4 Making Judgements: Belief, Explanation and Interpretation
Chapter 4
Making Judgements:
Belief, Explanation and Interpretation
The Oxford Dictionaries ‘Word of the Year’ for 2016 was a new arrival, symptomatic of yet another shift within the public rationality of western culture – ‘post-truth’, defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’
The iconic cover of the April 1966 number of Time magazine posed a question, highlighted in red against a stark black background, that cut to the heart of the cultural debates of that age: Is God dead? Its March 2017 counterpart mimicked this dramatic style in posing the new question lying at the core of American public life: Is Truth dead? Do we live in an age of aggressively asserted private beliefs, rather than evidenced public truths? Was the sociologist and cultural critic Philip Rieff right in characterising the history of human civilisation as a shift from ‘fate’ to ‘faith’ – and finally to ‘fiction’? Why are objective facts now less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to subjective emotion and personal belief? Is this just some transient form of generational narcissism, or is it the shape of the future?
In such an environment, personal belief – that is, something that cannot be proved to be true but is believed to be reasonable – flourishes; the problem is that it is recategorised as ‘truth’. While some speak about a rejection of authority in western culture, we are really seeing a relocation of authority within individual private experience that leads to people becoming trapped in their own personal versions of reality, refusing to accept external referents that might call these into question.
Many are alarmed at these developments, feeling that such an emphasis on context, discourse and history has led to a neglect of traditional concerns for truth and a responsible attempt to grasp a reality which ultimately lies beyond our control and to which we can be held accountable. We are caught up in a battle of ideas in which there is no criterion of adjudication accepted by both parties. Some claim that knowledge is independent of history, power and perspective, and others that knowledge is determined by history, power and perspective.
A Post-Truth World: Conspiracy
Theories and Wish-Fulfilment
One of the most important manifestations of a post-truth culture is the surge in contemporary conspiracy theories. Dan Brown’s highly successful novel The Da Vinci Code (2002) fictionalised some controversial theories regarding early Christian history, arguing that the Catholic Church kept secret Jesus Christ’s marriage to Mary Magdalene, from which sprang a ‘holy lineage’ protected by a secret organisation known as the ‘Priory of Sion.’ Despite its obvious evidential deficits – and the fact it is conceived as fiction – this theory achieved a huge following. It was what a lot of people wanted to believe.
Some conspiracy theories are religious – for example, the idea that American government agencies have been infiltrated by Satanists. Others are anti-religious – such as the sensational theory that COVID-19 was a synthesised form of cobra venom that was intentionally being spread via drinking water and vaccines, possibly as part of a plot by the Catholic Church to turn everyone into a ‘hybrid of Satan’. Most, however, are based on cultural and political beliefs – such as an alleged London paedophile ring run by political elites, or the ‘Great Replacement Theory’ which holds that an indigenous white European population is being replaced by non-European immigrants. These theories often function as rallying points for social groups, especially minorities that are perceived or treated as marginalised outsiders. The rise of the Internet has led to uncontrolled dissemination of such conspiracy theories, which, on account of their ‘ubiquity and repetition on the net, have assumed a veracity divorced from reality.’
As might be expected, these theories have attracted a lot of academic attention. Why do so-called ‘free thinkers’ believe such weird things? Although these were initially seen as pathological, perhaps resulting from ‘brainwashing’, more recent studies have seen them as indicative of neglected aspects of human reasoning that illuminate how people arrive at beliefs, and enact these in their lives. Such theories tend to attract people looking for simple explanations for complex phenomena, and who are unwilling or unable to think critically. Studies of followers of the ‘Da Vinci Code’ theory, for example, suggest that they were unable or reluctant to consider alternatives, or engage the evidence suggesting it might be a fake. Once they believed it, they couldn’t be swayed.
