I mentioned yesterday that a philosopher named Kuhn came up with the terminology “paradigm shift.” And, I mentioned that what he conclusively showed was how even scientists are influenced by some of their preconceptions. Let me put it another way. If any of you have read the original Sherlock Holmes novels–not the movies, please, the novels–you know that he was an obssessive character, whose claim was that it was possible for a person to train themself in a limited area of life in such a way that they became dispassionate observation machines, able to draw accurate conclusions from their dispassionate observations.
But, in one sense, he was reflecting what would become the dominant idea up until Kuhn and his contemporaries wrote. That idea was positivism (often nicknamed modernism). What is positivism? Well it was used in both science and jurisprudence. In science, positivism was:
A philosophical system that holds that every rationally justifiable assertion can be scientifically verified or is capable of logical or mathematical proof, and that therefore rejects metaphysics and theism.
Whereas in jurisprudence it was:
The theory that laws are to be understood as social rules, valid because they are enacted by authority or derive logically from existing decisions, and that ideal or moral considerations (e.g., that a rule is unjust) should not limit the scope or operation of the law.
Notice that in both cases, if it cannot be measured or touched or, etc., it is really irrelevant. One can see how under positivism, it was quite possible for science to become totally indifferent, or even hostile, to religion. In jurisprudence, this led to the rise of the idea of separation of Church and State being interpreted to mean that nothing of the Church should be seen within the State. This idea of positivism influenced fields such as journalism, where the reigning idea was that of the dispassionate journalist or newsman who would sort through the news to present what was important to us. Think of Walter Cronkite (if you are old enough to remember him) and you would have a good idea of that type of dispassionate journalistic approach.
At this point, it is very important that you understand a couple of things. Many positivists were not in the least bit hostile toward religion. Again, think of Walter Cronkite and many other journalists of that era, who were admired by most of the culture for their ability to report the news in what appeared to be a neutral fashion. They had no “liberal” agenda, nor were they trying to shade the news in any way. Rather, their ideal was precisely the opposite of that. They were trying to present the news without inserting themselves in the process. In their case, they really were trying to be fair and balanced. The later claim that there is (was) a liberal agenda to present the news from only a certain and very biased viewpoint is actually a post-modernist claim that dates to after Kuhn, and is based on some of the changes in the culture.
In the same way, many scientists were not pushing any particular agenda. They were simply trying to do science. And, one of the tenets of science was (and is) that one should always seek the natural explanation that best explained the phenomena that they were observing, even if that explanation clashed with previous explanations or with the Bible. The phenomenal advances in technology, from the late 19th through the 20th and into the 21st century would certainly be cited as proof that this neutral approach to science works. Please understand that most scientists of that period would not consider themselves to be anti-Christian (or anti-religious) in any way. You can read the stories of many who were (and are) Christian. They simply saw (and see) no connection between what they were doing and Christianity (or religion), other than in some very general sense. Moreover, the increasing complexity of the various fields of science tended to (and tends to) ensure that one cannot be both a theologian and a scientist, like was much more common in the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment period.
Nevertheless, there certainly were those who used positivism to put forward viewpoints that were very negative towards religion. Particularly the growth of the idea of Separation of Church and State comes out of positivism. On the other side, the Scopes trial brought strong cultural memories to what was then a clearly Protestant nation of the history of Copernicus, Galileo, and the Inquisition. Southern fundamentalism came out of that clash looking like they wished to return to the days when the Church would tell the State what it could call knowledge and what it could not call knowledge. The repercussions were enormous for the Church.
But, the paper on philosophy of science by Kuhn, and other later writings set off a bomb underneath this culture, a bomb that is still wreaking its havoc.
===MORE TO COME===
Leave a Reply