and that idea or science is something that can be done without reference to theology and religion. We can look back and say, wow, you're all operating in this entirely Christian culture. You just don't see it. So that's what we're doing Background, background beliefs. We're digging down into that and looking at it more.
Speaker 1:And in this next section we're going to make reference to a guy called paul fireabend. Uh, he died in 1994 and that's when I it was about then that I was reading him, um, reading like his main book is a book called against method, fascinating book. But he was himself involved in that whole analysis of scientific method in the 20th century, the mid-20th century, and you've got Thomas Kuhn in the background and Paul Feierabend is coming out of that background of interacting with that and Popper and other analysts of scientific method. And Paul Firebend is interesting because he is fascinated by all of this. And then when he starts to lecture in America in the 60s, in America in the 60s and there's a whole new variety of person who's starting to come to university from many different cultural backgrounds and he's aware that they see the world in many different ways and that it's not totally obvious to them to see the relevance of certain claims and theories because they have such different cultural backgrounds. And it's part of that 60s revolution of realizing how differently people see the world and that there are many possible ways of seeing the world. And that just the idea that there's just one simple, fixed view of the world and there's just a right answer to every question that's all up in the air in the 60s, paul Feyerabend is science was this kind of forerunner of freedom, radical, open mindedness, let's look at all possible ways of seeing the world and find out, experiment, investigate.
Speaker 1:In the 16th century or 15th century, even science was then perceived to be something that was radically open to different ways of seeing the world and investigating radically different ways of seeing the world, and that, even if a lot of evidence could be given for traditional ways of seeing the world, science and the great pioneers of science of that period were saying yeah, no, there is lots of evidence maybe for these Aristotelian ways of seeing the world, but we have different ways of seeing the world. But we have different ways of seeing the world and we're collecting, we're in the process of collecting evidence for new ways of seeing the world and we're working out new ways of seeing the world that we think are better and more accurate ones, even if initially these scientific pioneers may not have had as much evidence, because they were still in the process of gathering it and finding out how to gather evidence and how to in, how to investigate new theories, new ways of seeing. But what appealed to Paul Feyerabend was that these pioneers of science had this attitude of wanting to see the world in bigger ways, different ways, challenging authority, challenging established ways of seeing it and being prepared to kind of almost take a risk and say this is something that a lot of, there's a lot of evidence against this, but I got this feeling this might be right, a right way of seeing the world, and I'm going to investigate that and test it and explore and gather evidence and so on. And then it turns out that these brilliant pioneering scientists, in the end their view proved right. So Paul Farabern had this idea of science as something radical, pioneering, mind-expanding, something that had no fear of inventiveness, creativity. That creativity and curiosity and a kind of exploratory creativity was part of science at its finest.
Speaker 1:There was a book written because Nature magazine once described him as the worst enemy of science, the worst enemy of science, and so there were some essays written in memory of him and Gonzalo Munoz wrote about him. Paul Feyerabend was once described in Nature as the worst enemy of science, but he was no enemy of science. On the contrary, he showed how complex and exciting science is and how it may become at once more fruitful and more humane, and that idea of a more humane science. Now, why that is said is because he felt that in say the 16th century, science was the radically creative, exploratory, open-minded revolution that was prepared to challenge anything and it was challenging the authorities of tradition.
Speaker 1:But Paul Feyerabend says like in the 60s in the modern age, says like in the 60s in the modern age, what had happened was science had become too complacent as an institution, as a tradition. It had become a tradition that was too complacent, too tied to static institutions and static ways of seeing the world, too satisfied with mediocrity and saying, well, we haven't got answers to we don't know all the answers, but we've got, we're confident of some of them and that's good enough. He felt there was a feeling of settling for something that's good enough and rather than that radical dissatisfaction, radical sense of saying let us challenge all the ideas and find better ones, better ones all the time. And he felt no, what science had done. The scientific institutions, he felt in the 1960s, had taken on the role of the medieval Catholic church, of shutting down radical investigation and creativity and insisting that people accept what they were saying on mere authority. He was saying people are told, like your ideas are wrong because we say so and here's our arguments, and if you don't find them believable, you're wrong, you're wrong, you have to find them believable. And he said whoa, hang on. Like that's exactly what was happening in the 16th century um, in the attack on the pioneers of the scientific project. And now the institutions of science have become like that and insisting that everyone believe what they say, um on, based on their authority and their arguments, saying here's our evidence and if you don't believe our evidence, you're wrong, you have to believe it, kind of thing. And he felt no, why are we like that? Why aren't we still with that pioneering, open-minded, fearless creativity in searching out new and better ways to see the world? And that was what he was like. So he was kind of obsessed with these moments of revolution in science, because at those moments of revolution and at key paradigm shifts in scientific thinking, key paradigm shifts in scientific thinking that the pioneers of that are having to go against, sometimes lots of evidence, because they maybe intuit or have seen clues that they wish to push into and follow up, and then they accumulate evidence until eventually they've accumulated so much evidence that the revolution happens and then lots of people adopt this new way of seeing and he said that should be right, at the core of scientific method, a radical open mindedness that the world is much bigger and more wonderful than our models accept and we should want to see them in that bigger and better way.
