DEFECTS OF BOTH RATIONALISM AND RELIGION

The disappointments leading to the new situations, both in old-fashioned rationalism and in old-fashioned religion, should be the first indication of ways leading to a remedy.

A.

The reason that scientists could so easily confess ignorance and yet be unmoved by proposals from the religious to seek enlightenment elsewhere is fairly clear: Scientists were arguing from a position of strength. It is not how much they knew, but their ability to know, the very idea of self-reliance through knowledge, that offered them more hope than all religion could.

This very idea was contested by Pierre Duhem. Science must be devoid of all pretense to theoretical knowledge, he said, because science can never prove its theories empirically. Unproven theories are more likely to be erroneous than true, and hence it is better to view science, not as a system of theories, but as a system of mathematical definitions used to correlate empirical data. Thus, if we think Newtonian mechanics is an empirical theory about the behavior of planets and stars, then we may be disappointed by the subsequent need to revise our theories. However, if we view Newtonian mechanics as a system of second-order total differ­ential equations to correlate observations, then these are immutable. True, the domain of application of Newtonian mechanics, the range of correlated facts, is changeable: We constantly try to apply the equations to new situations or with increasing precision, until we are stopped by experience from doing so indefinitely.

In this manner Duhem succeeded in rescuing science from the state of permanent revolution to which it might have been thrown when it turned out that empirical proof of scientific theories is impossible. But there was a price to pay: The informative content of scientific theory was gone. Theoretical science had to be viewed as a mere mathematical system to pigeonhole and correlate empirical data, and its aim had to be viewed as mere convenience and usefulness. This view of the status of theoretical science (conventionalism) as mathematical, and of the aim of science (instrumentalism) as technological, sharply con­trasts with the classical view of science as enlightenment - as chiefly the knowledge of the true laws of nature, as the true explanation of the empirical phenomena, with technology as a mere by-product of true knowledge.

In advocating this change Duhem had the support of antireligious philosophers like Poincare and Mach, and he was very proud to count these as allies. But he alone went further, and argued that the new philo­sophy of science permits, perhaps even requires, an adjustment of our philosophies of religion and of enlightenment.

Duhem was an orthodox Roman Catholic; his philosophy helped him harmonize his religious and his scientific commitments. He readily admitted all this, but he stressed that he advocated his view of science, his conventionalism (theoretical science belongs to mathematics), and his instrumentalism (theoretical science belongs to applied mathe­matics), not only for the sake of religion, but chiefly for the sake of science itself.

B. The conclusion that religion has won, that it has not capitulated to rationalism in any way, is thus being pressed. Indeed, my own teacher, Sir Karl Popper, in his classic “Three Views concerning Human Knowl­edge” (Conjectures and Refutations, 1964), accepts it. I wish to explain my dissent from it.

Popper’s argument is this. In the late Middle Ages, instrumentalism was the current philosophy of science, as Duhem has observed. The argument between the Church and the Copernican heretics was not scientific but philosophical. The same Jesuits who attacked Galileo’s philosophy used Copernicus in their astronomic calculations. Saint Robert, Cardinal Bellarmine, S.J., accepted the Copernican hypothesis mathematically, and insisted that Galileo was transgressing his rights as a Catholic when accepting the Copernican hypothesis philosophi­cally: As long as the Copernican hypothesis was unproven it was not the duty or even the right of Galileo, as a scientist or as a Catholic, to assert that Copernicanism was really or philosophically true. Strangely, not only Duhem, the Catholic, but even Poincare, the free-thinker, endorsed Bellarmine’s position; with Niels Bohr, says Popper, instru­mentalism became the accepted fashion; and so science capitulated and the Church won.

In the tradition of science, it was taken for granted, as Giorgio de Santillana illustrates in a detailed study, that Bellarmine stood for obscurantism and Galileo for enlightenment. In the late nineteenth century, as Popper shows, Mach and Poincare tacitly, and Duhem open­ly, endorsed Bellarmine’s view of Copernicanism and rejected Galileo’s. Copernicanism, they said, was not true information about the universe, about the center of the universe; rather, they said, it was a system of applied mathematics. Copernicanism, they said, does not tell us what and why, but how. Some unsophisticated historians of science still repeat the nineteenth-century story, according to which the debate between Galileo and his opponents is now dead, since Copernicanism has won; the observations of stellar parallaxes (shifts of the scenery caused by the motion of the observer), which Galileo could not observe (for want of a strong telescope), are by now established as the facts that prove Copernicanism to everybody’s satisfaction.

This is misleading when taken as the overall picture. Bellarmine has won, but on a technicality and concerning a minor point. When Bellarmine argued that Galileo had no right to proclaim Copernicanism philosophically true, he was not debating with Galileo. Rather, he was threatening Galileo; more precisely, he was defending the Church’s authority over the scientists. His argument concerning Copernicanism was a rider to explain his threat - a rider concerning just a point at issue, not the main issue itself. And Galileo agreed with Bellarmine on what the issue was. In his Letter to the Grand Duchess, he defended nothing less than the scientists’ freedom from the authority of the Church, suggesting that the Church has no business telling scientist (as scientists) anything at all. It was the self-reliance of reason, of the individual’s ability to read the book of nature without the aid of authority, tradition, and priests, that Galileo was defending. Bellarmine darkly and menacingly had hinted that Galileo was siding with the Protestants, and Galileo darkly and vehemently repudiated the charges. John Watkins, Paul Feyerabend, and other followers of Popper, have recently sided with Bellarmine on this: Protes­tants were self-reliant when reading the Book of God, and scientists when reading the book of nature.

Bellarmine showed great insight: when self-reliance is allowed to any extent, there may be no stopping it. This insight is, indeed, Platonic - as ex­plained in Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper himself endorses it. The choice, he says, is between self-reliance and the return to the apes (return to complete dependence). Bellarmine lost to an extent that would have alarmed him - that indeed alarms many a Catholic leader today, leaders such as Cardinal Ottaviani, who, in protest, resigned his position as head of the Vatican Congregation in charge of faith and morals in 1967.

Protestants almost unanimously capitualed to science much earlier; the Protestant equivalents of Ottaviani are a handful of fundamen­talists. Even branches of the most orthodox sections of Orthodox Jewry have accepted science. It is not merely that religion yields to science what is due to science. With few exceptions the religious these days allow the rationalists to spread the gospel of self-reliance even in the midst of religion. Bellarmine has lost as few valiant fighters ever have.

C. Symmetry between the defects of rationalism and of established religion is hard to advocate. What the religious are losing to science and to the scientific tradition is viewed as progress by most people. Whether the same can be said of the scientific tradition or the rationalist tradition is highly debatable, for the tradition of science lost aspirations for theoretical knowledge when it accepted Bellarmine’s instrumentalism. True, Bellarmine’s instrumentalism, his view of science as applied mathematics, makes room for the freedom to accept any metaphysical commitment. But this is hardly a gain; it is the loss of the hope, of the ideal, to develop a scientific metaphysics or a scientific world view; it is thus a catastrophic loss of self-reliance, or at least loss of the hope of self-reliance, or at the very least loss of the precious illusion of self-reliance. When religion loses, self-reliance gains; when rationalism loses, self- reliance loses too. Hence there is hardly any place for any symmetry. Things look bleak.

VIII.