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Lecture and Discussant Text Jim
Proctor Lecture Text Background [2-Matrix: Trinity-Morpheus-Neo] I am speaking, of course, of The Matrix: Reloaded. Science, as both diabolical and redemptive technology, [3-Matrix: Sentinels] science as a seemingly real yet utterly virtual world of computer code in which people are unwittingly trapped like the prisoners in Plato's cave, [4-Matrix: Code World] science as the empowering tool of Morpheus and his band of high-tech freedom fighters. [5-Matrix: Neb. Crew] Yet religion, too. [6-Matrix: Neo/Bullets] Listen to the strong parallels one scholar draws between the original Matrix and the central story of Christianity:
He also notes the very important Buddhist
theme of The Matrix, stressing "our ignorance of existential reality" as
the fundamental problem both in Buddhism and the world depicted
in the movie.
So we have science on both sides, but most significantly, science is the tool of the oppressor. And religion clearly is the source of insight and strength among Neo and his disciples. Science up against religion. And who wins? In the battle between diabolical science and religious insight, religion prevails. But the victory is short-lived: after all, the original Matrix grossed a measly $165 million,[2] small change to many of us here, thus the imperative to produce sequels such as that appearing on the movie screens tonight. [7-Graphic: S&R] Science and religion: powerful stuff in our society, as revealed in The Matrix and countless other instances of popular culture. This is ultimately why we are here tonight, and why I am honored to deliver the closing lecture in a three-year series UC Santa Barbara has sponsored, with the gracious support of the John Templeton Foundation, on science, religion, and the human experience. [8-Photo: Ninian Smart] This series was dedicated by Chancellor Henry Yang to the memory of Ninian Smart, former Professor of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara, a pioneer in the study of religion and worldviews, and a trusted source of wisdom in the early days of planning this ambitious program. Our series began one Friday afternoon on April 20, 2001, when Nobel Laureate Walter Kohn spoke to a literally overflowing lecture hall. We have had sixteen to date, the most recent being Harvard historian Anne Harrington's lecture last month. In all, over sixty UCSB faculty, drawn from across the physical and life sciences, social and behavioral sciences, and humanities have participated in some significant way in selecting speakers, serving as commentators, and presenting lectures. It would be rather presumptuous of me to claim to stand on the shoulders of these giants in this lecture. But I would like to examine one thread which has woven through many of these lectures, starting with Walter Kohn's reference to the Pope and ending with Anne Harrington's discussion of how science has been invoked to prove the healing efficacy of prayer. This is the thread of authority in science and religion. [9-Graphic: Hotei] The approach I will take can be clarified by means of a well-known Buddhist proverb, as represented in this early 19th century picture by a Zen artist priest. Here the childlike, rotund, enlightened figure Hotei points heavenward (note there is no actual moon) and asks: "Mr. Moon, how old are you: seventeen or three?" Doctrine and teachings, according to this proverb, are like a finger pointing to the moon, which represents ultimate reality, or more properly our experience of this ultimate reality. There is wisdom in this proverb, but a cursory reading would overlook how the moon and the finger are intertwined. Science and religion are often understood as mere fingers pointing transparently to reality and God, or the sacred; hence, a good deal of what you read about science and religion constitutes an attempt to harmonize reality and God, to bring these multiple moons together. Our lecture series has been based on an expanded premise: we are interested in the finger as well as the moon, the human experience of science and religion as well as the realities toward which science and religion point. We do this not because we don't believe in the moon, but because we wish to avoid the intellectual hypocrisy of making certain scientific or religious claims about the moon without acknowledging that this very act involves pointing a finger. I want to help clarify science and religion by taking the next step. I am interested in the fingers pointing to the finger that points to the moon. When I was working for the Peace Corps in southern Africa in the early 1980s, I met a man who was once a teacher and now wandered the streets of the small border town nearby with a pencil and small notebook in hand. And each time he passed an object that caught his eye he would stop and take notes about it. This man's notebook was filled with glimpses of the moon. But no fingers pointed to him; most people thought he was crazy. There will never be a lecture series devoted to this man. One may explain the difference in that science and religion offer such rich insights in comparison to the scribblings of a crazy man. But, at bottom, the ultimate reason is that many fingers point—rightly or wrongly—to science and/or religion, and no fingers ever pointed to him. So if we want to make sense of science and religion, and the realities toward which science and religion point, we must also bring ourselves into the picture. It is our fingers, pointing