4 Authority, Autonomy, and Tradition
I have suggested that there is an error in the frequently repeated statement that we live in a pluralist society. We are pluralist in respect of what we call beliefs but we are not pluralist in respect of what we call facts. The former are a matter of personal decision; the latter are a matter of public knowledge. The difficulty of maintaining this absolute distinction between knowing and believing has been illustrated in a number of recent cases which have been going through the United States courts up to the Supreme Court. In one case the proposal to teach creation along with evolution in the public schools has been declared illegal. One view of the origin, nature, and destiny of human beings may be taught in the public schools; another may not. In the long judgment handed down by the Court there is no suggestion that questions of truth or error were considered. The only question is whether the proposed view is science or religion. If it is science it may be taught-true or false; if it is religion it may not be taught-true or false. For science is what we all know, and religion is what some people believe. By contrast, in one of the state courts the school board has been successfully sued by a group of Christian parents on the ground that what is taught in the public schools is really a religion, namely secular humanism, which is a total view of human nature and destiny in which one may or may not believe. No doubt the judgment of the State Court will be appealed, and no doubt the Supreme Court will overturn it. But the point is: how and where do we draw the boundary between what we know and what we believe? A whole series of Supreme Court judgments in the United States depend on drawing this line. But can it be done?
There was a time when no such line was drawn. For most of human history it had been thought that all knowledge was one and that theology was as much part of human knowledge as astronomy or history. Even as late as the end of the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton was as much involved in theology as in astronomy and physics. How has the line come to be drawn?
As I mentioned earlier, Hannah Arendt has suggested that it was the invention of the telescope (and perhaps the microscope) that started the trouble. When people peered through these new instruments, they discovered that things were not exactly what they had been thought to be. How, then, are we to be sure that we are not deceived by appearance? How can we be certain? From the asking of this question-one can argue-there followed the whole program of the past three hundred years of European history, a program of systematic scepticism. Every supposed truth must be critically examined afresh. Old traditions and dogmas must be exposed to the acids of critical doubt, and only what survives is to be retained. The rest can be thrown away. That is the only safe path from the darkness of superstition, dogma, and tradition to the clear light of truth.
The name usually quoted as the great pioneer of this movement is that of Descartes. He sought passionately for a firm foundation for knowledge, something that no rational person could doubt, and for a way of building systematically on that foundation by means of clear and distinct ideas, words and concepts whose meaning was determinate. The ideal was to be found in mathematics, where everything is absolutely clear and distinct and everything is related to everything else in a coherent way which reason can grasp. And, as is well known, he found his starting point in the famous statement cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am."
Let me suggest three questions about this program. In the first place there is already a great act of faith. How do we know that things are such that we can ever expect to enjoy this kind of total insurance against error? Why should we rule out the possibility that things are such that human life is intended to require the taking of risks? It seems, in fact, that both human and animal life requires taking risks. What grounds are there for thinking that this idea of total certainty is anything other than an illusion, a piece of wishful thinking which has no relation to reality? We know very well that insurance companies make large profits out of this desire to be safe against risk, but did God consult the insurance companies in designing the world? There is certainly no proof that this assumption is other than illusion.
Second, even if we should grant that the statement "I think, therefore I am" is proof against doubt, it is so only because it makes no contact with any reality outside the thinking self-outside Descartes's famous stove in which this great thought came to him. May it not be the case, as modern scientists have shown, that only statements which can be doubted make any contact with reality? We may take mathematics as our ideal of a kind of thinking which is not open to doubt, but mathematics is itself a construct of the human mind, and we should heed the words of Einstein: "As far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality" (Ideas and Opinions, 1973, p. 233. I owe this reference to Professor T. F. Torrance).
Third, we have to examine the program for "clear and distinct ideas." This requires a more thorough examination. Ideas can only be handled by the use of words. We may have clear and distinct visual images and no verbal description will be a substitute for these, but ideasif they are to have any interpersonal currency-have to be expressed in words. And words are useful only insofar as their meaning is indeterminate. If the meaning of words was to be absolutely clear and distinct, there would have to be as many words as there are things in the universe. Every word we use is useful only insofar as it is part of a whole language, and every language is a distinct way of grasping and ordering the experience of the people who use it. This is true even at the simplest levels. When I point to an animal and say: "That is a dog," the word "dog" is useful only because it can refer to a large range of animals of an enormous variety of shapes, sizes, colors, and habits. I can use it confidently only if I have enough experience of these animals to be sure that this specimen is one of that class. There might be some doubt in my mind (not being an expert) about whether it was a dog or a fox. In respect of many biological species one has to be an expert to know whether the specimen in question belongs to this or that species. The point is that the use of the species name is meaningful only because it has a reference which is not absolutely fixed. As Polanyi has put it, "Only words of indeterminate meaning can have a bearing on reality" (Personal Knou~led~e, p. 251). If the meaning of words were determinate, all verbal statements would be tautologies. Polanyi also quotes some words of A. N. Whitehead: "There is not a sentence which adequately states its own meaning. There is always a background of presupposition which defies analysis by reason of its infinitude" (Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 88). Moreover, the full sense of the word depends on the culture in which the language has been shaped. In some cultures a dog is seen as a member of the household and an object of affection; in others it is primarily a scavenger and an object of contempt. The word "clog" has distinctly different meanings in the two cultures, and the full meaning of the word can never be exhaustively specified.