Speaker 1:Just as a little footnote, he was quite supportive of Christian creationists, not because he necessarily believed that Christian creationists were right, but he liked the fact that they didn't accept the scientifically traditional answers that were sort of insisted upon in education and he's like saying well, here are people who say I don't believe that, I think I want to. And he liked the creationists because they were trying to find scientific reasons for a creationist perspective. Now, he himself didn't believe in the creationist view, that kind of rebellious attempt to find evidence of a counter hypothesis. He thought that was healthy and good and that rather than shutting it down, there should be room for that sort of thing. So that's fascinating. I only found that out about him relatively recently and it is a fascinating thing about him relatively recently. And it is a fascinating thing about him.
Speaker 1:So I'm sorry I've gone on quite so long about Paul Feyerabend, but he is interesting because he, like quite often the things that we're looking at in the Christ-centered cosmic civilization, is, we're aware that reality is in fact a lot, lot bigger, richer, deeper, higher, more fascinating, more mysterious, more, um more everything really, than the models of reality we come up with, with, our, our human limitation and our systems of thought. And so, in a way, paul Feyerabend's view of science is good because he's like, instead of science being a limiting thing, it's an expansive thing and he would want to scientifically investigate anything and everything, instead of creating a view of science that is shutting down. Investigation, limiting questions, and so on. Investigation, limiting questions, and so on.
Speaker 1:Now some people would say there are problems with his proposals. Yeah, there certainly are, but sometimes people misunderstand him that what he's looking for is the radical open-mindedness, the courageous curiosity, because sometimes people would say is he saying then that if you go to the doctor and the doctor is saying, oh, I've got a radically new proposal to deal with your infection, radically new proposal to deal with your infection, I'm going to sacrifice a dove on the roof and throw some petals off, and that's what I think. What would he regard that as equally valid as taking antibiotics? And then of course, that's not. Uh, what poor fire ben say he said because he would want to say well, why do you think that? What is the theory that you're proposing? What evidence have you collected? And don't do this experimentation at the cost of human lives immediately. Find some way of testing this idea about sacrificing a bird on the roof and throwing petals off. Try that in a more controlled environment and then see if that does in fact yield great healing results or something. It's not that all proposals are equally valid or equally to be applied or so on. Rather, he's just saying let's, there isn't.
Speaker 1:His book, in a way, is called against method because he's saying there isn't just a kind of impersonal machine method that you can just say oh, I've got this perfect method, this machine and it and I just have to turn the machine and out comes truth. He says it doesn't work like that. Human beings find truth or push towards truth or approximate towards truth, not simply because they discovered this perfect machine that will find out truth and all you've got to do is run the machine and truth pops out. The end truth isn't like that. That understanding the universe isn't like that, that it isn't as if the centauri or the klingons or aliens in all across the whole galaxy, all arrive at exactly the same model of the universe. That's not true. The, the seeing the world and describing it is personal, is social, has emotion and culture involved in it. So, look, we might come back to him and there's a lot more he has to say. That's fascinating, but I wanted to introduce him because I do quote him from time to time in this next section of our Christ-centered cosmic civilization investigation.
Speaker 1:So here let's get back to this issue of background belief. Background beliefs do not only at the power of background beliefs and some people would say, well, look, we all can agree on the evidence or the observation. Background beliefs affect the way we interpret the observations or the data. But there's more to it than that. We've seen already. Definitely, background beliefs affect the way we interpret the data, but there's more than that. Background beliefs affect the data, affect what we actually observe. Data like what do you, what you expect to see changes what you actually see. Now you might think, no, that isn't. That can't be true. Like you, like what you, what is out there to be seen. That's objective, that's you, what you want, what you expect to to see can't affect what you actually see, can it? No, like listen, it definitely affects what you expect to see, definitely affects what you actually see.
Speaker 1:Like there's an example that someone told me recently and they were saying that they can, they can think, they can think I don't know where the pepper is and they don't think that it's in the cupboard in the kitchen, say so, I don't think it's in, I don't think it's there. And then they open the cupboard and they're not expecting to see it, so they don't see it. But it actually is there and someone late will go well, what is that? Look at it, it's right there. And it's right there. And then you go oh, it was there the whole time. I didn't see it because I didn't kind of expect to see it. That's an easy example.