A dispassionate observer of conspiracy theories might suggest that they indicate the danger of belief – people see logic where there is none and then refute anything that contradicts their views, sometimes to dangerous and violent ends. Conspiracy theories are certainly indicators of gullibility, the disturbing capacity of human beings to believe weird things. Yet the best way to counter this is not to suppress belief as a general category, but to foster the emergence of a critical belief – that is to say, a belief that is affirmed knowing its vulnerabilities, in the light of an individual’s critical judgement that this represents the best way of making sense of things in comparison with a range of possibilities.
The rise of a post-truth world has exposed a major concern – the public assertion of ideas that people want to be true, and retrospectively developing arguments in their support. As the satirist Hasan Minhaj observed, ‘emotional truth is first. The factual truth is secondary.’ If you want to believe something, you will find ways of rationalising that belief and persuading yourself that it is true.
Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World (1932), anticipates this form of thinking that has become so influential in a post-truth world: identify your preferred conclusion, persuade yourself this is a self-evident truth, cherry-pick the evidence, and declare this conclusion to be the only option for a thinking person. ‘I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.’
Sigmund Freud saw this need-driven form of argument as typical of religion, which proposed God as a human ‘wish-fulfilment’ offering a false consolation in the face of a meaningless world. Yet Freud failed to be consistent here: we are all – whether religious or secular – prone to create an imagined world which corresponds to our desires, and retrospectively develop arguments for its validation. Some secular humanists, for example, assert the fundamental goodness of humanity. It is a noble aspiration, which is called into question by the formidable moral challenge posed by the brutality of human history. As John Gray points out, ‘genocide is as human as art or prayer’. The easiest way of coping with this is by denying the problem through a highly selective reading of our history. A more realistic approach recognises that we are indeed a flawed species with a remarkable capacity for self-deception. At least this helps us to figure out how we might come to terms with this problem. Can we cope with human evil if we define humanity as fundamentally good? Happily, most humanists are fully aware of this problem, and are rightly cautious in asserting human goodness as a fundamental article of faith.
Atheism can be argued to represent another example of the reification of a desire for total autonomy and unaccountability. The philosopher Thomas Nagel illustrates this point well. Nagel’s own account of the origins of and motivation for his atheism suggests that it is a post hoc rationalisation of something more fundamental – his desire for a godless universe. ‘I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.’
In a post-truth age, it seems reasonable to claim experiential or emotional privilege for our beliefs and desires – ‘it’s true for me.’ This self-referential position allows the individual thinker absolute authority in matters of their own beliefs; given their dismissal of external perspectives or adjudications, there would seem to be no way of disproving what they assert in terms that they would consider to be valid.
Yet even in a world in which there is a widening fissure between public truth and private belief, most still agree that beliefs need to be examined and assessed. The New Testament’s advice that Christians should ‘test everything, and hold fast to what is good’ exemplifies the critical spirit that intelligent religious faith demands, deserves and regularly – though sadly not invariably – exhibits. Pope Francis speaks for the Christian tradition as a whole when he points out that faith must be grounded in truth; if it does not it is simply ‘a beautiful story, the projection of our deep yearning for happiness, something capable of satisfying us to the extent that we are willing to deceive ourselves.’
As Plato suggested, an ‘unexamined life’ is not a meaningful form of existence. We need to think critically about what we believe – both in terms of what we affirm, and what we exclude. We cannot live authentically through affirming publicly what we know to be false privately. Yet as an educationalist, I have come to the reluctant conclusion that an alarming number of people don’t want to think about their core beliefs or values, whether secular or religious, fearing that these might be exposed as inadequate or delusional.
I remember a conversation with a retired politician in Belfast many years ago, when I queried him on this point. How, I asked him, could he publicly defend an idea that was (at least in my view) ridiculous. His answer? ‘Practice, dear boy. Lots of practice.’ We need to have a serious conversation about these matters. The denial of reality may be a convenient political stratagem, but it is hardly a basis for a sustainable worldview. Can we live a meaningful life if we suspect that we may have based our identities on something false?