I hope that the importance of this point will become clearer in the course of the argument. As an introduction to the critique of the Cartesian program, let me take a famous statement of Bertrand Russell about the way in which scientific truth is established, the way in which we come to be able to say "We know," as distinct from "Some people believe." Russell writes:
In arriving at a scientific law there are three main stages: the first consists of observing the significant facts; the second in arriving at a hypothesis which, if it is true, would account for the facts; the third in deducing from this hypothesis consequences which can be tested by observation. (The Scientific Outlook, p. 58)
In the ensuing discussion I am following the argument of Drusilla Scott, Everyman Revived: The Cominonsense of Michael Polanyi.
This is beautifully clear, but does it explain what actually happens? Let us apply the critical method to each of the three stages.
1. "Observing the significant facts." We have to ask, "Significant for what?" There are billions of "facts" lying around all the time; which ones are significant? It depends, of course, on what you are interested in. For the scientist interested in solving a problem they are the facts which are significant for that purpose. If he simply examines facts at random he will get nowhere and waste his time. The scientist has to identify the problem and then judge which facts have significance in relation to that problem. That is a matter for personal judgment and there are no rules for deciding it. And it must be a good problem. Years have been wasted in the attempt to solve problems which led nowhere; witness, for example, the centuries spent in seeking the secret of perpetual motion, or of making gold out of base metals. There are many modern examples. A good scientist is one who can identify a good problem. But what is "a good problem"?
What, indeed, exactly is a problem? Here we touch a perplexity which has puzzled thinkers from Plato onward. What are you doing when you try to solve a problem? Are you looking for what you know or for what you do not know? If you know, there is no problem; if you do not know, how do you know what to look for? Indeed, how do you know that there is anything at the end of the trail? The answer seems to be that to recognize a problem is to sense, by a kind of intuition, that there is something to be discovered which has not yet fully revealed itself but of which there are hints. A good scientist is one who has a sound intuition about where that something lies, and on that basis is able to identify facts which may be significant for searching in that direction. But he has no proof in advance that his intuition is correct. It is a matter of faith, and he has to stake his professional life on it, in the sense that if the intuition is false he may waste years of his life in a futile quest. There are many tragic examples of such long and eventually futile efforts. And very clearly this is not a matter of clear and distinct ideas and of things which cannot be doubted. Here is how one of the greatest scientists has described the quest. I am quoting from Einstein's The World as I See It (p. 125). "The supreme task of the physicist is the search for those highly universal laws from which a picture of the world can be obtained by pure deduction. There is no logical path leading to these laws. They are only to be reached by intuition, based upon something like an intellectual love." This passionate search is the only context in which the scientist can begin to guess which facts are significant. It is a venture of faith, believing where one cannot yet see. Without this faith and this "intellectual love," science cannot begin.
2. We move to Russell's second stage, the framing of a hypothesis. Here again the history of science demonstrates that this is never a matter of step-by-step logical argument. There are no rules for framing hypotheses. It is much more a matter of intuition and imagination. Some of the most significant new theories have come from a vision or a dream. The immensely creative generalizations first formulated by Newton and by Einstein were in no sense the result of a process which could be described in terms of rules or fixed procedures. As one physicist has said of Newton's laws, "They are the achievements of the human imagination and insight hardly equalled by any poet" (Sir Arthur Vick, "The Making of a Scientist," The Listener 29.1.59). And Einstein is recorded as expressing his delight when the poet St. John Perse spoke to him of the importance of intuition in poetry. "But the same thing is true for the man of science," he said. "The mechanics of discovery are neither logical nor intellectual. It's a sudden illumination, almost a rapture. Later, to be sure, intelligence and analysis and experiment confirm (or invalidate) the intuition. But initially there is a great leap of the imagination." (The conversation is reported in Crossan, The Dark Interval, 1975, p. 31.) If all knowledge were to come up to Descartes's specification, scientific discovery would never happen.
