Ever wonder why it is that arguments over things like “intelligent design" or the “truth" of the Christian Bible always look like a quote from Shakespeare? “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". And that scientists, if they manage to get a word in edgewise, don’t seem to keep it there for long? I suggest part of it is the way we argue.

Y’see, in a lot of arguments held outside the science realm, folk start with an idea that something is true. “The Bible is the literal word of God", for example. Then they go looking for support (“proof") for that truth. The more points you can assemble in support of your truth, the better that truth looks. If there are points that do not support your truth, it’s up to the arguer to argue them away. In cases that are not long catalogues of cut-and-dried facts all pointing one way, the outcome of the argument can depend less on the facts than on the eloquence of the debaters. The one who shouts loudest has the floor.

Within the science realm, it’s different. Folk start with an idea, same as everywhere else. But they think that idea is false. Every observation, analysis, experiment, is designed with the express purpose of taking an idea and showing that it cannot be so. Only if the scientist fails to show that the idea is false is the scientist allowed to accept the confounded notion that the idea might be true. At least until the next set of questions and experiments. The nearest a scientist comes to “proving" a “truth" is when two centuries of observations and experiments fail to come up with anything less false than the idea being tested. Such, for example, is the paradigm of evolution of living things by natural selection.

Jeez, every other word in that last paragraph was false or fail. No wonder so many of us who are in the sciences get depressed. Especially when our mode of argument gets used against us.

Intelligent design proponents, for example, know just enough about the scientist’s obsession with falsification to apply it in a debate. They will take some fact that, taken by itself, seems to disprove evolution and then announce “Since this fact does not support evolution, therefore evolution is false AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS TRUE". The scientist’s response is, of course, “you haven’t considered the possibility that intelligent design is also false". But by this time the audience is up and roaring and in no mood to explore the intricacies of hypothesis testing. The intelligent design proponent has won the “eloquence" battle – and the debate.

Behold the moral in big neon letters. Debates outside the sciences frequently appeal to the emotions. The goal is to move people to your point of view. Scientific debate cannot, by definition, do this. It has to be a sober, and sobering, march through the data. Check your ego at the door, because that Petri dish full of bacteria is sitting there gunning for your most cherished idea, the one you expect to make you rich and famous. If they shoot that idea down, no amount or oratorical eloquence on your part is going to set it back up. You have no choice but to accept it. Or, to leave science and become one of those pseudoscientific demagogues who don lab coats, chase ambulances, and peddle manufactured calamities in the name of profit.

So I guess that leaves me out of theological debates, unless I’m in a screaming mood. I can observe, test, and accept the principles of ethics that are established in a Bible. I can observe, test, and accept the principles of human behavior that make it useful for people to put these principles down in a Bible and give them the option of reducing their personal life workload by accepting that Bible as “the truth". But I cannot observe, test and accept that the Bible is the literal “word of God", in fact those observations I do make repeatedly falsify that notion.

Apparently I’m not alone even in the theological world. The spiritual leader of a church I attended in Columbus, Ohio many years ago, and a respected writer and thinker, had something to say about “Bible believers"; I have since learned that this is a major theme in much mainstream Christian thought.

“The Bible is a book, an object made by human hands. Jahweh, through Moses and the prophets, repeatedly instructs the chosen people to reject the idolatry of other nations, to revere no object made by hands, but only the living God who is far beyond all comprehension or attempt at imagery and whose instruction to humans is in the NOW. Therefore, those who ‘believe in the Bible’ are idolaters, and not Christian, or even any part of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic faith system."

I can't falsify that hypothesis - it's a faith matter, outside the realm of science. But it sure as hallelujah appeals to me.

  - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

All opinions are mine as a private citizen.