toward or away from science and/or religion, that complete the picture sketched by the Zen priest. This is why authority, or more precisely trust in authority, matters fundamentally in science and religion. If there is one overarching concern I have that motivates this talk, it's not primarily what people believe about the moon, nor even whom they trust as authorities, but rather how they trust these authorities, and what power these authorities wield over us as a result. I want to treat science, religion, and other major institutions of epistemic and moral authority with respect, but take them off their pedestal, in what I will call a blending of commitment and critique. I want to rebuild science and religion from the bottom up—that is, from the trust we place in them that gives them the right to command our attention. Trust places us in a position of openness to profound insights, but it also places us in a position of vulnerability. Blending commitment and critique recognizes that trust in authority is a good and necessary thing, but that these authorities are, after all, thoroughly human and finite entities. They are, in the truest sense of the old Buddhist proverb, the finger and not the moon, and we must never forget that both are implicated in the act of pointing. Trust in authority among Americans[10-Lecture: Section 2] I'd now like to share the results of a National Science Foundation-sponsored research project I have administered over the last several years in conjunction with several students; I'd especially like to acknowledge two graduate students, Evan Berry of Religious Studies and Tricia Mein of Sociology, who worked alongside me.[3] Among other topics, the project concerned the trust Americans place in four domains of authority for matters of true and false, right and wrong. [11-Graphic: Trust in science and religion] We know that there are different levels of public trust in institutions of science and religion. But science and religion do not stand alone as domains of epistemic and moral authority. [12-Ansel Adams photo] One of our faculty discussants for tonight, Catherine Albanese of Religious Studies, has written extensively on she has calls "nature religion" in America, a phenomenon she traces from our contemporary environmental age back to the times of early European settlement.[4] As the famous American architect Frank Lloyd Wright once said, "I believe in God, only I spell it Nature." The case of nature religion suggests that many people place nature alongside science and religion as an important authority—think of, for instance, how much we tend to trust products that are natural, the ways many people regard nature as a source of spiritual insight, or the notion that society based in the principles of nature would be in a much better condition than it is now.[5] These notions build upon longstanding historical traditions: the tradition of natural law—descending at least from Saint Thomas Aquinas of the 13th century and arguably reaching back to Aristotle—in which standards of morality are related to the nature of the world and of humans, and the rather different tradition of naturalism, devoted to regarding nature as a substitute for God in explaining physical and human reality. Nature is thus an interestingly complex authority, spanning theism, spirituality, and antisupernaturalism alike. To this trilogy I added government or state as a fourth authority, based in part on the work of scholars of religion such as Robert Bellah,[6] on a phenomenon they call civil religion, a veneration of state and national identity which also implies a trust in government not simply as a political power, but for larger epistemic and moral matters as well. [13-Graphic: Trust in science, religion, nature, and state] I, then, was interested in exploring the trust Americans place in these four authorities—science, religion, nature, and state. (We also were interested in trust in self, but discovered that few people were willing to admit that they didn't trust themselves, so the notion of self as authority won't be included here.) There are important differences between, and complexities within, these authorities which must be acknowledged at the outset: for example, science, religion, and the state can readily be identified with human institutions, but nature is an elusive and abstract category, perhaps more of a subliminal authority than the others. Additionally, these authorities can mean different things to different people: science, for instance, can mean technology to one person and a certain form of rationality to another, while religion could mean God or it could imply the thoroughly human institutions of religion which many Americans escape by calling themselves "spiritual, not religious."