3. Finally we come to Russell's third step, the verification of a hypothesis by experiment. Here again there is a great oversimplification of the way scientists actually work. A true hypothesis will prove itself true in all kinds of unexpected ways, and scientists will be continually testing it in new situations. But every day, in laboratories all over the world, there are experiments which yield results different from what the theory would require. Probably the majority of these are put down to mistakes in procedure. Many of them are left aside as puzzles to be considered later. Only if they point the way to some new and interesting problem are they followed up; otherwise scientists would waste their time in useless experiments. And, finally, a theory is abandoned only when it has been shown that there is another theory which is more intellectually and aesthetically satisfying and which can account for more of the facts. It is well known that when a new theory is propounded, such as those of Copernicus or Einstein, there will usually be for some years a passionate debate between the defenders of the old and the advocates of the new. The outcome may be in doubt for some time. But one thing is certain: scientists do not abandon a theory simply because some experiments have yielded results which do not confirm it; they abandon it only when a better theory is available. This point is particularly striking in the field of biology. A succession of scientists have pointed out enormous inconsistencies and impossibilities in the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection among random mutations. Cosmologists have affirmed that the known time-span of the universe is insufficient even for the earliest steps of this process. There is an almost total blank in many of the places where the intermediate stages between species should be represented in the fossil record. These and many other facts which seem to make the theory untenable are widely recognized. But until a better theory is produced, this one remains in place. It can never be proved; it might reasonably be held to be disproved by many arguments. But it remains the accepted theory until something held to be more acceptable takes its place.
We have to conclude that Russell's account does not do justice to the way science actually works. If we attend only to the textbook writers and the popularizers of science we get the impression that all this is "fact," quite different from the worlds of imagination and intuition in which poets move and from the world of faith in which religious people move. But if we look at the way scientists actually work, we see that this is a false impression. There are not two separate avenues to understanding, one marked "knowledge" and the other marked "faith." There is no knowing without believing, and believing is the way to knowing. The quest for certainty through universal doubt is a blind alley. The program of universal doubt, the proposal that every belief should be doubted until it could be validated by evidence and arguments not open to doubt, can in the end only lead-as it has led-to universal scepticism and nihilism, to the world which Nietzsche foresaw and which Allan Bloom and other contemporary writers describe.
Let us then return to the problem which Descartes set himself to solve. It is of course true that our eyes can deceive us, that perception is fallible, that "seems to be" is not necessarily the same as "is." How do we in fact make any trustworthy contact with reality? How do we escape from the pure subjectivity into which Descartes has led us, from a situation in which we have lost confidence in our capacity to know things as they really are? Let us, following Michael Polanyi again, turn from using the visual sense-as most of the philosophers of the last three hundred years have done in their discussion of perception-to using the tactual image.
Polanyi invites us to consider our use of tools. We take a hammer and use it to drive in a nail. The impact of the hammer on the nail is felt through a pressure on the palm of the hand. But we are not (when we are intent on driving in the nail) conscious of what is happening in the palm of the hand. We are conscious of the impact of the hammer on the nail. That is where we focus. We are tacitly aware of the pressure on the palm, but focally aware of the impact on the nail. If we start thinking about what is happening in the palm, we shall miss the nail. Now transfer this to an activity which is concerned with exploring reality rather than with knocking in a nail. A surgeon uses a probe to investigate a cavity which cannot be observed directly. No doubt there is a slight pressure of the probe on his hand, but he pays no attention to this; he attends to what is happening at the end of the probe. One can almost say that the probe is an extension of his hand: he feels the lumps and hollows that the probe explores. He indwells the probe; it is an extension of himself. He may be tacitly aware of the feeling in his hand, but he is focally aware of what the probe is finding out about the patient's body. Note two more points: first, when he is a student learning the job and is introduced to this type of probe for the first time, he will have to attend to the probe, focus attention on it; but when he is an experi enced surgeon he will only be tacitly aware of it, focally aware of what he is finding out through it. Second, while he is using the probe, he is relying on it. A time may come when he is no longer satisfied that it is the right instrument. He may need to discard it and find another. But while he is using it, he must trust it. He cannot at the same time rely on it and doubt it. He uses it a-critically.
