Rationality and Scientific Progress: the Demise of Rationality

RATIONALITY AND SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS: THE DEMISE OF RATIONALITY

“The French and English philosophers had wanted to cast off every remnant of primitivism. Christianity and Judaism were great evils to the rationalist radicals because they were still imbued with a primordial religious spirit. They were survivors from the mythic age of mankind.”

Science, Myth, and Rationality

“In the Turgo-Condorcet conception of scientific progress the Western denial of the mythopoetic and affirmation of the rational attained its ultimate expression.” (F.E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Athenem, 1987), p. 305). In later systems of sociology and anthropology the ‘law of development’ of religion by stages adumbrated during the Enlightenment was expanded into a world view of the growth of human consciousness (a’la’ Hegel’s Phenomenology). Historical reason had come to salvage reason itself, but historical reason has been found wanting. Dostoevksi’s aphorism, “If there is no God then everything is permissible” was a self-fulfilling prophecy which only extended the reputation of the impious philosopher Euhemerus (an atheist classical author of antiquity who wrote a novel describing the circumstances of the human birth of the dominate gods and the manner of their deification).

Historicity, Thought, Perception, Speech and the Incarnation

Now that the sociology of science has emerged as a sociological specialty, it might prove beneficial to locate the historical and intellectual context of its formative periods of institutionalized arrangements (see R.K. Merton, The Sociology of Science (Chicago, 1973). Historically, from the Antigone of Sophocles to Pope’s Essay on Man, man’s first awakening to his creative powers caused him to believe that he was the wonder of the world. And after the first Scientific Revolution (Galileo and Newton, 17th and 18th centuries), man rapidly became lord of the universe. Celestial mechanics seemed to exclude God from the heavens (Galileo); then Newton’s mechanics dethrones God as Lord of the earth; then Comte’s positivism removed God from the social structures; and finally, by way of Freud’s reductionism, God was excluded from even the inner man--the psychological dimension, the subconscious, the non rational. After Freud, faith was totally psychologized and thus removed from objective dimensions of reality. From this point Western man was not far removed from Peter Berger’s ‘Fiery Brook’ at which Berger futilely attempts to relativize the relativizers (see Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality and sections on Freedom, Epistemology and Irrationalism).

Einstein versus the Received View

Until the crisis of the ‘Received View’ of the nature of science, which by the 1950’s was apparent to all au courant, the Einsteinian revolution controlled the scientific paradigm. His Principle of Relativity relativized all perception and jeopardized classical empiricism- reductionism (cf. perception of motion and magnitudes). Einstein’s Kinematical Principle affected all understanding of space and time. And his Dynamical Principle affected our conception of causality. It is the author’s opinion that believers who wish to creatively transcend the trinity of crisis which dominates much of contemporary thought, i.e., (1) the Crisis of Pluralism, (2) the Crisis of Privatism, (3) the Crisis of the basis of Justification of belief/behavior which generates the fourth crisis, (4) the Crisis of Narcissism, must produce a solution to these problems.

The Kantian Camel of Constructivism: Reality--Discovered, Created, or Both?

Kant bequeathed the conviction to his successors, Hegel preeminently, that in knowing, the mind actively constructs what it knows. Ficte, Schelling, and Hegel brought Kant’s paradigmatic revolution to its ultimate implications—(1) The identification of total reality with creative thought; (b) This monistic metaphysics of the absolute identity of God, Man, and the universe entailed the rejection of the God incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth; (c) Belief in the transcendent creator God who is also eminent to His creation, was no longer academically respectable. These implications of this intellectual revolution are all but self-evident regarding God’s relationship to human history, i.e., time and space. According to the Kantian-Hegelian perspective, there can be no creation redemption as biblically presented (cf. Canon, Historical Theology, Baur’s Hegelianism; see my syllabus, “Hegel-Marx, Neo-Marxism and Liberation Theologies”); therefore, Prometheus must be unbound once more in the form of autonomous man who was worthy of the integrating center of reality as it followed through human-historically, i.e., psychologically-sociologically contingent consciousness, which is under the direction of Hegel’s Geist. Nineteenth century theologians produced a Jesus in the image of his makers, totally incapable of meeting the challenge of the day. Up to Kant, Western thought located rationality in the fact that both mind and matter were structured and that knowledge was the human discovery of how the world actually was.