[7] Because of these and other complexities, I utilized a dual methodological strategy, involving a quantitative survey of over 1000 Americans administered between April and June 2002 by UCSB's Social Science Survey Center, and a followup set of in-depth qualitative interviews of roughly 100 selected survey respondents over the summer of 2002. Let's remember a few features of 2002 related to trust in authority. Perhaps the most important item was the continued U.S. response to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001: [14-Cartoon: Still Standing] if we had delivered the survey and interviews just one year prior, the political climate would have been altogether different. Recall that, for at least some Americans, the election of George Bush to the presidency in late 2000 was mired in questionable legal practices stretching from Florida to the Supreme Court. [15-Cartoon: Bush-Supreme Court] 9/11 gave the U.S. an enemy, [16-Cartoon: Osama Bin Laden] and with it a new authority to the President and the federal government. By spring 2002 the enemy was increasingly portrayed as Iraq, specifically Saddam Hussein; [17-Cartoon: Reasons to invade Iraq] preparations were being finalized for the new Department of Homeland Security, terror alerts continued throughout the country, and in general, the issue of trust or distrust in government was perhaps never more timely, as Americans struggled to make sense of these sweeping changes affecting their country and their lives. The status of other authorities was in the news as well: [18-Cartoon: Jerry Falwell] religion received both increased zeal and scrutiny in the light of September 11, and the connection between religion and government was highlighted in June 2002 when the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance amount to a government endorsement of religion, prompting leaders on all sides of the political fence to rush to decry the ruling, [19to23-Cartoons (5): Pledge of Allegiance] though—if political cartoons are any indication of the breadth of public opinion—Americans were more divided, expressing both trust and distrust in God, government, conservatives, and liberals in the context of this controversy. Religion received attention for another reason as well in the spring of 2002: [24-Cartoon: Don't talk to priests] the sex scandals of Catholic priests and the apparent coverup by the Church. In comparison to the state and religion, science and nature received relatively less attention, [25-Cartoon: Science-God] though there was some concern over genetics and cloning, [26-Cartoon: Bush and forests] as well as the marked shift of the Bush administration in environmental policy. But trust and distrust was expressed in other realms as well, from baseball in summer of 2002 [27-Cartoon: Baseball] to the revelations throughout the year of major corporate scandals and their possible connections with the Bush administration. [28-Cartoon: Cookie jar] With all this bad news, you would think that Americans would have expressed high levels of distrust in authority. This refusal to accept authority at face value was an apparent feature of the country that so enamored one famous 19th-century European student of American democracy, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, that he envisioned a new model of authority emanating from the American experience. [29-Quote: de Tocqueville] To de Tocqueville, the bonds of traditional authority were weak even in the American family:
Yet in comparison, trust in authority in contemporary America is generally stronger than in other European societies. [30-Graph: ISSP trust in religion/state] Results from a 1998 survey conducted under the auspices of the International Social Science Program suggest that Americans display a much higher trust in religion than other European countries, and a somewhat higher trust in government than many of these countries. [31-Graph: ISSP trust in nature/science] An earlier ISSP survey from 1993 asked respondents to indicate their trust in science, and it also had an interesting question concerning sacredness in nature which we can use as a surrogate for some form of deep trust in nature: these results show that Americans tend to trust science more than other countries included in the survey, but do not trust nature as highly as in many other countries. Thus, on a relative scale, we Americans are near the top in trust in religion, close to the top in trust in science, above average in trust in government, and below average in trust in nature. [32-Blank slide] Now let's examine the results of my survey. I included a variety of questions about trust in these authorities: in many cases we found that, to make our telephone survey more concrete and understandable, we had to frame these four domains of authority in the context of people who represented them; so that for instance the domain of religion was framed as "insights gained from religion, including the views of religious leaders." This complicated our analysis somewhat, but results from the qualitative interviews helped us sort out these composite categories. We gauged respondents' levels of concern for twelve categories of policy issues, and for those where a high level of concern was expressed, we asked respondents to rate science, religion, nature, and state as authoritative sources of information or guidance with respect to that policy issue. Then we calculated the average trust expressed for each of these authorities. We also included two questions for each of these four authorities that probed the possibility of what one could call "hypertrust," an extreme or exclusive trust in authority. Finally, toward the end of the survey we asked respondents to give a summary rating of their overall trust in these authorities as sources of information or guidance for their lives. I can give you some general statistics. [33-Graph: Mean overall trust] In terms of overall trust of these four authorities on a scale of 0 to 10 with 5 as a midpoint, average trust expressed by Americans was relatively comparable, ranging from 5.5 for government to 6.7 for science, with religion and nature in between. You can also see from the vertical error bar lines on each graph that there was much more variability