After a month or so of intensive reading in the school science library, having exhausted the works on biology, I came across a section that I had never noticed before. It was labeled "The History and Philosophy of Science" and was heavy with dust. I had little time for this sort of stuff, tending to regard it as the uninformed criticism of the certainties and simplicities of the natural sciences by those who felt threatened by them - what Dawkins would later call "truth-heckling." Philosophy, like theology, was just pointless speculation about issues that could be solved through a few decent experiments. What was the point?
...By the time I had finished reading the somewhat meagre holdings of the school library in this field, I realized that I needed to do some very serious rethinking.
Far from being half-witted obscurantism that placed unnecessary obstacles in the relentless place of scientific advance, the history and philosophy of science asked all the right questions about the reliability and limits of scientific knowledge. And they were questions that I had not faced thus far. I was like a fundamentalist Christian who suddenly discovered that Jesus had not personally written the Apostles' Creed, or a flat-earther forced to come to terms with photographs of the planet taken from space. Issues such as the underdetermination of theory by data, radical theory change in the history of science, the difficulties in devising a "crucial experiment," and the enormously complex issues associated with determining what was the "best explanation" of a given set of observations crowded in on me, muddying what I had taken to be the clear, still water of scientific truth.
Things turned out to be rather more complicated than I had realized. My eyes had been opened, and I knew there was no going back to the simplistic take on the sciences I had once known. Like most people at that stage in their education, I had enjoyed the beauty and innocence of a childlike attitude to the sciences, and secretly longed to remain in that secure place. Indeed, I think that part of me deeply wished that I had never picked up that book, never asked those awkward questions, and never questioned the simplicities of my scientific youth. But there was no going back. I had stepped through a door, and could not escape the new world I had now entered.
Alister McGrath, Dawkins' God, pp. 4-5.
2 comments:
Seems that you're still looking into this question of faith vs. reason, which is great to look into (take a look at that post, some days back. I've added a comment.) I just wanted to let you know that I'm keeping an eye on this, now that I've corrected the erroneous bookmarking that I perpetrated some weeks ago. I can't comment much on this particular quote, having no experience with the author or work, and I don't want to take it too out of context for fear of misunderstanding what you're trying to get across. Enlighten, please?
If you have a look at the talk on science and apologetics that I posted more recently, that should explain the quote a bit more.
Alister McGrath is a scientist and theologian from Oxford. I was reading his book on Richard Dawkins recently, and was struck by his inclusion of his discovery of history and philosophy of science as part of his journey to Christianity. It's not what converted him, obviously, but it was a factor in his changing attitudes to science and Christianity. As a teenager extremely keen on science, he had the mindset (shared by people such as Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) that science is a rational pursuit of truth about nature that can explain everything, and religion is simply childish superstition. McGrath's reading in the history and philosophy of science led him to see how complex and fuzzy an enterprise science actually is. And when he began to learn more about Christianity, he came to believe in it, and he became a Christian.
I found this quote interesting, because I had been wondering whether the sociology of science (perhaps more critical than the philosophy of science) could be useful in Christian apologetics. Not for establishing the truth of the gospel, but perhaps for defeating "defeater beliefs" or for kategorics - attacking the worldview of scientific materialism.
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