The Structure of Scientific Inquiry and Rational Behavior

In order to better understand contemporary hermeneutics, perhaps a brief word about four major architects of the New Hermeneutical Circle would be in order: (1) Wilhelm Dilthey (1833- 1922), Historicism; (2) Edmond Husserl (1859-1938), Phenomenology and the effort to transcend subjectivism; (3) Max Scheler (1874-1928), Sociology of Knowledge and (4) Martin Heidegger (1889-1977), Temporalizing of all being.

Historicism and the Incarnation: Demise of Christian Paradigm of God and Creation

The heart of the Gospels is the incarnation. How does it fare in Dilthey’s hands? He says that the true historican and interpreter is a collaborator who investigates the evidence and arguments proffered by an author in support of theory. Only those can really understand an author who enters into the same work and research with him (Clara Misch-Dilthey, Der junge Dilthey (Stuttgart, 1962), p. 186). Here we can note Dilthey’s best known theses concerning the social and historiographical sciences: “Operation called Verstehen” is often mistakenly assumed that Dilthey made subjective empathy the foundation of interpretation, that he was psychologizing the “operation on psychology and must, in the last resort, rely on introspection or the so-called “subjective experience” which was mistakenly identified with Dilthey’s “Erleben” by Max Weber, and the distortion continues unabated by contemporary discussions of the methodological

2 character of historiography, psychology and social sciences (see Peter Winch, The Idea of Social Science (London, 1965); and H. Albert, editor, Theorie und Realitat (Tubingen, 1964). Dilthey called for a Kantian philosophy of the human mind as “a process or certain kind of behavior with a certain kind of structure.” (Clara Misch-Dilthey, Der junge Dilthey, p. 91). As Kant’s First Critique called for a paradigmatic revolution based in Newtonian philosophy of science (though Kant actually distorted Newton with an evolutionary model of the universe), so Dilthey’s revolution concerning scientific inquiry is Einsteinian (as was Whitehead’s and Process Thought in general). As early as 1860, Dilthey had set forth a provisional hypothesis (see Hermeneutik Schleiermachers, not published until 1966 as Volume XIV in Dilthey’s Gesamelte Schriften, SIV Stuttgart, Berlin 1922-1967). He attempts, as does Hans G. Gadamer, to work out a positive relationship between the ‘historicity of the knower’ and ‘the objectivity of historical interpretation.’ Dilthey declares that, “all text interpretation begins with a provisional hypothesis (a’la’Popper) which, in the course of interpretation, is checked against the contexts and will either be changed according to what one finds in the contexts or replaced by another fitting hypothesis.” (Vol. XIV/2, pp. 658-59, 708). By 1880 he had generalized his view into a theory of the fundamental functional structure of all processes of active and passive adaptation and learning in living systems. All growth in scientific knowledge are considered as paradigms of these systems (note Piaget’s developmentalism).

Structuralism and the History of Science

Scientific inquiry, scientific progress, and rational action, are seen as processes of adaptation and learning (a’la’ Dewey and Pragmatism). There are at least five basic implications of Dilthey’s Structuralism which are exemplified by the history of the sciences:

1. There is no such thing as a determinate, exclusive starting point of any kind of inquiry or action.

2. There is no such thing as a singular, primary and privileged or absolute source for human knowledge or action.

3. There is no such thing as a primary and privileged or absolute foundation, ground, or guarantee of validity of knowledge or reliability of ways of acting.

4. There is no such thing as a primary, ultimate or absolute criterion for the truth or falsity of knowledge and/or the reliability of a rule of action. (Krausser, “Dilthey’s Revolution” Review of Metaphysics (1968,69):262-280).

5. The implications of these ‘relativistic axioms’ for the biblical view of incarnation, canon, i.e., any final authoritative word within the space-time matrix, should be crystal clear. Their significance lies in the fact that they dominate much or most biblical hermeneutics under the auspices of being scientific, of course.