in the responses of Americans on religion, for instance, than science: religion is both trusted strongly and distrusted relatively strongly. For the questions on hypertrust there was more variability between authorities. [34-Graph: Hypertrust] As examples, the mean response to the statement "Science will eventually answer all important questions about humans, the world, and the universe" was only 3.7 on a scale of 0 to 10, whereas "The Bible is the literal word of God" had an average of 5.8, "There would be more peace and harmony in society if we simply followed nature" had an average of 5.4, and—though one could well argue that recent public opinion contradicts this—the statement "Our American government can be trusted to tell the truth" had an average of only 3.5. Note from the error bars that each of these statements elicited considerable variability among Americans, though few people showed strong hypertrust in science and in state. What is more interesting than overall statistics, however, are the patterns in trust placed by individuals in these four authorities. [35-Graph: Trust correlations] Examining the overall trust responses, for instance, one sees a strong correlation between trust in religion and trust in state, and another strong correlation between trust in science and trust in nature. What this means is that people who tended to trust, or distrust, religion felt likewise about the government, and the same with nature and science. By applying a procedure called factor analysis to all sixteen trust variables, these patterns come into sharper focus, as two primary underlying factors or composite models of trust are revealed. [36-Slide: Models of trust] The first is characterized by hypertrust (or distrust) in religion, including strong adherence to traditional theological tenets, and trust (or distrust) in state; this factor alone explains nearly a quarter of all the differences (variance) in the entire set of sixteen variables. A second model is close behind: the model of linked trust in science and nature. This model too has both adherents and detractors. Following typical factor analysis procedure, these two models are assumed to be independent of each other: it's not that Americans choose either God and government or science and nature—they could choose both or neither. We will, however, find violations of this assumption soon. Interestingly, there was relatively little association of these models with standard demographics; this means those who are young and old, male and female, rich and poor, educated and uneducated can be found supporting or opposing both models. However, in one strong difference between the two models, people who trust religion and state tend to identify as politically conservative and as morally conservative, whereas the opposite is true of those who trust in science and nature. It is also interesting to consider where those who scored high and low on these two models of trust reside in the United States. Our ability to do so is somewhat limited in that we had only slightly over 1000 respondents distributed across the entire country. [37-Map: Respondent locations] But if you group respondents by two-digit zip code prefix some interesting geographical patterns emerge. [38-Map: Trust in God and state] These maps are grayed out in areas where we had too few respondents or too much variability in their responses. The averages for each of the remaining areas are divided into four quartiles: the highest, representing in this case strong trust in religion and state relative to other parts of the country, are dark green, and the lowest, representing strong distrust, are dark brown. There is evidently a great deal of variability in each region of the United States: look at California, for instance, with regions ranging from strong trust to strong distrust. [39-Map: Trust in nature and science] Similarly, the map for the science and nature model shows extensive variability at the two-digit zip code level, though in many regions trust for this model is opposite that of the first model. Another implication we should draw from these maps is that the caricature of each—say, the Bible Belt for those who trust in God and government—is limited: trust (and distrust) in these two models is much more widespread across the country than one would initially imagine. So far we have only examined responses to our survey questions, but we also interviewed selected respondents in depth, and we asked those who scored in the top and bottom quintile or twenty percent of each of these models of trust in authority to say more about it. Among those who trust strongly in God and government, you do find some relatively pure cases of trust, [40-Quote: Respondent 584] as in respondent number 584, a 61 year old, well-educated woman from Alabama:
But just as often, those who scored the highest were reluctant to speak as if they trusted everything they heard, especially from the government; [41-Quote: Respondent 608] for instance, respondent 608, a 19 year old Latina student from California, says:
Those on the other end of the spectrum, however, were quite willing to characterize themselves as not trusting in religion and state, and some offered their own theories as to the linkage; [42-Quote: Respondent 466] for instance, respondent 466, a 56-year old female from Michigan, says:
In the case of the second model of trust in authority, those who scored in the top quintile were quite willing to admit their trust in science and nature. [43-Quote: Respondent 561] Respondent 561, for instance, a 60-year old man from Washington state, says:
On the other end, those who scored in the bottom quintile were similarly willing to express either strong distrust or irrelevance to their lives; [44-Quote: Respondent 28] for instance, respondent 28, a wealthy 44-year old from Pennsylvania, says:
These responses raise the very important question: why the strong alliance between religion and state, and between nature and science? The interviews suggest lots of possible combinations, but the overall pattern is clear. I will venture two answers at this point. The first is probably obvious to you: this is, in part, how these authorities are packaged in contemporary American culture, especially the connection between God and government. We need look no further than our President, for whom commentators have frequently noted how he resorts to religious language and images. [45-Quote: President Bush] As you recall, his 2003 State of the Union message, for instance, ended with an explicit linkage of God and American destiny:
A second explanation is more speculative, but worth considering. [46-Graphic: Model similarity] There is an interesting structural similarity between these two models: each has an ultimate authority—religion, or ultimately God, on the one hand, and nature on the other—as well as an authoritative human institution—the state, or science—which represents and communicates the truths of their respective ultimate authority in the human realm. Now, of course in the case of religion and government, this association is tantamount to theocracy, a violation of the U.S. constitutional separation of church and state. Yet support for a linkage of church and state is stronger in the United States than in many other countries: [47-Graph: ISSP religion/state] consider these 1998 ISSP results for the statement "My country would be better if religion had less influence," in which the United States mean response strongly opposed this statement, surpassing Canada, Great Britain, Northern Ireland, Italy, Russia, and Israel. The second model's linkage, between science and nature, is well represented in many people's views of ecology: here again—perhaps less problematically than with the theocracy model—the human institution of science is understood as an authoritative conduit for the ultimate authority of nature. Trust in authority: A deeper examination[48-Slide: Section 3] Let's now think more deeply about trust in authority. I'll begin by making a few important points, points which are perhaps self-evident yet are often forgotten. [49-Slide: Trust summary] 1. Trust in science and religion is prior to belief. Many studies of the popular uptake of science and/or religion focus on beliefs, such as theism, evolutionism, or materialism, as indicative of behavior. But ours is a highly plural world of meaning, in which diverse truths are proclaimed—to return to our former analogy, many fingers each pointing at a particular moon. Trust is the filter that commits us to certain of these beliefs and avoids others, based on the messenger as well as the message. We choose which authoritative finger to point our own fingers at, and based on this commitment, we open ourselves to understanding the moon as revealed by this or that authoritative finger. That's why I'm more concerned about trust than belief: trust is prior to belief. 2. Trust in science and religion may be necessary, yet entails vulnerability. As in personal relationships, trust involves commitment without full understanding or control—which we do not have over this world, not even our own lives. We cannot simply point our own finger to the moon in an act of defiant isolation; to some degree we must depend also on those fingers we consider authoritative. But this commitment places us in a vulnerable position: we could be manipulated, or manipulate ourselves. Many people have blamed religion for preying upon vulnerable souls, but science, or more specifically a certain form of rationality associated with science, has come under scrutiny as well [advance to #3]. 3. Ultimately, what I'd like to argue is that, given their powerful role as authorities, science and religion must encourage more mature forms of trust which blend commitment and critique. For better and for worse, many of us trust science and/or religion to guide our lives. We must choose wisely. But these authoritative fingers pointing to the moon have a duty to encourage trust with both eyes open, trust that blends the commitment of pointing our finger this way or that with the critical insight that we are, after all, only pointing our fingers at other fingers, and not at the moon itself. Let's see how we could move toward this final point, by way of an expanded discussion of trust in authority. What do I mean by trust? I distinguish trust from two related terms, "faith" and "confidence." Faith implies for many people a sort of blind conveyance of trust, something unreasonable, irrational. It is a term many people reserve for religion. Yet physical chemist-turned-philosopher Michael Polanyi argued that faith is central to the scientist's commitment to the beliefs and norms of the scientific community,[9] and philosopher Mary Midgley has written that science is another form of religion, offering an alternative path to salvation for those who will put their faith in the scientific world-picture.[10] Indeed, Midgeley defines faith much as I define trust, saying: [50-Quote: Mary Midgley]