Speaker 1:There's loads of ways that happens, that what we don't expect to see, sometimes we don't recognize a person because we're seeing them in a totally different context and we don't expect to see that person in that context and we actually don't really recognize them. We don't know, we don't kind of see them. There's lots of examples of this. So Paul Feyerabend he chronicles the way people have reported the appearance of the moon. I found this really fascinating. He looked at what people said they saw when they looked at the moon and he went through all sorts of different cultures and time periods and and people were describing what they saw when they looked at the moon and he found that, like, although everybody is seeing the same thing, what they describe that they are seeing is very, very different and it depends on what they believe the moon is. So he said he, this is and I've noticed this in lots of different situations too even like what what they, what a person, a person will describe, could describe somebody. This happened very recently.
Speaker 1:Two different people described seeing a person saying something. One person believed that the speaker was angry. So they said I saw how angry they were. The other person didn't believe they were angry. That person believed that the speaker was passionate and cared a lot about the subject and they said I saw how much they cared about this subject. And when I said but I heard they were angry, they'd go. No, they weren't even a bit angry, they were happy and excited by the subject. So literally two people observe the same speaker. One observed them as angry, the other observed them as happy because of what each of them believed about that person. One of them believed they were angry, so saw them as angry. The other person believed they were happy and excited and saw them as happy, as an excited. And then I know we might say but were they? Did you find out? Were they actually angry or were they actually happy? I'm not well, I can't remember now. Maybe neither of them, no, but maybe one of them was right and they were actually angry or they were actually happy. But that's not irrelevant at the moment. What's relevant is they what they thought. They thought the person was angry. They saw them as angry. They thought the person was happy. They saw them as happy.
Speaker 1:What they actually saw with their eyes was affected by what they expected to see, sort of thing. So it was common in antiquity to understand the moon as a turning basin or a rolling sphere turning basin or a rolling sphere. And so people reported that they saw the moon either turning or rolling, because that's what they thought. They either thought it was a bowl that was turning over or a sphere that was rotating. That that was, yes, if they say, is a sphere and it's rolling around. So those that believed it was a sphere that was rolling said, oh, I saw that I saw the moon rolling. Those that believe it was a bowl that was turning said I saw the moon turning and that's interesting because their expectation affects what they saw. But interestingly, after the Copernican revolution and after everybody changes to see the moon as this stable, static, like large scale planet thing in the sky, like effectively a stationary object that is orbiting around the Earth, you know, but a stationary thing that isn't like rolling nor turning. So after the Copernican revolution, really pretty much everybody saw that the face of the moon was stationary and they saw not the moon rolling or turning. But they would say during an eclipse or something they'd say I saw the shadow of the earth pass across the face of the moon. Now we would say, yeah, that is the right thing, that is the correct way of looking at the moon. Yeah, it doesn't really matter whether it's the correct way or not.
Speaker 1:What people described they were seeing was a function of their background beliefs about it. The same state of affairs was observed quite differently because of background beliefs. We actually see this all the time and I've seen that in quite intense scientific, experimental situations as well, where a person is looking, believes something's going to happen. They see an effect happen, they describe it as, yes, the thing happened that I expected to happen has. Yes, the thing happened that I expected to happen. But somebody else sees the same thing and they, they don't have those expectations. They're not involved in that experiment at all. They're doing maybe a completely different experiment. They see it and go well, hang on, like what do you think just happened? I, I didn't see that at all, and they saw something different, because they weren't they. They weren't looking for the same things.
Speaker 1:So you might say, well then, is it possible to see reality at all?
Speaker 1:Can we never see what the world's actually like?
Speaker 1:Are we always only seeing our own imaginary picture of the world? Is it the case that we are sort of all locked into the perspective that a particular set of background beliefs provide? Is it possible to break out of background beliefs and see things differently? Well, yeah, it is, and that's what we've been thinking about. Isn't it that there are times where a radic, a different way of looking at the world happens? Or even, like in that example, one person saw that the person is angry, the other person saw them as happy, but then, if they kept observing and the person revealed that they say were happy and they weren't angry, then the person who saw them as angry would go oh yeah and no, actually they were happy and they would see them differently.
Speaker 1:So it is possible to change the background beliefs, and that can happen on a big scale, of course. Were a whole paradigm of looking, way of looking at the universe changes and we look at the universe what, from being in what like, like in the, we think about that example of an aristotelian way of looking at the universe to a copernican way of looking at the universe. But that kind of thing has happened, you know, many, many times in different ways. So it isn't that the background belief is immovable, it can be moved. It can be moved and that evidence can be collected and built up means way of looking, a new way of looking can become ever more persuasive until there's this shift and then this totally different way of looking becomes adopted on a large scale. So it can happen. But we want to think perhaps next on how does that happen?