A good place to start is the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s 1978 speech ‘How to build a universe that doesn’t fall apart two days later’, in which he reflected on the nature of reality, and our generally hopeless attempts to resist the lure of fake realities. We live in a society in which ‘spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups – and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener.’ But there is a problem here that goes right to the heart of human identity: ‘Fake realities will create fake humans.’ Human authenticity depends on experiencing and encountering reality which challenges and excites us, not some fake reality designed to advance someone’s agenda. We need a centre to our lives that will hold firm and shelter us.
For Dick, human beings seem to be hardwired to construct ‘universes of the mind’. We are brilliant at constructing throwaway worldviews, understandings of our universe and our place within it which are a response to a transient cultural mood or a pressing personal need. When the cultural wind changes direction, the worldview is quietly sidelined once it has ceased to be fashionable. Dick’s analysis confirms the importance of a way of thinking that has been tried and tested over an extended period of time, having been both thought through and lived out. Its virtues lie not in its novelty, but in its perceived real-life relevance and reliability.
The German poet Hermann Hesse identified this problem in Germany during the period of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. He despaired that what passed as ‘critical thinking’ back then was little more than a loose aggregation of ‘intellectual fashions’ and the ‘transitory values of the day’. To Hesse, it seemed that Weimar culture was little more than a superficial intellectual formalisation of ‘intellectual mediocrity, of surface glitter, smug comfort, sham conventionality, and foolish optimism.’ The historian Peter Gay concurs with this analysis: in his view, the cultural mood of Weimar Germany was driven by a suspension of critical thinking, an exaltation of irrationality, and a romanticised yearning for the order and stability of the old German Empire which paved the way for Hitler’s rise to power.
Hesse concluded that many in Germany, dissatisfied with flaky cultural superficialities, were coming to long for a worldview that was anchored in the depths of reality. As we’ve seen, Germany in 1920s and 1930s, dominated by ‘spurious realities’, ended up lacking the intellectual and cultural resources to resist the more robust ideology of the age: Nazism. And so Martin Heidegger, that doyen of German philosophy, declared in 1933: ‘The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: that from now on every single thing demands decision, and every action responsibility. Heil Hitler!’
What is reality? For Dick, the answer could be stated in a single sentence: ‘Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.’ Reality does not depend on us for its existence. It is not a social construction or cultural invention, something that we control or create, but is rather something that stands in distinction to – though not necessarily against – us, which can ground, inform and enrich our social, cultural and spiritual existence. Dick’s analysis raises numerous questions that need to be explored, including whether classical worldviews which have a much longer history of mental inhabitation, existential testing, and practical implementation might provide more resilient and fulfilling ways of living than their short-lived modern counterparts.
In what follows, we shall reflect on how we believe we might gain access to reality. To begin with, we shall reach into the past, and consider some formative reflections on these themes from classic Greek philosophy.
Plato and Aristotle on Theory
The word ‘theory’ is now widely used to refer to a ‘system of ideas intended to explain something’ or a ‘rational type of abstract thinking about a phenomenon’. It has overtones of detachment and abstraction, allowing the observer to stand over and against the observed. Yet the modern English word ‘theory’ offers an impoverished and attenuated account of a more complex and comprehensive idea, which has been adapted for the specific technical needs of the natural sciences.
For classic Greek philosophers, a theory is not primarily an abstract set of ideas; it is fundamentally a way of beholding and inhabiting reality. Where modern understandings of theory, for understandable reasons, reduce it to an intellectual desiccation or a rational abstraction, the Greek term theōria offers us a richer vision of how we envisage our world, sensitive to our need to see or imagine things as they really are, and work out how we fit into the picture that it discloses. We are not passive and disinterested spectators of an external reality, but are active and informed participants in its processes.
Plato used the term theōria to designate a way of seeing and grasping reality that lay at the heart of philosophy. The philosopher is someone who has caught a grand vision of reality, or experienced a transformative beholding of the world, and is able to communicate this to others so that they might capture its vision and live accordingly. Plato draws on the metaphor of a shadowy cave, within which humanity is confined; the philosopher is someone who has seen the greater world beyond this cave, is transformed by this vision, and tries to articulate this to those who remain within the cave.