Now, says Polanyi, consider that probe as an example of the means we are using all the time to understand reality. We use words. We have to learn to use them. When we learn a new word we have to attend to it, focus on it. If we come across a horrible new word like "eschatology" or "contextualization," we have to focus on it and find out exactly what it is supposed to be useful for. When we start using it, throwing it around in our theological essays, we do not attend to it focally: we attend to the meaning which we hope it conveys. While we use it we rely on it to do what we want. We make it our own. We indwell it, as the surgeon does the probe. We are tacitly aware of it, but focally we are attending to the meaning we are trying to convey. Like the surgeon, we may come to doubt whether it is the right word for the job. We may write a sceptical essay in which we talk about "contextualization" as a word which some people use but which we do not think helpful for understanding what is really involved in communicating the gospel. But if we use it without quotation marks, we are relying on it to do the job. And, obviously, since we cannot write an essay in which every word is in quotation marks, it means that we are relying on these words to do the job. We use them confidently, a-critically. If we did not, we would have to be totally dumb.
But words are obviously only the most elementary of tools. We can only use them as part of a language which is shaped by the experience of a whole people. Behind every word there is a history. I use the word "experience." Used in that way it is a fairly new word in English. It used to have the same meaning as "experiment"; it has come to have its present meaning in English theological writing during the past hundred years, partly as the result of developments in German philosophy. I have some reasons for doubting whether it is a useful tool. But while I use it (without quotation marks) I am using it a-critically, relying on it to make contact with reality. But it has no meaning apart from a set of concepts which it was used to express.
So we have words, languages, concepts-all tools on which we have to rely a-critically while we use them. And beyond these there is the vast language of mathematics, the apparatus of dictionaries, maps, computers, all the tools on which we tacitly rely while focally attending to the meanings we want to grasp or to communicate. And all these things are part of a larger entity which we usually call a culture-a whole way of understanding and ordering things which is embodied in language, story, and all the forms of social life which are made possible through a shared language and a shared story. Most of this we learn, or perhaps one might say absorb, during the first few years of our lives as we learn to talk, to read, and to share in the common story of our people. Normally we simply take it for granted. We are not conscious of it. Like the lenses of our spectacles, it is not something we look at, but something through which we look in order to see the world. The lenses of our spectacles are performing exactly the function that the lenses of our own eyes are made to perform. In that sense, they are part of us. We indwell them. So also with a vast amount of our culture-its language, its images, its concepts, its ways of understanding and acting. It is only when we are exposed to a totally different culture and a different language, shaped by a widely different history, that we can turn back and see that what we always took for granted is only one way of seeing things.
What is surely obvious about all this is that it is a risky business. Knowing things as they are is not something that happens automatically or that can be guaranteed against failure. Even the newborn infant has to learn how to focus the lenses of the eyes in order to make some sense out of the patterns of light and darkness all around. At every stage there has to be a personal commitment to probe and explore, and at every stage we have to rely on tools, instruments, which we have to trust while we use them. But we have also to be ready to examine and reshape the tools so that they may be more fitted to the reality to be explored. The commitment is a personal matter; it has to be my commitment. In that sense it is subjective. But it is a commitment which has an objective reference. It is, as Polanyi puts it, a commitment "with universal intent." It looks for confirmation by further experience. The test of its validity will be that it opens the way for new (and often unexpected) discovery. It has to be published, shared so that it may be questioned and checked by the experience of others.
If this is even an approximately true indication of what is involved in knowing, how has it come about that, in our culture, there is a dichotomy between what purports to be factual knowledge, public truth which everyone is expected to accept, and the world of beliefs and values about which we say that everyone is free to have his or her own? It is hard to answer this question, because we are questioning our own assumptions. We are asking whether what we take to be obvious is really true. We are being asked to take off the spectacles we have been using and take a look at the world through another pair. If a visitor from another culture, accustomed to seeing things through another pair of spectacles, were to try to understand the way we see things, how would he go about it?
I think he would find that, like many people, we have two pairs of spectacles and use them for different occasions. To understand this our visitor would need to know a little of our history. If he did, he would know that there was a time when we used just one pair of spectacles. For many centuries European people saw the world as a unified cosmos in which all things had their place and their significance in relation to God, who was their creator and sovereign. Within this unified view of things there were certain ways of behaving which were appropriate to a world so understood. Centuries of this belief and of this assumption about human behavior have worked so deeply into our collective consciousness that, especially when we are thinking about personal and domestic matters, these assumptions about what is proper human behavior still have a strong pull. Our ideas about what is good conduct are still rooted in that older view of the cosmos. In certain situations we revert to that older view, put on the old spectacles for short-range sight.