I will retain the term "trust" versus "faith" to avoid confusion over certain readings of faith, and also to emphasize the relational character of trust. If faith is an act on the part of the faithful, trust is both a premise and a desired outcome of a relationship. This is where trust differs from confidence, a term often used in social surveys. What is your level of confidence in the economy? the media? and so on. But confidence is an instrumental, not a relational, property: one decides whether or not to invest in stocks based on confidence, but one decides whether or not to invest one's life in a relationship, or a meaningful network of relationships such as a religious organization, based on trust.[12] Most of the literature on trust concerns its significance in interpersonal and professional relationships, regarding it anywhere from a mere social and economic lubricant[13] to an intensely personal but inescapably political set of what Anthony Giddens calls "facework" commitments,[14] to the fundamental existential challenge in the first year of human life.[15] My interest lies in extending the capacity for trust learned from interpersonal relations to more distant authorities: this is similar to what Giddens calls "faceless" commitments and Niklas Luhmann calls "system trust," except trust in authority often takes forms which are quite personal and concrete rather than impersonal and abstract. When people say they trust in God, they do not generally imply some broad Platonic principle; even when people say their trust lies in scientific rationality and not God, the level of commitment and passion implied in this form of trust is often as deeply personal as that of the theist. An important question concerns the "why" of trust in authority. As noted in the Mary Midgley quote earlier, it would be na•ve to think that the necessity for trust in authority has diminished in modern times: perhaps our allegiances have shifted, and the decline in religious authority is evident especially in Europe, but trust appears to be here to stay. Luhmann argues that the very nature of modernity is its "unmanageable complexity," necessitating trust as the basis for the inevitable risk-taking behavior in which we all must engage.[16] [51-Blank slide] But trust in authority is not simply an individual act on our parts, as authority is both produced and consumed: institutions of authority expend considerable effort in achieving and maintaining legitimacy, that is, in securing our trust. To explore this two-way street of producing and consuming authority, the term authority requires further clarification. As with trust, authority is a relational concept: it does not exist unless it is recognized. Hannah Arendt distinguishes authority from relationships based on coercion on the one hand, and mere persuasion on the other; authority involves an agreed-upon hierarchy.[17] The Oxford English Dictionary distinguishes between two types of authority: involuntary authority, such as political and legal systems which demand our obedience whether or not we agree with them, and voluntary authority, that which concerns us here.[18] My interest lies in authority as involving two forms of content: epistemic authority over what is true and false in how the world is, and moral authority over what is right and wrong in how the world ought to be. Authority is usually discussed in its political context, but assertions concerning epistemic and moral matters are arguably found in all contexts in which authority is exercised. It is convenient to think of science as a purely epistemic authority and religion as a purely moral authority; then they would be legitimate in their respective realms, and there is no possibility of conflict. [52-Graphic: NOMA] Such was the argument of the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who suggested that science and religion constitute NOMA or "non-overlapping magisteria."[19] Gould's NOMA argument, though popular with many people and certainly conciliatory toward science and religion, nonetheless presents highly truncated notions of both scientific and religious authority. It is true that scientific authority is often grounded by reference to expert opinions on the facts, and religious authority is often claimed primarily over matters of value, but these schemes represent more of a political settlement worked out over the last few centuries than a reflection of some neat divide between facts and values, a commonly-assumed schema with surprisingly little justification.[20] [53-Blank slide] This leads to an interesting challenge, what I call the "competing gods" problem: there are many claims to authority out there, which cannot be entirely ignored. As we discovered with religion and state, and with nature and science, a common answer to the competing gods problem is to forge alliances, to link up one's authority with another authority so as to declare an alignment of the constellations. This approach is exceedingly effective, perhaps because it addresses the discomfort most people experience with cognitive dissonance between two competing authoritative claims.[21] Thus the groundswell of interest in harmonizing science and religion, [54-Graphic: Wired cross] which seems primarily driven by a need to bring them into alliance. Consider the imagined relations between science, religion, and state in the tragedy that took place over the skies of the United States, stretching between California and Texas, in the morning of February 1 this year.