To ‘theorise’ was thus not about developing abstract ideas, but was rather about discovering and then actively participating in a vision of some greater reality that was best expressed using visual metaphors (such as ‘seeing’). As Pierre Hadot has emphasised, many forms of ancient philosophy did not focus on abstract reflection, but on developing intellectually defensible and existentially viable ‘ways of living’ that embodied this transformative vision of humanity and the cosmos. A good philosophy is something that we can embody, not merely teach or explain.
In some ways, the classical understanding of ‘theory’ is thus closer to the modern idea of a worldview – a way of framing or imagining the world that both discloses its intrinsic rationality and interconnectedness, while at the same time providing a framework for the creation of meaning and moral values, enabling the human agent to act properly within the world. Early Christianity grasped the importance of this idea, speaking of a bios theōretikos – not an abstract and analytical approach to existence, but rather a ‘contemplative life’ in which individuals grasped how they were meant to fit into a greater scheme of things, and could act authentically within this framework. This bios theōretikos was not so much a set of ideas as a template for personal transformation.
This, however, does not detract from the importance of theōria as a means of explaining our world and illuminating our place and role within it. This naturally raises the question of how such ‘theories’ are developed, and how their reliability can be assessed. Let’s begin to explore this question, starting with the natural sciences, widely regarded as providing the most reliable forms of knowledge outside the realms of logic and mathematics.
Explanation in Science
How do we move from observing the world to proposing and evaluating scientific explanations of the world? The reasoning process now known as ‘Inference to the Best Explanation’ (formally stated in the 1960s, but which was already widely used under other names) aims to identify possible explanations of observations of nature (a ‘logic of discovery’) before determining which of these is the ‘best’ (a ‘logic of justification’), using criteria such as the degree of ‘empirical fit’ (how well the theory accommodates the evidence), and non-empirical criteria such as simplicity, elegance, predictability and comprehensiveness. Not all of these criteria can be used in every situation; as Karl Popper pointed out, while Darwin’s theory of natural selection offered a persuasive explanation of the history of the biosphere, it had limited predictive capacity.
Yet the identification of the best explanation currently available does not amount to a proof or demonstration that this explanation is true. Declaring that something has been ‘scientifically proven’ is potentially misleading. Science is about questioning everything in the quest for a better understanding of our universe and being willing to adopt a new perspective or theory if the evidence seems to demand it. If a scientist is ‘certain’ about her beliefs, she will be reluctant to challenge or criticise them, let alone abandon them. An openness to theory change is essential for scientific progress. Science depends on being willing to challenge the existing consensus, to doubt the allegedly certain, and open up new vistas of investigation.
In the bygone days of scientific positivism, it was widely assumed that data could prove theories. Today, the language has shifted in the light of changing theoretical models; the challenge is now to find the ‘best of the available competing explanations’, knowing that ‘best’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘true’ (it’s just our best shot at the moment, and we may find something better later).
This helps explain why Thomas H. Huxley, an enthusiastic Victorian advocate of Darwin’s account of evolution, refused to allow that Darwin’s theory was ‘factual’ or that it counted as ‘knowledge’. Huxley insisted that Darwin’s theory was a most compelling and ‘ingenious’ hypothesis, with greater explanatory power than its rivals. Yet this judgement was comparative, not absolute. The relative superiority of Darwin’s theory over other explanatory frameworks did not necessarily mean it was true.
There is thus an inevitable provisionality to scientific theorising. Certain things can clearly be proved scientifically – for example, that the chemical formula of water is H2O. But many others remain frustratingly elusive and uncertain – not because of any failure of the scientific method, but because of the limits that arise from its specific nature. As the scientific method is historically situated, it is necessarily provisional in some of its conclusions, in that it is restricted by the evidence that is available at that moment in time.
