Scientific Ideology

I have been thinking lately about skepticism, empiricism, and ideology. These three concepts are not synonymous but all too often they are treated as if they are... particularly by mend and women like Richard Dawkins. Part of this post, to be sure, is a result of the hub-bub surrounding Ben Stein's new documentary about Intelligent Design and the bias within the scientific community, but part of it predates that hullabaloo and is rooted in conversations with a microbiologist friend about faith and sociology.

Let's start with an examination of definitions. Skepticism denotes the doubt of an item's truth value or, if you like, “disbelief in any claims of ultimate knowledge.” Empiricism is, of course, epistemology through experience—the use of the natural senses (and amplifications thereof) to ascertain true principles about our material reality. Ideology, in the sense that I and my fellow Cultural Materialists employ it, is “any socially constructed and maintained philosophical orientation that operates on conscious and unconscious levels through norms, values, mores, and laws.” Empiricism becomes an “enfant terrible” in light of these other two terms.

I have a great appreciation for the sciences and I am a rather open-minded theist when it comes to scientific data. I've adapted my understanding of the creation account because of what astrophysics tells me about the age of the universe and what microbiology tells me of our species' age and line of descent. [NB: It helps that the literary critical approach to Genesis allows for this view (written as a Hebrew chiastic, it would be both reasonable and permissible to view the creation narrative as a symbolic representation rather than an objective historical record).] I think that Christians need to have this level of openness and must not hedge ourselves in through erroneous applications of perceived timeless truths. I trust the Bible and Tradition because of my trust in the Spirit of God who inspired and preserves them... but I do not twist them to imply what they were never meant to connote. As rational believers, we should embrace much of what empiricism has to offer. There is nothing innately wrong with studying material reality.

The problem, as I see it, is that the scientific community has gone beyond the utilitarian application of empiricism and has, through this abuse, fashioned a skeptical ideology. It is not surprising that this would happen because ALL groups form ideologies. It is inescapable. It's just how the human works as a social animal... and ideology-formation is not without its merits.

But empiricism makes no claims about spiritual reality because it would go beyond empiricism's jurisdiction. It is, by its very definition, unconcerned with items of knowledge which cannot be sensed in the natural way. But that should be the extent of it. To say that empiricism somehow disproves the supernatural is like saying that the color red is absent from the visual spectrum because my microphone has never sensed it! The scientist speaks out of turn when she claims that God cannot exist or, by the lights of empiricism, “probably” does not exist.

It is one thing to use empiricism as a tool to learn about reality. It is quite another to use that system as your sole epistemological tool. It is the IDEOLOGY of the community that brings about the censuring of those who would ponder the possibility of Intelligent Design. It is the IDEOLOGY of Dawkins, rather than his training, which provides him his default antagonism toward religious faith. He endorses the possibility of Intelligent Design, at least in the Stein documentary, but he and all other theorists of note have no universally-satisfactory origin narrative to offer other than “it happened... SOMEhow.” Though he himself would admit that life may well have began through an extraterrestrial, “alien” influence, he cannot (or will not) posit that any details of that external cause could be known in any of our human religious systems.

Why is this? In light of a missing set of data, should he not be open to any reasonable possibility until that data set is found? And is not a highly-intelligent extraterrestrial source as reasonable (or as far-fetched) as a theistic system? The answer is hubris. Pure and simple.

To say that life began beyond of our planet is to table the creation question and allow it to slip into infinite regress (who created our alien creators?). Faced with a dearth of empirical evidence to explain the origin, he says, essentially, well the evidence exists... but it is just “offworld” at the moment, please call again later (presumably after we've explored the galaxy and found that older planet which can offer us our missing link to that first cause).

To petulantly cling to his closed-minded notion, Dawkins and his ilk will promote theories which hold just as little water in the realm of science than does today's Intelligent Design paradigm. His refusal to yield any ground to theists is because his pride will not accept that there can be epistemological pathways other than material empiricism. Rather than embrace that transcendent question mark and say “we honestly do not know,” he will say “well we know that whatever the answer is, it's quite obviously NOT any archaic religious system.”

My problem with Dawkins is my problem with most scientists: he is not scientific enough! The scientist must embrace a practical agnosticism... but Dawkins and his peers have insisted instead on a “necessary atheism.” They do this because they don't see the boundary between the purpose of their pursuit and the ideology of their community.

When faced with the off-the-cuff musing of so-called rational man or the religion that stretched back into antiquity and has been discussed by minds as brilliant as St Aquinas, I'll choose the one that does not smack of the teachings of a sci-fi-writer-cum-religious-guru. Who knows, maybe the publisher of Dianetics would be interested in Dawkins' alien cosmology.