New Scientific Thought: Data and Dogma as Compatible

Basic directions in the philosophy of science have undergone radical shifts within the last decade. For many years, operationism in physics, logical positivism in philosophy, and radical behaviorism in psychology emphasized the necessity for empirical confirmation of truth. Dust-bowl empiricism rode the crest of scientific popularity for a long time, making it fashionable to ridicule the use of abstract terms like soul or mind. Such non-public constructs, it was felt, had no place in the fact-seeking operations of science. Someone has said that Watson, in his revolutionary attempts to put psychology on the same scientific plane as physiology, took the mind out of psychology. Bergmann asserted that no term without an exhaustive empirical referent was meaningful. This approach is epitomized in the popular detective’s insistence, “All we want are the facts, ma’am, just the facts.”

Slowly, men of science and philosophy began to see the sterility of an approach to knowledge that excluded all consideration of unobservable reality. Common sense rather forcibly dictates that words like choice, intention, beauty, and mind point to referents that though non-empirical are in some sense real and should therefore have a place in scientific as well as lay thinking. An embarrassing gap became apparent between what everyone intuitively “knows” and what scientists were studying. Scientific research was in danger of becoming a precise but irrelevant investigation of trivia. Carnap, Hempel, Pap, and others expressed their concern that words defined explicitly and exhaustively in terms of their empirical referents do not begin to cover the world of reality. It became obvious that much exists that cannot be verified by positivistic criteria, that a new approach was needed to allow scientists to deal with unobserved and inherently unobservable reality.

In an article entitled Strong Inference, Platt argued that progress in scientific understanding depends not upon proof but upon disproof: Can we reject an explanation proposed to account for observed phenomena? If so, we are that much closer to the “true” explanation. Such thinking led to a newer philosophy of science, one that recognizes the inherent unprovability of propositions (empirical or non-empirical), yet offers a structure within which hypothetical constructs can gain probabilistic confirmation. The approach may be summarized by four steps necessary for arriving at some understanding of unseen reality: (1) formulate—either intuitively or on the basis of prior investigation—a number of possible explanations for certain phenomena; (2) logically derive from each explanation a set of specific predictions about how things should be if that explanation were true; (3) determine how well each set of predictions fits with observable, consensually agreed upon reality; (4) discard the explanation having the smallest correlation between its set of predictions and phenomenal data. The four-step process may then be repeated with the remaining alternatives; each time a more intricate pattern of predictions is generated, until all but one explanation has been discarded on the basis of poor fit with empirical reality, and the remaining explanation gracefully accords with the data.

Empiricists are quick to point out that such a thoroughly inductive procedure runs the logical risk of affirming the consequent. If Fido was run through a large sausage grinder, he is dead; therefore, if Fido is dead, he was sausaged. The conclusion is faulty and represents the inevitable risk taken in thinking inductively. Yet one may minimize the chance of error by generating a set of predictions detailed enough that if the predicted events do occur, it is extremely unlikely that the hypothesis from which the predictions flow is incorrect. One still runs the risk of being wrong, of course, but the opportunity to explore unseen reality more than justifies the risk.

Three important implications of this new approach to the philosophy of science stand out for the thinking Christian. First, science is admitting its incurable impotency in ever arriving at final truth. Conclusions based on scientific investigation must always be stated in terms of probability. Second, if we are not to discard our brains in accepting a religious faith, we must accept the necessity of an ultimate tie between our beliefs and consensually agreed upon public reality. Although Scripture teaches the very real existence of many intangible entities, these entities must interact with one another and with empirical phenomena in at least partially specifiable ways. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the new approach to approximating truth allows for the independent existence of non-empirical, non-public constructs within a scientific framework. Terms like soul, mind, and new life in Christ are sensible terms that one can study and probabilistically validate by specifying what events will be observed if these entities are real. The Christian who desires to use these terms can no longer be labeled soft-headed. It is rather the atheist who rejects spiritual reality because it lacks absolute test-tube proof who is out of step with modern scientific thinking. The Bible’s description of man’s nature, an example of a hypothetical construct that can now be studied, seems more consistent with what people do and think than the many available theories of man. If competing schools of thought can be shown to account less well than biblical conceptions for the mass of observable data, then our beliefs receive probabilistic confirmation and become the most likely explanation.

To step from intellectually recognizing a position as most probably true to committing one’s intellect and will to that position is to exercise saving faith. Christians must recognize that revelation provides the only means of discovering absolute truth and by faith rest in the certainty of God’s self-revelation through his Word and Jesus Christ. Moving from probability via faith to the certainty of revelation is not meant to be an accurate description of what persons usually do when they accept the Lord Jesus Christ as Saviour. Yet by describing a credible basis for faith on current scientific grounds, we offer to that faith a measure of intelligent support and provide an answer to the concern that faith is a flight from reason.

Lawrence J. Crabb, Jr., is a staff psychologist and assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, from which he received the Ph.D. last year.

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