This is not a problem; it’s just the way things are. With most serious forms of human understanding we must appreciate that our knowledge is located at a particular moment in history, and that the passing of time will bring new pressures – such as theoretical advance or the availability of new evidence – that require us to adjust our ideas in their light. The real problem is that we don’t know what the future will hold, and thus cannot predict how our ideas will change.
What may seem to be epistemically secure today may thus be abandoned in the future, in the light of the emergence of new evidence and more sophisticated theoretical reflection. The bleak imagery of Arthur Koestler’s narrative of scientific progress highlights the need to recognise the unpredictability of science: ‘The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.’ The phlogiston hypothesis is a good example of such a ‘discarded theory’. ‘Phlogiston’ was proposed during the late seventeenth century as a fire-like element contained within combustible bodies which was released during the process of burning. The discovery of oxygen by Joseph Priestley in the 1770s led to the abandonment of this hypothesis. Phlogiston was thus a stepping stone on the way to a firmer grasp of reality, which we have now left behind in the relentless march of scientific progress. We need to be ready to let go of a theory if something better comes along in the future – no matter how secure it may appear at the time.
As the philosopher Michael Polanyi suggests in Personal Knowledge, science is on a journey, and we have no way of knowing where it will go and what it will leave behind in the future. Many scientific theories that once commanded widespread support have now been displaced by alternatives. So, what will happen to these new theories in the future? They might be better than those they had supplanted; but are they right? Might they simply be transient staging-posts to something else, at present unknown, rather than final resting places?
These reflections point to the need to speak, cautiously but legitimately, about scientific ‘beliefs’. For example, most scientists today believe that the age of the universe is 13.77 billion years. They certainly have good reasons for doing so, but they don’t know this. Nobody started a stopwatch when the universe began. It is a provisional inference from the best scientific observations of our universe in the light of the presently dominant Lambda-CDM model of the Big Bang. But there are alternative models already competing for attention, and modifications may need to be made to core aspects of this model in the future. And if that happens, our estimates of the age of the universe can also be expected to change.
Explanation in Religion
Explanation, then, is a significant aspect of the natural sciences. What about other areas of human belief, such as religion? In his influential Golden Bough (1890), James Frazer suggested that religion was a failed primitive version of science, offering explanations of the world and human society that have now been both discredited and displaced by modern scientific discourse. Yet despite Frazer’s overstatement of the explanatory role of religion, many continue to argue that while the primary role of religion is not explanatory in the scientific sense of the term, it nevertheless provides a broad framework for making sense of our world and our lives.
The philosopher Richard Swinburne, for example, argued that God is the best explanation for the complex patterns of phenomena that we observe in the natural world – above all, the capacity of the natural sciences to make sense of our universe. ‘I am postulating a God to explain what science explains; I do not deny that science explains, but I postulate God to explain why science explains.’ The existence of God may, Swinburne argues, be inferred from what is observed in the world – and once this idea of God is articulated, it can explain what we experience around us.
As we noted earlier, G. K. Chesterton popularised the idea of religion as a ‘big picture’, which was to be judged by its ability to make sense of multiple aspects of human experience. After a period of agnosticism during the 1890s, Chesterton returned to Christianity because he believed that it offered a coherent, intelligible and testable picture of the world.
In his famous 1903 essay ‘The Return of the Angels’, Chesterton pointed out that it is the Christian vision of reality as a whole – rather than any of its individual components – that proves compelling. Chesterton claimed to be adopting the scientific ‘method of the hypothesis’. Like a scientific theory, Christianity was to be tested in terms of the overall sense it made of observation and experience. Individual observations of nature, Chesterton declared, do not ‘prove’ Christianity to be true; rather, Christianity validates itself by its ability to make overall sense of those observations. ‘The phenomenon does not prove religion, but religion explains the phenomenon.’