(See the following essays on the web site: www.worldvieweyes.org/struass-docs.html “Unpacking the Foundations of Modernism and Post Modernism: From Objectivity to Social Construction of Reality;” “Race Toward Immanence: Demise of Transcendence—the Post

3 Modern Rejection of True Truth and Objectivity;” and “Idolatrous Absolutes: Man’s Search for Ultimate Truth.”)

Husserl’s Search for Certitude: Logic and Mathematics versus Psychology

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was the father of the phenomenological movement. Internal ambiguities in his thought make certain disputed areas of concern impossible to resolve. Nonetheless, the historical factuality that “the most powerful forms of non theistic Existentialism were born from the phenomenological movement” and therefore must claim descent from its founder, Edmund Husserl. His philosophical enterprise is also inseparable from his preoccupation with mathematics and logic. He attempted to remove these areas from psychology (see Logic, Humanities Press, E.T.). His concern for his theory of philosophy as a strictly ‘presuppositionless’ science. Husserl calls for a ‘return to things themselves’ but his ‘things’ are no more the objects of our experience taken as tings in themselves than they are the conscious subjects, conceived a’la’ Descartes, as isolated or enclosed egos. It is rather experience or consciousness itself as the meeting place of subject and object, for knowledge is always knowledge of! Through his study of Aristotle and Brentano, Husserl goes out on both idealism and realism in his notion of “constitution.” Whereby the consciousness grasps its object as ‘constituting’ the meaning of the world. Though consciousness is intentional it is necessarily consciousness giving meaning. Thus, meaning becomes grounded in finite consciousness which is constant flow through ‘time.’

The idealistic interpretation of Husserl tends to emphasize the "transcendental Ego", a pure impersonal consciousness at the root of individual experience which actively constitutes "the world." Hardly the ultimate source of meaning revealed through the 'Incarnational Paradigm.' Husserl's student, Martin Heidegger, received the master's mantle in 1928 at Freiburg, and to Heidegger the essential mode of human existence is "being-in-the-world" (in-der-welt-sein; see his Sein und Zeit which underlies the 'historicity of human consciousness'). Heidegger's 'pure- consciousness' is the primitive and irreducible context of experience and leads man to a pre- conceptual awareness, i.e., a pre-rational, pre-linguistic intuitive awareness which already discloses man as fundamentally related to his world. Thus the exclusive access to being is by way of human existence which is intrinsically historical and therefore constituted by temporal modes of being. The investigation of Being necessarily takes the form of an historical hermeneutic or interpretation and the truth of Being is sought and found within man's history and as it develops in the modes of his temporality. Thus the theme of historicity, so fundamental to Hegel, Dilthey, and Scheler, becomes absolutely central to Heidegger, who moves radically beyond Dilthey in making it constitutive of man's very existence as Dasein, which is disclosed to be 'finite transcendence' whose ultimate meaning is time, thus relativizing all existence (see my essay on “Husserl's Theory of Knowledge”; see John Richardson, The Existential Epistemology: A Heideggerian Critique of Cartesian Project (Oxford, 1987) and Radnitzsky and Hartley III (eds.) Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality and the Sociology of Knowledge (Open Court Press, 1987). Dasein is a project that is a being who is continually being constituted by a drive beyond beings toward Being, whereby he is constantly coming to be himself, not the Incarnate Lord, but the reciprocity between past and future constitute man's new being. Man exists (i.e. exsistit - stands our from) as essentially temporal being by care (sorgs). Now his influence on Ludwig Binswanger and the existential-psychoanalysis school of psychology, the late

4 Bultmann's entymythologieserung project and Gadamer's hermeneutic are rather easy to perceive.

Scheler's Wissenssoziologie and the Incarnation

Another architect of our pluralistic perspective is Max Scheler (1871-1928). In 1925 he published Die Wissen-foremen und die Gesellschaft (E.T. Forms of Knowledge and Society) in which he coined the term Wissenssoziologie (cf. W. Stark, "The Conservative Tradition in the Sociology of Knowledge" Kyklos 3 (1960); Seheler desired that his Sociology of Knowledge would replace the classic philosophical epistemology and Comtean and Spencerean theories of knowledge (see Hamilton, Knowledge, 78ff).

