To my knowledge, there are two ways of doing science. The first resembles a child playing hide-and-seek. He has no rigorous system for finding the other players, maybe, other than looking into the place he just hid. His movements are sporadic, one moment pealing a curtain back, and the next going outside to check the bushes. He aims only for discovery, and, for him, anyone could be hiding anywhere. The world is the playing field. The other way of doing science is more methodical, something you might find an adult doing when he is coaxed into playing the same game. He systematically starts at the top floor of the house, and moves his way down, eventually going outside to find the remaining players.
To our modern and adult minds, the latter option seems the most efficient. But as is my way, I am of the opinion that children always know best, even though they don’t know why they know best. Imagination comes naturally to them, and as a guiding principle for us imagination is particularly suited to address what I take to be a problem in current scientific inquiry.
Humans have the trouble with thinking in paradigms. I often picture thoughts as bouncy balls stuck in cube, that cube being a specific paradigm. If I ask a question, any question at all, the kind of valid answers I receive are limited to the inherent content of that question. When my mother asks me how classes are going, I don’t answer “yeah, only if you put cheese on it” or “the square root of 14.” There a limited set of valid answers to this question: like “boring” or “great,” or I could even tell a long story about how my professor accidentally rubbed chalk on their face. Even this latter answer, though indirect, relates to the question in an important way.
The same can be said of science: if I ask a certain question, the answers I can receive are limited by that question.
The trick of it, or so it has been argued, is to learn how to ask the best question so as to extrapolate the best answers. A controversy over whether this is even possible could arise here, and though I could go down that track, for the sake of argument let’s assume what i'm saying is true.
Given that certain paradigms are more advantageous than others for solving issues within a specific arena, I want to move on to the arena where both the principle of a better paradigm and a childlike imagination come in handy.
Ironically, the study of prehistory is the result of a paradigm shift like the one I explain above. Prior to Darwinian evolution, the very possibility for a prehistory didn’t exist. Scientists and philosophers didn’t ask questions about origins prior to the 17th century—at least in the West. Genesis, after all, gives a clear indication that “in the beginning God created the heaven’s and the earth.” At the time, theology hadn’t considered what ‘in the beginning’ might mean beyond theological interests: things like the creation mandate and God’s aseity. Theologians, in other words, were not biologists or archeologists, they were theologians. Their theology naturally influenced the Christian scientists of the Medieval era, even on into the pre-Enlightenment.
With Darwin’s discoveries, however, came raw scientific data for which that current scientific community could give no rational account. In some of my reading, I’ve often noted the feeling of confusion and shock expressed by Christian scientists at the inability of theology to account for the new scientific data. For us, these sentiments seem both familiar and alien. Any post-Reformation worldview where solo scriptura dominates the psyche inevitably results in over-sensitivity to the exclusion scripture at any time. To be honest, however, though I understand the initial feeling, many of these overactive sentiments pervade contemporary Evangelicalism to the point of being silly. Scripture is a type of authority, it is not the authority in all things. In an simple sketch: scripture does not contain all truth; it contains certain objective truths. Scripture is doubtless the authority when formulating a definition of love, but it is not the authority on underwater basket-weaving or Post-Kantian metaphysics, nor is it, as I am suggesting on science. How can it be? (One may want to say that scripture inadvertently refers to everything. Really? We have to be careful in saying precisely what we mean. Anything is related to everything in some way. I could say that the label on my toothpaste inadvertently refers to everything, and it be equally true. What is meant is that scripture gives an account of reality, not an account of everything in that reality.)
Contemporary atheists rightly point out the flaws in both the past and present Christian psyche for failing to make this distinction. They may be operating from a problematic paradigm. I commend Creationist’s desire to uphold a literal interpretation of the Genesis 1 account. They may very well be right, and, more importantly, have somehow managed to insert teleology back into the scientific discussion. But they might likewise be misguided if all they want is to preserve a bit of theology that qualitatively goes unchanged whether the macro-evolutionary process is true or not. The miracle of creation remains a miracle whether it takes 7 seconds, 7 days, or 7 millennia. When Peter saw Jesus walk across the water, he didn’t think, ‘If only he had run across the water, now that would have been something”!
I return to paradigms and prehistory.