[22] [55-Photo: Space shuttle Columbia liftoff] Here science and science-based technology was both the underlying rationale and the source of protection for six Americans and one Israeli crew member of the U.S. space shuttle Columbia as they hurtled through space. Yet the comforting authority many people place on scientific expertise was shattered as the space shuttle itself, and its fragile occupants, were lost following heat buildup upon reentry. [56-Cartoon: Space exploration] Many of the editorial cartoons of the time focused on—generally justifying—the issue at hand, namely scientific exploration. [57to59-Cartoons (3): Columbia and God] But many, many more resorted to highly anthropomorphic images of religion, as the God of what were apparently six Christians and one Jew served as the ultimate Protector. [60to61-Cartoons (2): Columbia and state] Others linked the tragedy directly to the American political identity. [62-Graphic: Columbia wing] These images contrasted sharply with the very technical reports emanating from NASA. The strategies available to NASA officials as they struggled to regain trust in their authority were limited: they could not build explicit alliances with state or with religion to share the blame. But NASA officials were aided nonetheless by a political and cultural climate in which God and government were closely allied with the space shuttle mission. Yes, science stumbled, but the very important scientific, economic, and moral questions concerning manned space research never found their way onto the editorial cartoons, because of this distributed political and cultural effort to ensure that the broader authoritative network, this overarching alliance of religion, science, and state, was maintained. [63-Blank slide] There are certain philosophical meta-arguments common to science and religion in producing what appears to be convincingly legitimate authority. I'd like to mention one: objectivity, a claim to authoritative certainty on a reality separate from those claims, a moon far removed from the finger. Science is famous for this, but objectivity is not an inevitable feature of scientific institutions. Philosopher and historian Stephen Toulmin has argued that European modernity involved not one but two traditions: an earlier tradition of Renaissance humanism grounded in a tolerant blend of religion, science, and the arts, exemplified in the work of Erasmus, Montaigne, and Shakespeare; and what he calls the 17th century Counter-Renaissance, when economic crisis and religious struggle resulted in emphasis on the rational pursuit of abstract objectivity by key figures such as Descartes and Newton.[23] Scientific objectivity can, in Toulmin's view, be traced directly back to this 17th century "struggle for certainty"; it is now, as it was then, epistemologically unnecessary to science, but politically advantageous in grounding claims of authority in uncertain times. There are perhaps deeper reasons, and contradictions, underlying the premise of objectivity as well. [64-Quote: Evelyn Fox Keller] Science studies scholar Evelyn Fox Keller invokes feminist and psychoanalytical theory in her attempt to fathom objectivity:
Objectivity is as much a feature of the transcendent God of certain western religious traditions as the transcendent reality of Descartes. Yet religion, in claiming authority not just on matters about God but matters of the subject, the religious believer, as well, necessarily adopts a divided stance on objectivity. Religion becomes, in essence, both "true" along objectivist lines and "true for me" in the subjectivist eyes of the believer, both a "fact" and a "value." The problem with the whole scheme, as suggested in several lectures in this series, is that objects and subjects are not separable—in fact, as Harold Oliver argued in his lecture last year, one can understand objects and subjects as derivative of relations. It is not that objects and subjects happen to relate, but that the very sense of object and subject assumes a prior relation between them. More concretely, there are profound ethical problems with the fact-value distinction implied in the object/subject dichotomy, where facts cling to objects and values cling to subjects: ethics become marginalized in science devoid of values, yet amount to moralizing among certain religious groups who claim to hold the truth on values. [65-Blank slide] If you don't believe that claims to objectivity are central to scientific or religious authority, try challenging this philosophical premise among adherents and see what happens—I suggest you keep a safe distance when you do this. Thankfully, there are many devoted scientists and religious followers who have no problem admitting that objectivity is not the most accurate way to understand the truths they pursue or believe so passionately. But there are many who respond with mixed scorn and pity for the ignorance of those who cannot see the light: [66-Graphic: Sokal article] the story is repeated among scientists, for instance, of how physicist Alan Sokal proved the intellectual vacuity of would-be assailants of objectivity once and for all by publishing a parody of the movement in one of their very own journals, Social Text,[25] or, on the side of religion, how would-be doubters of the existence of a transcendent God have long been proven wrong. [67to69-Graphics (3): Proof of God] This seems to be a particularly popular topic on the web: interestingly, science is often cited as the authority in proving God's existence. [70-Blank slide] So much for the production of authority; let us now consider its consumption, because that is where each of us come in. One problem is what is known as authoritarianism, a mode of hypertrust in authority. Authoritarian personality theory was first suggested in the work of Erich Fromm.