Jung on Science

[D. Allan]

This quote by one of my favorite authors is quite amazing. Jung, if you don't know it, was a famous psycoanalyst and student of the human mind.

Science is the art of creating suitable illusions which the fool believes or argues against, but the wise man enjoys for their beauty or their ingenuity, without being blind to the fact that they are human veils and curtains concealing the abysmal darkness of the unknowable. -Carl Jung

Far from demeaning Science, doesn't this attitude elevate it? Probably most scientists would agree with Jung. BTW I wish most theologians had the same attitude of humility toward their religious constructions, theories or dogmas.

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Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books. -C. G. Jung

[David Koot]

Rubbish.

[Dr. Shane]

Most theologians do not see their religious beliefs as being of their own construction. Rather they believe them to be the result of divine revelation.

Science is based mostly on observation. We observe that a 10 lb ball and a 100 lb ball both fall at the same speed. We repeat the experiment over and over and the result continues to be the same so we conclude it to be a scientific fact. Of course it is still only based on human observation, which theologians would say are more subject to error than divine revelation.

[D. Allan]

The Wikipedia article on "Science" names 3 philosophies of science, (there may be others for all I know):

There are different schools of thought in the philosophy of scientific method. Methodological naturalism maintains that scientific investigation must adhere to empirical study and independent verification as a process for properly developing and evaluating natural explanations for observable phenomena. Methodological naturalism, therefore, rejects supernatural explanations, arguments from authority and biased observational studies. Critical rationalism instead holds that unbiased observation is not possible and a demarcation between natural and supernatural explanations is arbitrary; it instead proposes falsifiability as the landmark of empirical theories and falsification as the universal empirical method. Critical rationalism argues for the primacy of science, but at the same time against its authority, by emphasizing its inherent fallibility. It proposes that science should be content with the rational elimination of errors in its theories, not in seeking for their verification (such as claiming certain or probable proof or disproof; both the proposal and falsification of a theory are only of methodological, conjectural, and tentative character in critical rationalism). Instrumentalism rejects the concept of truth and emphasizes merely the utility of theories as instruments for explaining and predicting phenomena.

Most people when they think of science think of the first category named here, methodological naturalism. Jung was evidently of the 2nd persuasion, critical rationalism.

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Nothing can exist by itself alone. -Thich Nhat Hahn

[Bravus]

Critical rationalism is the approach championed by Sir Karl Popper (and in a modified form by his student Imre Lakatos) and is probably the most effective philosophical approach (although by its own standards it is not scientific since not falsifiable by empirical evidence).

A critical rationalist perspective could in principle be applied to theology, with the difference that the relevant evidence for falsifying certain propositions would be evidence from revelation, madiated by sacred texts (rather than empirical evidence from experiments).

David K, you were participating in just such falsifications when you took on ideas like "Genesis 1 is allegorical poetry" and "the word 'chepets' in Isaiah 38 can be translated as 'business'". You would probably argue, though, that you have proved the reverse of those two propositions (i.e. "Genesis 1 is literal" and "'chepets' means 'pleasure'"), which is a more methodological naturalist perspective (to continue the analogy from science).

Instrumentalism is useful in science and even more useful in my own field of educational research and theory, but probably not really applicable to philosophy.

[Dr. Shane]

Ultimately we must accept theology on faith. Those of us that believe in a literal understanding of Genesis 1 do so by faith.

Much of science requires us to believe in human reasoning, which seems easier to believe in for many. After all, when we repeat an experiment several times and get the same result, it is easy to trust our reasoning that what we observe is what we believe it to be.

Contrast that to believing that Christ actually rose from the dead, the gospels are accurate or that Moses actually received the law of God as recorded in Scripture. In that respect, it seems believing in the law of gravity is easier than believing in the law of God.

[D. Allan]

Thanks, Bravus. So if critical rationalism were to find error in its approach to science it would prove itself unuseful!! But if it did prove itself useless then it would actually be useful!! Some kind of phiolosophical impasse here,...?

Perhaps Instrumentalism would be easier to apply to theology. Actually it sounds alot like William James' pragmatic approach in his Varieties of Religious Experience. Maybe it is Critical Rationalism that is used in the 'higher critical method' of Bible study.

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Being smart about life only keeps us from living it. Thomas More

[Bravus]

Shane: which is why I love what Jesus said to (Doubting) Thomas - "you have seen and believe, blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe".

I think the point is that falsificationism cannot itself be falsified, at least not by empirical evidence. In other words, it is logically impossible to test whether falsification 'works' in a way that would prove it wrong. In a sense, it is used instrumentally: it is used because it works, and we don't really care whether it's true in some higher sense.

So not an impasse, but perhaps an irony: Popper proposed falsificationism as a cure for the 'problem of induction', which was that inductivism (the foundation of the methodological naturalist approach) could not itself be shown to be correct except by induction, which is circular reasoning. Turns out falsificationism is in a sense open to the same flaw. So instrumentalism carries the day, in philosophy of science if not in science.

The problem with instrumentalism in theology is that is eschews any truth claims, whereas theology is by definition about truth. I suspect that all traditions in theology would be most like methodological naturalism (in metaphorical terms), but then the hermeneutic methods used to interpret the textual evidence vary widely. Most theological arguments actually end up boiling down to methodological arguments.

[D. Allan]

Quote:

After all, when we repeat an experiment several times and get the same result, it is easy to trust our reasoning that what we observe is what we believe it to be.

Perhaps what Jung is saying, and Critical Rationalism too, is that although the results may be the same our reasoning about what we see can still be wrong. Instrumentalism seems to avoid that problem by side-stepping it and only being concerned with the predictibility of results. A very practial method if results are what concern you.

[Bravus]

Yeah, the observation is just the observation. To say 'objects of different mass fall toward the earth in the same time if dropped from the same height (in the absence of air resistance effects)' is an observation statement. To expand from that to Newton's law of universal gravitation (and you also need his second law of motion to explain the falling objects, but let's stick with gravity for a minute) is the leap that takes it from observation to science.

Newton said 'any two masses anywhere in the universe exert an attractive force on each other' (we can add some other stuff to make the numbers work, but that's the basic idea). So now we have a scientific theory that is falsifiable. If we could find any two masses anywhere in the universe that repelled each other, or even didn't attract each other, we would have falsified Newton's theory. So far, all the evidence we have been able to obtain supports the theory.

We tend not to say a theory is 'proved'... there might still be experiments that we have not done that falsify it. Instead, we say it is 'supported by the evidence'. We do sometimes say a theory is 'disproved' if it is falsified. This is a bit of asymmetry - it's possible to disprove but not to prove.

Examples of falsified theories include geocentrism (the earth being at the centre of the universe) and phlogiston (a substance that causes things to burn, and is lost from them when they burn, reducing their mass). In the first case it took a number of experiments over many years with astronomy to provide the evidence, as well as some brilliant arguments from Galileo. In the second it took Lavoisier's careful experiments.

[D. Allan]

Quote:

it is logically impossible to test whether falsification 'works' in a way that would prove it wrong. In a sense, it is used instrumentally: it is used because it works, and we don't really care whether it's true in some higher sense.

Oh, thanks for that explanation.

Quote:

The problem with instrumentalism in theology is that is eschews any truth claims, whereas theology is by definition about truth.

I think Ed, the author, might say that theology should be about relationship not truth. Just a guess. What does Jesus mean when he says, "I am the truth?"