For Chesterton, a good theory – whether scientific, ideological or religious – is to be judged by its capacity as a whole to accommodate what we see in the world around us and experience within us. Chesterton’s language echoes Plato’s view of philosophy as a theōria, an illuminating imaginative framework: ‘With this idea once inside our heads, a million things become transparent as if a lamp were lit behind them.’ Chesterton explained this point as follows:
Numbers of us have returned to this belief; and we have returned to it, not because of this argument or that argument, but because the theory, when it is adopted, works out everywhere; because the coat, when it is tried on, fits in every crease… We put on the theory, like a magic hat, and history becomes translucent like a house of glass.
Chesterton argued that Christianity, when seen as a complete ‘spiritual theory’, was able to offer a better account of the coherence of human history and experience than its rivals. On being asked why he was a Christian, Chesterton replied: ‘Because I perceive life to be logical and workable with these beliefs and illogical and unworkable without them.’ We see here Chesterton articulating a participatory approach to theory – namely, that it creates a conceptual space within which people can generate meaning and value.
Religion is primarily a way of interpreting life, creating the possibility of existential meaning and moral values. An interpretation of human existence involves trying to answer questions of meaning – who we are and why we matter. As the German philosopher Walther Dilthey once remarked, ‘we explain nature, but we understand the life of the soul.’ Within what story shall I locate myself? How shall I live? Who am I, and what am I meant to be doing? We therefore turn to reflect on the role of interpretation in religion and in science, focusing on Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
Scientific Interpretation: What Does
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Mean?
Theories about how our world functions can be tested by the application of the scientific method; those dealing with what it means cannot. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, whose doctoral research was supervised by the philosopher Bernard Williams, made this point with particular clarity.
We cannot prove that life is meaningful and that God exists. But neither can we prove that love is better than hate, altruism than selfishness, forgiveness than the desire for revenge … Almost none of the truths by which we live are provable, and the desire to prove them is based on a monumental confusion between explanation and interpretation. Explanations can be proved, interpretations cannot.
Scientific theories explain what we observe and discover in the world. Yet these also need to be interpreted. Perhaps the most contested case of scientific interpretation concerns Darwin’s theory of evolution. What does this mean? What are its moral and spiritual commitments?
Darwin’s task was to make sense of a series of observations about the natural world, some of which were already well known, and others which he had accumulated while serving as naturalist on HMS Beagle during the five years of its voyage round the world (1831–6). How could he account for the observation of evolutionary change in the biological realm? Darwin’s explanation of his observations, eventually published as The Origin of Species (1859), rested on a proposed mechanism of ‘natural selection’, paralleling the ‘artificial selection’ familiar to animal and pigeon breeders. Evolution arises initially through the emergence of variation in each generation, and subsequently through the differential survival of individuals. Those who have characteristics which increase their probability of survival will have a greater likelihood of survival and reproduction, thus passing these variations to the next generation.
Darwin’s theory offered a plausible explanation of what was known about the biological world that was better than the alternatives then available – such as various forms of creationism, or the ‘transformist’ evolutionary theories of the French naturalists Georges-Louis Leclerc or Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. It was able to offer a better explanation, for example, of the persistence of vestigial structures and the distinctive characteristics of the flora and fauna of remote islands. Darwin did, however, face some difficulties, most notably his lack of a viable genetic theory which would allow the undiluted transmission of biological variations – something that was provided by Gregor Mendel’s vital (yet initially neglected) 1866 paper on ‘Experiments on Plant Hybridization’. Darwin’s theory was placed on a more rigorous foundation in the twentieth century, particularly following the discovery of the gene.
Then what does Darwin’s theory mean? How is it to be interpreted? For example, given that Darwin had clarified the mechanism of evolution, did this mean that it was now possible for humans to take control of this process, and direct it towards certain social or political goals? Some have argued that Darwin advocated what later came to be known as ‘social Darwinism’, which flourished in Britain and elsewhere in the 1920s, and came to be linked with eugenics as a means of limiting the capacity of certain social groups to reproduce. Though there are hints of such an attitude in some of Darwin’s correspondence, this is better seen as a later interpretation of the significance of his theory, rather than something that Darwin himself recognised or advocated.