Scheler speaks of ". . .the fundamental fact of the social nature of all knowledge. . ." "The relationship of the Sociology of Knowledge to the theory of the oistgin and validity of knowledge (epistemology and logic), to the genetic and psychological studies of knowledge as it evolves from brutes to man, from child to adult, from … to civilized man, from stage to stage within mature cultures (developmental psychology) to the positive history of various kinds of knowledge, to the metaphysics of Knowledge, to the, rest of the sociology of culture, i.e., of religion, art, law, etc., and to the sociology of real factors, i.e., of blood groups, power groups, economic groups, and their changing "set-up" -- all this must necessarily be touched upon." (M. Scheler, "Problems with a Sociology of Knowledge" Philosophy Today 12 (Spring 1968) 43; and Hamilton, Knowledge, pp. 78-9).

Scheler's theory of the Sociology of Knowledge both precludes in principle, a scientific study of the determinate connections between knowledge and social structure and articulation of crucial biblical theme. The Incarnation, as signaling the immanence of the transcendent creator/redeemer of the universe. Of course, we understand that any involvement with creation demands self-imposed limitations on our sovereign God, whether in Creation, Incarnation or Inscripturation, but motivated by love and not ontological necessity.

There is no rational quarrel with the fact of psychological and sociological contingencies in man's sitz im leben; rather the quarrel is with the radical reductionistic tendencies of much scientific, philosophical and theological relativism. The question remains: How can a historically conditioned knower attain objectivity of historical interpretation? Thus the essence of the Christian Faith, the Incarnation and the Nature of Science are at stake.

Historicity and Theories of Rationality (Berger's 'Fiery Brook)

Society determines the presence (Dasein) of ideas." (Berger/Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality, p. 8) The emergence of ideas come, according to Scheler, not through any independent variable, but in history there were real factors which conditioned thought or regulated conditions through which the ideal factors could affect history.

Thus Scheler rejects the notion that man is born with 'reason', i.e., universal, necessary structures, either biblical or Kantian (e.g. Laws of logic, numbers, physical laws, etc.). He declares that "We reject. . .the notion that there is a certain factual 'unborn' functional apperation

5 of reason, given in all men from the beginning, the idol of the Enlightenment as well as Kant." (Scheler, Problems, p. 49) All perception, cognition, thinking and speaking have sociological character (cf. the international debate concerning the nature of Science - Kuhn, Feyerbend, Hanson, Popper, Polanyi, Toulmin, Lakatos, Cohen, et al.) not of course the content of all knowledge and still less its objective validity (Hamilton, Knowledge, p. 175).

World-Views and Language Games

If there are as many world-views as there are languages (ca. 5000 languages and dialects in the world), then how does man attain linguistic universals which are imperative for communication? All theories, i.e., world views (note problem of tension between observational language and theoretical terms—cross-cultural and linguistic paradigms) are incommensurable; how then is a growth of 'scientific knowledge?, possible? I suggest that the history of science provides a 'paradigm' which can be effectively utilized in any discussion of the nature of 'rational communication.' If one must see the world as a Hindu, Animist, Newtonian, Einsteinian, Monadism, does (can) law ever convert from one paradigm to another? A paradigm entails:

1. community, Gestalt; 2. coherence, i.e., rationality given through certain shared presuppositions; 3. consistency, i.e., justification of belief and behavior within the paradigm; 4. consensus, i.e. 'normal' agreement within the paradigm.

The marvel of the minds' power to recognize anomalies given certain paradigms and to accept new paradigms with more comprehensive rational explanatory powers if a fact. The mind enables man to transcend his psychological, genetic, and environmental determinism. ":f this is not true, both Science and the Incarnation are reduced to merely another trip oven; the cuckoo's nest.

Through the century intellectual developments revolted against universal rationality. Rational judgment (critical thinking) is the one criterion eliminating the "vestigial empiricism" of Kant. In his description of consciousness, Kant postulated an .original synthetic unity of apperception as a priori condition of the "I think." The result is Fichte, Hegel and absolute reason.

The Myth of The Framework

The stronger version of epistemological relativism is commonly known as the "incommensurability thesis." This is the view that certain frameworks have such different notions of truth or rationality that they cannot even understand each other (see Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Winch, Wilson, et al.). The 'incommensurability' thesis claims that 'comparing paradigms' in order to understand and weigh the merits and demerits of conflicting theories on a rational basis is impossible. The history of science does not provide a positive evaluation of this thesis (see Feyerabend "Problems of Empiricism" in R. G. Colodeny (ed) Beyond The Edge of Certainty, 1965). Total incommensurability between frameworks is a nonsense; critical discussion is at an end if there does not exist the model of sharply demarcated systems of language (compare G. Steiner's After Babel with Chomsky's theory of language acquisition and translatability; W. V. Quine, Word and Object, 1960; D. Davidson, "On the Very

6 Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" Accounts of The Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1973-4), 5-20).

