Natural Science

The "evolution debates" in Kansas are about much more than evolution:

The Kansas school board's hearings on evolution weren't limited to how the theory should be taught in public schools. The board is considering redefining science itself. Advocates of 'intelligent design' are pushing the board to reject a definition limiting science to natural explanations for what's observed in the world.

Instead, they want to define it as 'a systematic method of continuing investigation,' without specifying what kind of answer is being sought. The definition would appear in the introduction to the state's science standards.

The proposed definition has outraged many scientists, who are frustrated that students could be discussing supernatural explanations for natural phenomena in their science classes.

...Stephen Meyer, a senior fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which supports intelligent design, said changing the schools' definition of science would avoid freezing out questions about how life arose and developed on Earth.

The current definition is 'not innocuous,' Meyer said. 'It's not neutral. It's actually taking sides.'

Of course, he's right. It's not "neutral." You know why? Because the world isn't neutral. You see, there's this thing called "the world," and we're a part of it. The world isn't whatever we pray for it to be - it exists and has certain characteristics that are very much not neutral in their effects on us. If Meyer wants to test this, perhaps he should jump off a tall building somewhere. But, wait, this sort of "test" is the very thing these people are against in the first place. If Meyer jumps off a building and goes "splat," is there a natural explanation for this such as "gravity" or is there a supernatural explanation such as "God was punishing him"? See, I'm thinking the first is the scientific, or "natural," explanation and the second is the unscientific, or "supernatural" explanation. Meyer, of course, can believe whatever he wants and he can tell his kids whatever he wants, but when his kids go to school to learn about "science," they should not be taught supernatural explanations for things.

Let me clarify, while I'm at it, what I mean by "natural" explanation and why this is far more important than being just about the "hard sciences" like biology, physics and chemistry as the word "natural" may make people think. For example, sociology is a social science. This does not mean that we look to biology, physics and chemistry to explain the social world. Of course, sometimes they matter a great deal, but many, many explanations of things in the social world require no knowledge of these things. They do, however, require non-supernatural explanations. If we want to understand why there's so much violence in the world, or why certain groups hate one another or why organizations work the way they do or anything resembling these questions, we cannot, as social scientists, appeal to some supernatural force or purpose. Poor people aren't poor because "God is mad at them," but because of certain "natural," i.e. not supernatural, processes that real people are a part of. The United States government doesn't do what it does because God speaks to our President or because we're "chosen" people who can do no wrong. If we want to understand how the United States government works, we treat it as a natural phenomenon like gravity: we observe it, analyze it, pose questions about it, experiment with hypotheses about it, and when we have some evidence, we try to form theories about it. Then we keep asking questions, keep observing and analyzing and try to come up with better theories about it because, with science, truths are always falsifiable, contingent on evidence we gather from the world.

This is in direct contrast with, say, religion, where the answers are given ahead of time and then the world must conform with The Word. Without this "naturalistic bias" that binds our explanations to nonsupernatural causes, the "systematic method of continuing investigation" part of the "new definition of science" rings hollow. Theologians may use a "systematic method of continuing investigation" when reading religious texts, but what are they doing? They're trying to better understand truths that are understood to already be there; they just have to interpret the text in the correct way - who cares what our experience with the actual world says.

Interestingly enough, this is very similar to the approach to studying the social world that many Left academics have been advocating, most notoriously under the banner of postmodernism but it's more pervasive than that. The idea is that sociology, you see, really isn't a "science," and for that matter, "science" doesn't really exist because it's not "objective truth," really. It's just another "discourse" or "culture" and the knowledge it produces is no different than any other "discourse." (I'm not kidding - I was in a graduate seminar where we had to take a stand on this issue, phrased in almost the exact same language I just used, and I was in the small, minority group.) The attack on science because it's not "neutral" and does not produce "absolute truth" should sound familiar - it's very similar to what the theocrats are saying. It also misses the boat on what science is all about in the same way. It's not about neutrality and it's not about absolute truth. Anybody who paid attention during their fourth grade science projects would know this. It's about the fact that we should strive for non-supernatural explanations of the world through, yes, a "systematic method of continuing investigation" that produces truths that are always, always, always contingent on how well they work for us in our interaction with the world. If you don't believe this is possible, then you must believe it's a total miracle that your car works, that your house hasn't fallen over and that, somehow, you wake up breathing each morning.

Of course, many have used "science" as a shield through which they sneak their claims about absolute, objective truths about the way the world both is and ought to be, but this is unscientific pseudoscience, whether it's used to justify racism, sexism, genocide or, simply, theocracy masquerading as "intelligent design." And many of those who reject "science" in the way I described are repulsed by all of these things. But they've thrown the baby out with the bath water. Now that the theocrats are borrowing their logic about science, texts and cultures, they've got nothing to stand on. The chickens are coming home to roost and the folks who deny everything but "socially constructed multiple realities" have no answer to the assault on science because they don't consider themselves part of science. In fact many consider themselves opponents of science, what with it's "Western imperialist discourse of totalistic rationality."

In case you haven't noticed, I'm a bit hostile about all of this. I expect idiocy from people like Stephen Meyer. What bothers me is that people don't immediately get what's so ridiculous about his new definition of science. For this we can blame many things, and the invisibility (even ignorance) of social scientists in this discussion is probably not even at the top of the list, but it's the part of the list that I'm most involved with so it bothers me the most.