Some suggest that Darwin’s understanding of evolution can be interpreted as the basis for a universal ethic. In a lecture of 1943, the evolutionary biologist and eugenicist Julian Huxley argued that Darwin’s theory, when rightly interpreted, allows for a normative ethic, and not simply an explanation of how ethics might have evolved or become significant in human evolution. Huxley is a little obscure in explaining how we might move from value-free observation to value-determining prescription. Yet Huxley was responding to a lecture on the same topic, delivered at Oxford in 1893, by his grandfather, Thomas H. Huxley. In that earlier lecture, Huxley argued that Darwin’s evolutionary theory was ethically barren, incapable of informing human ethical reflection. ‘Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.’
So which Huxley is right? We can’t say. Both Huxleys offer interpretations of Darwin’s theory. Even if we could ascertain that one of them represented a closer approximation to Darwin’s own views, this would not make this right; it would simply count as a better interpretation of Darwin, rather than the right answer to the great ethical question under discussion.
Finally, does Darwin’s theory entail atheism? Many populist atheist writers have taken it as self-evident that this is the case, despite Darwin’s own statements that he did not consider his own theory to mandate atheism, in that it was compatible with conventional religious belief. It is certainly true to say that ‘natural selection’ contradicts, or at least presents difficulties for, certain religious understandings of creation; yet there is a significant intellectual distance between calling for a review of such doctrines of creation and proving atheism. After all, Augustine of Hippo set out an interpretation of the book of Genesis in 401 which held that God created the world in an instant, and then set in place an extended process of development through which the created order changed over time. Perhaps the time has come to retrieve this older theory.
Although I welcome and value the capacity of scientific theories to provide explanations for the workings of our universe, I am sceptical regarding their religious, metaphysical, or ethical interpretations. While Darwin’s theory of natural selection effectively explained the observational evidence available to him at that time, the moral and spiritual implications of his theory are still ambiguous and subject to debate.
While scientific theories and explanations are grounded in evidence and are subject to empirical testing, our interpretations of their implications for human existence and self-understanding lack the same level of credibility and authority. In the end, they are opinions, not facts. They are beliefs about the implications of Darwin’s theory for human morality and meaning. This is not a problem; it’s just the way things are. But it can easily become a problem if these interpretations of scientific theories are mistakenly given the same authority as empirically-tested explanations of reality.
This naturally raises the question of whether interpretations, scientific or religious, lie beyond critical assessment. Are we free to choose any interpretation of our world that we like, without the need for reasoned consideration? What if the evidence is not adequate to compel us to adopt a particular position? This suggests we need to consider the relation of agnosticism and belief.
Agnosticism: A Better Way?
What happens when we are confronted with a situation in which the evidence is not sufficient to allow us to reach a secure conclusion? This problem arises regularly in everyday life – within the legal system, as juries struggle to make sense of a body of evidence; within the scientific community, where researchers often find the evidence is open to multiple (and inconsistent) conclusions; and in metaphysical and religious debates about ‘ultimate reality’ or God. We regularly make judgements, rather than draw necessary conclusions – judgements that rest on interconnected webs of personal beliefs, themselves open to challenge and critique.
We have already engaged the influential Victorian scientist Thomas H. Huxley – often known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ – in this chapter. Huxley considered respect for evidence to be both an intellectual and moral virtue. However, not every aspect of a scientific way of thinking could be proved with the available evidence. Some fundamental scientific beliefs lay beyond proof, even if their reliability was widely assumed. Though often presented in populist atheist tracts as advocating the conflict of science and religion, Huxley’s position was far more complex and nuanced than this, as this important reflection makes clear:
True science and true religion are twin-sisters, and the separation of either from the other is sure to prove the death of both. Science prospers exactly in proportion as it is religious; and religion flourishes in exact proportion to the scientific depth and firmness of its basis.