But our visitor would see that during the past three hundred years a quite different view of the cosmos has gained ground, first among a few intellectuals and then gradually throughout society as a whole. And this provides the spectacles which we use in public life. These give us a quite different view of things. Now the figure of God has disappeared into the shadows. He may exist or he may not; the question is not vital. We have learned to understand things in a different way. The way to "explain" things is to analyze them into their smallest parts and show how everything that happens is ultimately governed by the laws of physics. If a thing or a happening can be understood as the mathematically calculable interaction of its parts, then it is "explained." Things are not to be explained in terms of purpose, because purpose is a function of the beliefs and values of the person whose purpose it is. Things are to be explained in terms of their causes, of what makes them happen. All happenings have causes, and all causes are adequate to the effects they produce. The ultimate goal is to understand everything in terms of the physics and chemistry of its constituent parts. Human life is ultimately to be understood as the product of an endless series of random hap penings in the physical world. Chance and causality are the sufficient "explanation" of all that is and all that happens. The main intellectual drive of our culture is in this direction-to understand everything in terms of the fundamental laws of physics.
The world so understood is the world of what are called "facts," the facts which we "know" and which everyone needs to learn. It is a closed world of cause and effect, a world from which purpose has been excluded as a category of explanation, and in which-therefore-there can be no judgment of "good" or "bad." It is a world, as we say, of valuefree facts. I know, of course, that developments in science during the present century have called this picture radically into question. They have done so in at least two ways. First, the advance of particle physics has shown that-to put it paradoxically-the ultimate elements of what we call matter are not material. It is no longer possible to envisage the atom as a system of rotating particles like billiard balls. As far as modern physics has penetrated into the secrets of the atom, its ultimate constitution may be described as a pattern of relationships between nonmaterial entities -relationships which can be represented mathematically but cannot be visualized. And, second, the development especially of quantum physics has shown that a picture of the cosmos which excludes the observing subject (as classical physics did) is not a true picture. The scientist, with his purposes, is part of the picture. The concept of a purely mechanical system operating without any place for purpose is mistaken. These developments in physics-and other developments resulting from the work of astronomers at the ultimate limits of human penetration-have certainly changed the picture of the cosmos which dominated the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But there has not yet been time for these far-reaching changes to be absorbed into popular thinking. Most ordinary people, and many practitioners of the human sciences such as sociology and economics, still operate with the myths of "value-free facts" and a mechanical universe. And in such a universe, the rules regarding human conduct which were based on a different and earlier view of what is the case have lost their ontological grounding. They have no firm basis in reality as science understands it. They can only be "values," matters for personal choice. They are what some people believe. They are not part of the world of "facts" which all human beings will have to take account of whether they like it or not.
The facts are "value-free" because the world of which they are a part is not the product of any purpose, but is the accidental result of the operation of the twin factors of chance and causality. Yet it does not take much reflection to see the absurdity of this. It has been seriously argued that a monkey with a typewriter could-given time-produce by chance all the plays of Shakespeare. I have not yet heard a scientist saying that the monkey could have manufactured the typewriter by chance. But the example is a nice one to end with, for the machine-a favorite model for this kind of thinking-is precisely that which can never be explained without invoking the concept of purpose. A complete rnechanical, chemical, and physical analysis of the parts of a machine and of the interrelation between them is not an explanation of the machine. It is inexplicable without some concept of the purpose for which these pieces of metal were put together in this way. A machine which creates itself and exists for no purpose is something which in most periods of human history would have been thought to exceed the imagination of even the most credulous. Yet it is widely diffused and is still given credence by respected scientists. It is this concept of a cosmos without purpose which provides the validation for the division of our world into two-a world of facts without value and a world of values which have no basis in facts.
I called it a picture, but that is perhaps not accurate. It is rather a set of concepts through which people see the world. The world looks like that because these are the lenses through which it is seen. The lenses themselves are not seen. We do not look at them but see through them. I shall try to suggest later how another set of lenses is available. I shall suggest that the Christian story provides us with such a set of lenses, not something for us to look at, but for us to look through. Using Polanyi's terminology, I shall suggest that the Christian community is invited to indwell the story, tacitly aware of it as shaping the way we understand, but focally attending to the world we live in so that we are able confidently, though not infallibly, to increase our understanding of it and our ability to cope with it. I shall suggest that this approach provides us with a 'way along which we may overcome the destructive conflict between liberals and fundamentalists within the Church. And I shall suggest, in line with what I have said in this chapter, that this calls for a more radical kind of conversion than has often been thought, a conversion not only of the will but of the mind, a transformation by the renewing of the mind so as not to be conformed to this world, not to see things as our culture sees them, but-with new lenses-to see things in a radically different way.