There is still human experience as an actually existing process which provides a point of reference in the 'selection' of a theory even in those cases where a common observation language does not exist. (R. G. Colodeny, (ed) Beyond The Edge of Certainty, p. 214)

Sarah Coakley brilliantly articulates the implications of three types of relativism:

1. The strong thesis of incommensurability. 2. The blanket sort of relativism that allows no room for any correspondence theory of truth at all. 3. The strongly deterministic notion of a cultural framework.

In going on to identify three separate areas in contemporary theology where different types of relativism obtain seems to be to present a continuing challenge to the entire body of Christ, especially all Christian institutions of higher learning.

(See Strauss's several papers on point at his website; John Bigelow, The Reality of Numbers, Oxford, 1988; H. I. Brown, Observation and Objectivity, Oxford, 1987; John Honner, The Description of Nature (Niels Bohr and the Philosophy of Quantum Physics) Oxford, 1988; Bryan Magee, Philosophy and The Real World: An Introduction to Karl Popper, Oxford, 1986; Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism, Oxford, 1987; Michael Redhead, Incompleteness, Nonlocality and Realism, Oxford, 1987; and Neil Tennant, Anti-Realism and Logic, Oxford, 1987.

Lonergan—Contra Relativist Analysis

The biblical interpretation of the Incarnation cannot be translated into any philosophy of language, mind or world-view which precludes privatized truth claims, propose an alternative to relativist analysis of thinking and language game theories of truth (see my paper on Structuralism-Contextualism). Certain a priori views of presuppositionalism, are helpless in view of the fact of new paradigms. We propose that the magisterial work of B. Lonergan (Insight, pp. 342-349) contains creative-constructive confrontation with contemporary pluralism which is lethal to the Incarnation claim. The following eleven theses are more than a match for Lessing's 'ugly ditch.' "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto him."

Lonergan's account of self-affirmation directly contradicts the relativist contention that correct judgments do not occur. Hence the following points of difference:

1. Relativists thought it largely a refutation of empiricism, i.e., it stresses the level of intelligence as going beyond the level of presentations. 2. Lonergan insists on the level of reflections versus the relativist. 3. The relativist does not (in fact) confine himself to levels of intelligence and presentations; he is aware of the unconditioned as the ideal toward which human knowing tends.

7 4. The relativist can face concrete issues (eg., "Is this a typewriter?"), but refuses absolute answers. 5. The relativist will even explain why there are further questions until everything is known: the universe to be known is a tissue of internal relations. 6. Oversight of the relativist position: questions are of two kinds—intelligence and reflection. 7. The questions answered by a pattern of internal relations are only questions which ask for an explanatory system. But things-for-us (things as described) are just as much objects of knowledge. 8. The relativist invents for himself a universe of merely explanatory systems because he conceives the unconditioned as the ideal of understanding, whereas the criterion of judgment is the virtually unconditioned. 9. The relativist argument from unending further questions is impressive rather than conclusive. The basic term of human knowing are fixed by the dynamic structure of cognitional process. 10. As human knowing begins from natural spontaneity, st> its initial developments are inarticulate. 11. It is true that I can be mistaken. But that truth presupposes I am not making a further mistake in acknowledging a past mistake as such. Errors are just as much facts as are correct judgments. But the relativist tries to banish fact, and with it, what everyone else calls truth.

As believers we need to understand how the great intellectual revolutions (paradigmatic revolutions, not merely evolutionary accumulation of more and more 'facts') of the 18th and 19th centuries opens the doors to Eastern metaphysics so abundantly visible since the 1950's. The Incarnation of the God/Man (vere deo, vere homo) must not be allowed to evaporate into eastern- reincarnationism or be extended to all humanity, as most 19th century liberal Christologies and much 20th century Christology (Kung, Pannenberg, etc--"Christology from below"). The controversy continues unabated—Incarnation, Myth or Fact. The cause of the Kingdom will grow only as many come to the God/Man, Jesus of Nazareth.

James D. Strauss