Huxley was critical of the dogmatism of theologians whose pronouncements, in his view, exceeded their evidential basis; he made the same criticism, however, of dogmatic atheists.
In a lecture of 1885, Huxley declared that science rests on a fundamental act of faith – ‘the confession of the universality of order and of the absolute validity in all times and under all circumstances, of the law of causation’. Why was this confession of the uniformity of nature an ‘act of faith’? Huxley was quite clear: ‘because, by the nature of the case, the truth of such propositions is not susceptible of proof.’ This point is widely conceded. As Bertrand Russell observed, ‘belief in the uniformity of nature’ is a principle that ‘cannot, without circularity, be inferred from observed uniformities, since it is required to justify any such inference.’
Yet while scientists are aware of the problem of circularity in believing in the uniformity of nature, this is not seen as causing any significant difficulties. It constitutes a framing and grounding belief which undergirds the natural sciences; although it cannot be proved to be true, many consider that the ongoing explanatory and predictive successes of the sciences are an adequate (if purely pragmatic) confirmation of its reliability.
One of Huxley’s more significant achievements was the introduction of the word ‘agnostic’ to characterise the scientific method. Huxley was clear that ‘agnosticism is not, and cannot be, a creed’; it is fundamentally a method. Although the term ‘agnostic’ is now taken to refer solely or chiefly to religious belief, Huxley developed it specifically to characterise the methods of the natural sciences, while recognising that it could be applied more widely. In 1884, Huxley summarised his views on agnosticism in the form of two creedal statements:
1. Agnosticism is of the essence of science, whether ancient or modern. It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe.
2. Consequently Agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the greater part of anti-theology. On the whole, the ‘bosh’ of heterodoxy is more offensive to me than that of orthodoxy, because heterodoxy professes to be guided by reason and science, and orthodoxy does not.
What of agnosticism today? The term is now used primarily in a religious sense, to refer to someone who declines to make a judgement on the existence or non-existence of God. While this is often presented simply as a personal stance of disengagement, it usually represents a reluctant pragmatic judgement that human reason is incapable of providing sufficient rational grounds to justify either believing that God exists or that God does not exist. The philosopher Anthony Kenny is an excellent example of a scholar to take this position:
I do not myself know of any argument for the existence of God which I find convincing; in all of them I think I can find flaws. Equally, I do not know of any argument against the existence of God which is totally convincing; in the arguments I know against the existence of God I can equally find flaws. So that my own position on the existence of God is agnostic.
These kinds of considerations led the Australian atheist philosopher Graham Oppy to argue that atheism, agnosticism and theism are all ‘rationally permissible’, in terms of their evidence base. Oppy defends his own preference (atheism) by arguing that this represents, in his view, the ‘best evaluation’ of all the relevant considerations, while making it clear that this is not intellectually compelling. Not all ‘sufficiently thoughtful, intelligent, and well-informed people’ will agree with his conclusion, he concedes, in that the evidence base for this belief is inadequate. ‘When we consider the best cases for atheism, agnosticism and theism, there are many, many points where we are required to make judgements; and it is the accumulation of those many, many judgements that feeds into our overall assessment.’ In reaching his judgement, Oppy is obliged to rely on criteria that are of his own choosing and his perceptions of the weight of evidence for various options. His atheism is thus a belief, not a certainty.
My own view is that agnosticism is inevitable and proper if we agree to limit our beliefs to what the evidence clearly mandates – which is the working method of the natural sciences. The problem, as we have seen, is that beliefs about meaning and morality lie beyond the evidential confirmation that is the hallmark of explanations in the natural sciences. It is hard to be a moral agnostic in today’s world, confronted with injustice on every side. While many would affirm that moral agnosticism is a legitimate intellectual option, most would concede that it is existentially unsatisfying and pragmatically irresponsible in today’s world.
We shall reflect further on these issues in the following chapter as we turn to consider to the question of what difference belief makes to life.