Time, Space & Knowability

[chaoschristian]

Pondering on this . . .

An emergent theme in neo-creation thought is the unknowability, or the uncertainty of knowing, the physical world. That the scientific process cannot yield results, since the natural world is unknowable. I've seen one of three tacts: emphasizing the uncertainty inherent in the scientific method and that theories are not ever proved, emphazing the uncertainty inherent in the physical world itself, or emphasizing the fact that since miracles are recorded past and present that all of Creation could be sustained on an ongoing 'miracle-by-moment' basis which defies scientific understanding.

Then there is the unknowability of things past line, which basically states that since we can't peer very far back in time with any level of certainty, then we can't expect what works today to have worked yesterday - used as a refutation of being able to apply known scientific concepts from the modern era to ancient times.

Now, I don't think that this is anything new, really, but in light of shernren's excellent thesis on The Scientific Myth of Creationism, I have to wonder where this is coming from.

Can it be as simple as saying the most modern evagelical Christians are being raised up in a theological system which puts so much emphasis on the scriptural revelation that the revelation of Creation is being given short attention or forgetton altogether?

Becasue, that is what I see - an emergent theology that teeters on denying the revelation of Creation, which would amount to a redefinition of orthodoxy.

 

[shernren]

Neo-creationist. Now that's an interesting way to name 'em.

I think part of the fault is partly due to a failure in the public image of science. A lot of scientific studies seem to come about nearly by fiat, where the public by necessity can only see the conclusions and can't go anywhere near following discussion of the evidence. It starts at the most fundamental level ... I was just thinking about how prevalent the atom theory is and how even 9-year-old kids are told that atoms exist - but do they know how? Are they taught the history of the various interpretations of microscopic matter (the humours and their combinations, fundamental indivisibility vs. infinitesimal divisibility, Democritus' atom) and how it was only as recently as 1905 (with Einstein's Brownian motion paper) that there was concrete, unambiguous evidence for it?

Right from the start science has this image of speaking from authority - "we are scientists, we've found this, therefore this is science". And I think that this has started a popular rebellion-against-authority against science, not just in neo-creation but in all sorts of modern ideas.

Interesting parallel (thinking aloud) :
Paranormal investigation
says conventional science is wrong
yet tries to achieve respectability by making "scientific investigation"
and re-interprets conventional evidence along less parsimonious paranormal hypotheses
while coming up with spurious evidence that seems to support only paranormal hypotheses.

Seems like an intellectual twin-brother to creationism?

Anyway, yeah. The "un-knowability of the past" seems to me to be a popular backlash to the scientists' declarations of knowability, strengthened by fundamentalist motives. I don't think there is any theology inherent in that position, in fact anybody who tries to support that position theologically should probably find himself / herself drawing parallels to Hinduistic maya theology quickly and therefore concluding that it is theoretically and theologically (though perhaps not practically) unsupportable.

 

[chaoschristian]

Neo-creationist is a term I started using when I realized that terms like creationist and YEC were insufficient.

All Christians are Creationists, and so I wanted to work against efforts to co-opt that word when describing those who believe God is the Creator of the Universe. This works two ways. One against the atheistic standpoint that God is not the Creator, and two against the neo-creationist standpoint that if God is the Creator, then evolutionary theory is incompatible with Christian theology.

Besides not like the way YEC looks and sounds (yes, argument by aesthetic!) I also thought it was too narrow. Neo-creationists aren't just about believing that the Earth is some 6000 years old, they are about redefining orthodoxy so that it is the only perspective.

Which leads me to my next point for using the term. Just as neo-conservatives are not just about revitalizing the conservative movement in American politics, but rather much more intent on redefining the philosophy of conservatisim by co-opting language, redefining meaning, and disciplining its 'membership' (such as running neo-con candidates against conservative incumbants who don't fit the neo-con ideals), neo-creationists are also not just about establishing that God is Creator, but exerting authority over all of the theological facets of that philosophy: interpretation, doctrine, teaching, evangelism to name the more important ones.

Neo-creationism is about redefining Christian orthodoxy, and does not reflect orthodox creationism as it has been known for centuries within the church; therefore I want to name for what it is and distinguish it from what it isn't.

 

[relspace]

An emergent theme in neo-creation thought is the unknowability, or the uncertainty of knowing, the physical world. That the scientific process cannot yield results, since the natural world is unknowable. I've seen one of three tacts: emphasizing the uncertainty inherent in the scientific method and that theories are not ever proved, emphazing the uncertainty inherent in the physical world itself, or emphasizing the fact that since miracles are recorded past and present that all of Creation could be sustained on an ongoing 'miracle-by-moment' basis which defies scientific understanding.

I believe that Kuhn's Scientific Revolutions has already encouraged the idea that scientific theory cannot be relied on because it will all be overturned by future discoveries, despite the fact that this is a gross exaggeration and not much in the history of science really supports this attitude.

Science is a highly filtered way of looking at the world and all of the miracles that we see in everyday life are things which are read between the lines. It is the misapprehension of what science is and how it operates that leads to an overstatement of the completeness with which it represents reality, both by those who accept science and those who reject it.

Can it be as simple as saying the most modern evagelical Christians are being raised up in a theological system which puts so much emphasis on the scriptural revelation that the revelation of Creation is being given short attention or forgetton altogether? Becasue, that is what I see - an emergent theology that teeters on denying the revelation of Creation, which would amount to a redefinition of orthodoxy.

