Science, Fundamentalism, and Faith

Recently perusing the comments in a blog I read, I came across the following statement:

Spirit stuff, by definition, cannot exist. It is usually defined as that which cannot be seen, felt, touched, heard, tasted or detected by any instrument now or in the future.

This definition doesn't quite match up with the numerous dictionary definitions of the word spirit, which range from "the principle of conscious life" through "incorporeal being". However, it pervades much modern thought, especially a strain that I call scientific fundamentalism. For example, an L.A. Times book review of The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science (by Natalie Angie) states the following:

Her first chapters cover familiar, if important, ground: The foundation of science is evidence; we can't always predict where pure research will lead, so we need to support the scientific dreamers; math is "unreasonably effective" at making sense of nature. And science is our most powerful weapon against fear and superstition — our "candle in the dark," as Carl Sagan so eloquently put it.

In and of itself, I mostly agree with the statement. A fundamental requirement for accepting a proposition or a theory should be evidence. However, scientific fundamentalism (which The Canon appears to champion) places severe, and in my view unnecessary restrictions on what constitutes evidence. Furthermore, it excludes all but hierarchical modes of knowledge and learning, therefore excluding much of what is and can be experienced in the phenomenological world.

Defining spirit to be "that which cannot exist" and then following it up with the conclusion that spirit does not exist exemplifies circular reasoning, is operationally useless, and serves only a Cartesian dualism. A more useful definition, one that may be closer to the dictionary definitions listed above, is the following: a spiritual phenomenon is that which is of a higher order than can be subjected to investigation by repeated experiment. This includes in situ human emotion, friendship, intuition, consciousness, meaning in general, as well as the emergent properties of large-scale complex systems; that is, phenomena that can be experienced but not studied.

Complex systems, in particular, create difficulties because they are by definition nonlinear and therefore impossible to characterize in any finite sample. I submit that they are ultimately easier to understand in terms of personalities, i.e. angels and egregores, than in terms of stochastic differential equations. I believe that pre-literate cultures understood this; far from being"superstitious", they possessed modes of knowing that were able to comprehend natural processes by relating to them, rather than studying them, in much the same way that we come to know another individual by relationship rather than cold, impersonal observation. There is evidence that that pre-literate knowledge systems, obtained through deep intimacy with their subject matter by relational means, enabled their stewards to live sustainably for aeons in a way that we are unable to do in a short 500 year period.

Bear in mind that a truth about pre-literate peoples lies somewhere on a continuum between two propositions: either they have lived at the harsh boundary between survival and extinction, in which case systems of knowledge that confer a competitive edge would be favored over those that do not; or they have been fortunate to live a life of relative ease that facilitates the development of unnecessarily ornate and colorful belief systems that have no place in the grim modern world. The latter proposition negates a commonly held assumption that our current science and technology is an unambiguous benefit to collective humanity. In either case, one has to consider the possibility that scientific fundamentalism is severely limited in terms of its ability to facilitate human happiness and long-term survival in a complex biosphere.

The blog commenter I quoted at the beginning of this article makes another assertion, "Science is really a conversation with nature." This is a mis-characerization of the nature of scientific inquiry, especially in certain biological sciences such as toxicology. From the perspective of "Nature" (a reification that I'll accept in this posting), science is less a conversation than an interrogation bordering on torture. See, for example, the critiques of Carolyn Merchant and William Kotke.

The LA Times book review casually mentions a glaring omission in The Canon:

Oddly, though, [the author] barely mentions the two most profound and beautiful ideas physics has ever cooked up — relativity and quantum theory — even though they underlie it all.

Yes, and why is that? Why is there no mention of the cracks in the foundation of scientifc fundamentalism, the apparent fact that matter itself ultimately consists of puffs of probability floating in a curved and twisting void? Could it be that these topics spawn too many questions that cannot comfortably be answered without equivocating basic assumptions about modern reality? Might it risk dispersing the collective attention away from focus on a materialistic narrative that serves only a narrow range of interests?

We are at an inflection point in our collective history where current modes of apprehending the natural world no longer serve us. The existing paradigm of hierarchical knowledge obtained at knife-point no longer has practical application in a self-reinforcing system of domination, wherein honest speakers of truth (whether or not they be conventional scientists) have no voice against powers that would use knowledge only to further entrench systems of hierarchy and empire at the expense of a sustainable biosphere. We need to accept modes of knowing and learning that acknowledge relationship with rather than domination over Nature.

To that end, I will now define faith, not as the belief in a proposition without evidence, but rather an openness and willingness to engage in relationship with the unknown, with nature, and with larger intelligences.