If we are going to construct a prehistory that resembles normal history in the most important way, the way of including facts, we can only do it on empirical grounds. This is the only reliable paradigm. To get reliable results, we can only employ the second kind of science, the methodical science to do it. Normal history is the construction of data over time from either eye witness accounts or reliable hearsay. Whether the bias of the author alters the details of that history is, of course, another question (and one with great import on this subject). At present, I only want emphasis that history needs facts to be history.
But what I find is mental gymnastics on the part of some of our contemporary scientist: I have in mind Renfrew and thinkers like him. They say they take the first approach, that of science in the older way, as an act of discovery. But they’re fooling themselves. The way they do this is by constructing a paradigm from which to ask questions, and then given that paradigm, they begin to make empirical observations. It is an attempt at discovery through a lens. With their given story, they begin to make empirical inferences. But they’re not constructing the right kind of paradigm; they’re constructing a tale.
In other words, contemporary scientists still have the propensity for assimilating data with empirical validations, but they are finding that the quantity of data (for which to make assertions toward the Darwinian model) is lacking. To resolve the issue, they tell a believable story of what might have happened within, say, the process of natural selection, then manipulating the data to see if it fits that story. But what they have done is mistaken the first view of science, discovery, with complete non-science, or narrative. In doing so, they have constructed a paradigm which limits the use of the data, not one that exploits it. In attempts to construct a paradigm for doing science, they construct a fairy tale for doing bad science, or what may be more accurately called non-science, or mythologizing.
As a result, we have professional scientists doing the work of the amateur novelist. Scientists and parts of scientific story are stuck somewhere in limbo: between art and science. For example, apotheosis as a theory is an act of the imagination, but it is neither scientific (in either sense) nor aesthetic. Darwin stuck to science, the Romantics infused aesthetics into nature, but what are these scientists doing? Can it be that they are practicing the ancient art of myth making, only leaving out the art? Their actions are logically equivalent to taking Tolkien’s Middle Earth myth, calling it prehistory, and inferring empirical data. If there's a bone, it probably belonged to an elf. If king Theodin had riches in his tomb, he was probably considered deity. In short, if the empirical accounts prove viable 1.) they prove viable only in accordance with that fairy-tale, and thus, 2.) are narrow both in application and, to use narrow in a difference sense, to the exclusion of the use of imaginative powers outside of that myth—a story they know very well that may be mistaken. This use of the imagination is not the same as the child’s, though it seems like it. Scientists limit in order to control the data, whereas a child has neither limitations nor control. On this model, nothing is left to mystery until empirical science absolutely contradicts.
Then the story has to change in order to fit the data. These scientists have been doing this now since Darwin, and have refused to change the model. One cultural upheaval arose about 5 years ago concerning the evolution into man in middle and high school text books. I forget the exact data problem, but the trouble science was being taught when it wasn't science. But science, by definition, especially empirical science, should never result in outright contradiction, only in modification. Newton's theory of gravity has kinks in it, and implications, but we still think that an apple falls from a tree for some reason. But we do not believe, as we used to, in the world-wide advent of homo sapiens. Now, apparently, humanity started with 2,000 nomads coming out of Africa. How can both stories come under the name of science?
How odd. How strange that scientists would create a mechanism, a paradigm, in an effort to find truth when that very mechanism cuts off data portions with which they have never imagined or encountered. One would think that with the wild discoveries in Quantum Physics that that sort of approach would have been done away with.
I would prefer to operate from another sort of paradigm, one which allows for the free flow of the imagination. I don’t, in constructing a prehistory, want to look at a picture in a cave and infer art because it fits well with my given paradigm. I want to be able to look a cave picture and infer either art, or a game, or a teaching lesson or whatever. The fact of my agnosticism is better than a hope in what may or may not be a fact. In other contexts, this paradigmatic approach may be best. But it does not work best for constructing a prehistory.
Why? A paradigm for the construction of prehistory must depend on facts. (This is why Renfrew succeeds with material engagement in the sense of constitutive symbolism, and fails with material engagement as concerns the extended mind.) Otherwise, we are no longer talking in terms of history; we have switched genres over into mythology or novel writing. The only continuity between prehistory and history is facts. To exclude them, is not to talk about history.
Only from the world of facts can one deduce the possibility for the unknown. The psychological phenomenon of the man who learns more and more but feels less and less intelligent should show us there is more out there than we could ever imagine. The activity of the imagination must be allowed to go wherever, without restraint, like the child. Prehistory exists, but we must be patient to find out what that means.
No comments:
Post a Comment