I think it is a manifestation of an addiction to certainty. Science embraces uncertainty. But the public which merely sits on the sidelines wants none of it. So they either distort science by making it the basis of their own personal model of certainty (simply ignoring the aspects of reality which do not fit) or they reject science because of the inherent uncertainty to seek some other source from which to feed their addiction.

I think part of the fault is partly due to a failure in the public image of science. A lot of scientific studies seem to come about nearly by fiat, where the public by necessity can only see the conclusions and can't go anywhere near following discussion of the evidence. It starts at the most fundamental level ... I was just thinking about how prevalent the atom theory is and how even 9-year-old kids are told that atoms exist - but do they know how? Are they taught the history of the various interpretations of microscopic matter (the humours and their combinations, fundamental indivisibility vs. infinitesimal divisibility, Democritus' atom) and how it was only as recently as 1905 (with Einstein's Brownian motion paper) that there was concrete, unambiguous evidence for it?

The media (including education) caters to demand. In our entertainment rich society, the effort required to truly understand science makes it nothing but unsuccessful entertainment to the great majority. I don't see how adding the additional complications of the historical development could improve the situaltion. I have certainly notice how relativity has been losing out to star trek and other science fiction shows. The latter grabs public attention and devotion much more effectively, convincing people that relativity must be wrong.

Right from the start science has this image of speaking from authority - "we are scientists, we've found this, therefore this is science". And I think that this has started a popular rebellion-against-authority against science, not just in neo-creation but in all sorts of modern ideas.

Scientists do not speak like this to each other. How else are the scientists to speak to the retarded public from whom their paycheck comes.

Interesting parallel (thinking aloud) :
Paranormal investigation
says conventional science is wrong
yet tries to achieve respectability by making "scientific investigation"
and re-interprets conventional evidence along less parsimonious paranormal hypotheses
while coming up with spurious evidence that seems to support only paranormal hypotheses.
Seems like an intellectual twin-brother to creationism?

About halfway between psychology (in which science proves inept simply because the techniques are not so apt for the subject of investigation) and Creationsim (which is pure rhetoric), I think.

Then there is the unknowability of things past line, which basically states that since we can't peer very far back in time with any level of certainty, then we can't expect what works today to have worked yesterday - used as a refutation of being able to apply known scientific concepts from the modern era to ancient times.

Anyway, yeah. The "un-knowability of the past" seems to me to be a popular backlash to the scientists' declarations of knowability, strengthened by fundamentalist motives. I don't think there is any theology inherent in that position, in fact anybody who tries to support that position theologically should probably find himself / herself drawing parallels to Hinduistic maya theology quickly and therefore concluding that it is theoretically and theologically (though perhaps not practically) unsupportable.

I don't think so. The un-knowability of the past is just a basic fact of reality. The past must be reconstructed from traces like memories which edit, transform and interpret the past. The farther we reach into the past the more mythical the memories/traces become, which means we generally only reconstruct archtypical representatives rather than actual details. But this is no reason to discard either the memories or the reconstructions. Human memory is no different except in scale, and we would not discard distant memories because of their lack of reliability because they are too much a part of what we are.

 

[chaoschristian]

I don't think so. The un-knowability of the past is just a basic fact of reality. The past must be reconstructed from traces like memories which edit, transform and interpret the past. The farther we reach into the past the more mythical the memories/traces become, which means we generally only reconstruct archtypical representatives rather than actual details. But this is no reason to discard either the memories or the reconstructions. Human memory is no different except in scale, and we would not discard distant memories because of their lack of reliability because they are too much a part of what we are.

Yes, only I really wasn't focused on memory as much as the concept of 'since we don't have a timemachine to go back 1 million years to see if gravity works the same way we see it working today, we cannot extrapolate that it would, and any such conclusion based on that premise are mere speculation.'

Although you do raise a point in regards to memory, history and myth.

 

[shernren]

I think there is a practical unknowability argument, and a theoretical unknowability argument. The theoretical one simply goes something like "we weren't there therefore we can never know what happened".

The practical one recognizes that the universe is approximately deterministic given: events are being observed at the macroscopic level and no supernatural interference. Therefore given any set of apparent present data and a set of known processes which acted to yield that observed data, it is possible to extrapolate back any amount of time to "see the past". The practical unknowability lies in the fact that both sets (present data and persistent processes) are not entirely known - note that theoretically if both were known completely then there would be no problem (I think the theoretical position would say that even then it is impossible to know on philosophical grounds).

One problem is that when evolutionists come out to say that evolution must accommodate practical unknowability, the creationists take it as evolutionist support for theoretical unknowability.

But given that a bit of reflection shows that all observations happen in the past, and therefore the only difference between past observations and present observations is quantitative (how far back in time) instead of qualitative, I really don't know why neo-creationism took it up as an argument. (You keep introducing good words - indicative, then neo-creationism ) It smacks to me of "reach for the nearest thing that looks remotely dangerous to the enemy ... " thinking - a disdain for the philosophical implications of their statements.

 

[chaoschristian]

I believe that Kuhn's Scientific Revolutions has already encouraged the idea that scientific theory cannot be relied on because it will all be overturned by future discoveries, despite the fact that this is a gross exaggeration and not much in the history of science really supports this attitude.

In my experience Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolutions is generally adored by social scientists and detested or ignore by those in hard sciences.

Its great strength and weakness is the delivery unto us of the concept of paradigmatic thinking. Good in that it provides a new framework in which to think about the development of idea systems, bad in that besides the reasons you pointed out, everyone started using the word 'paradigm' in just about everything they did. This actually became a game for us at university - how long could a doc student go on talking before he/she used the word paradigm.