[26] To Fromm, freedom is the essential right and responsibility of being human, but with the evolution of individualism came not more freedom but less as people rushed away from its responsibilities and challenges. [71-Quote: Fromm] This "escape from freedom," which Fromm witnessed in the aftermath of World War I, is primarily manifested in authoritarianism, founded on "the conviction that life is determined by forces outside of man's own self, his interest, his wishes. The only possible happiness lies in the submission to those forces" (p. 171). Fromm's theory was applied in a major empirical study by Theodor Adorno and others,[27] who explained it developmentally in terms of child-parent relations, and postulated a number of features, including authoritarian aggression and submission, superstition, black-and-white views, destructiveness, and heightened prejudice. Adorno's theory has been criticized on both conceptual and empirical grounds, but one early finding that has been supported in more recent studies is that some sort of authoritarianism seems characteristic of the political right but not the political left.[28] Related to authoritarianism or hypertrust is the problem of hyper-obedience, revealed in the classic but highly debated study by Stanley Milgram.[29] [72-Graphic: Milgram experiment] In this famous project from the early 1960s, Milgram devised an experiment whereby subjects were instructed to administer electric shocks to students when they missed answers on a verbally-administered quiz, increasing the level of shock with each mistake. The shocks were not real, but the students acted as if they were in considerable pain. Nonetheless, on the stern urging of the experimenter, the majority of subjects raised the shock level to the maximum of 450 volts in spite of severe posted warnings on the device, the students' apparent pain, and the subject's own expressed doubts. [73-Quote: Milgram] Milgram says:
Yet authoritarianism and obedience are complex. We found this by asking people if they had doubts about their trust in authority, which many of our respondents were quite willing to share with us. Respondent 195, a 33 year old woman from Texas, for instance, said of science: [74-Quote: 195 science]
And of religion: [75-Quote: 195 religion]
And of government: [76-Quote: 195 state]
And of nature: [77-Quote: 195 nature]
What does this all mean? In particular, is trust in science and/or religion necessarily linked with authoritarian obedience, or does it lead to more responsible forms? I could produce evidence supporting a favorable or harsh reading of both, but there are warning signs. [78-Graphic: Trust and Obey] For religion, think of the old standard hymn Trust and Obey [79-Quote: Romans 13] and the injunction in the New Testament—one I often hear on Christian radio talk shows—from Romans 13, which says "Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established." Science has no equivalent sacred text with such explicit wording, and yet in its common claims to objectivity and universality, its common excuse that values are beyond the pale of science, there can be an implicit call to a similarly singular obedience. Would generalized hypertrust in science in our society be as bad as generalized hypertrust in religion? I am not sure: I suspect that authoritarianism is possible with any authority, but is certainly exacerbated if encouraged by that institution of authority. Reenvisioning science, religion, and trust[80-Slide: Section 4] Consider, by way of conclusion, three alternatives for science, religion, and the webs of trusting relationships we spin with them. [81-Slide: 3 options] The first option, the authoritarian vision, is commitment without critique: science and religion possess insights to dazzling realities, and we would do well to follow them without question. The second is its opposite, critique without commitment, perhaps embodied in the paradigm of secularization. The third alternative is to embrace the paradox of blending commitment and critique, to refuse to believe that these are zero-sum entities such that the more committed you are, the less your apparent capacity to think for yourself, and the more critical you become, the less bound you apparently are to communities that struggle for meaning. I would like to reflect on these three options by closing, as I began, with reference to a major film on science and religion, one I suspect you may have seen. [82-Quote: L. Frank Baum] In 1890, an aspiring writer declared the following:
Ten years later this writer published a little book titled The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, [83-Graphic: Wizard of Oz shoes] and nearly 50 years later the movie we all know so well was released. Apparently, what the Chronicles of Narnia were for English literature scholar and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, The Wizard of Oz was, perhaps in a quite different sense, for L. Frank Baum: a popular children's tale presenting a subtle yet sweeping statement about religion. But what exactly was Baum trying to say? One interpretation, as suggested in his quote noted above, is the triumph of rational critique over religious commitment. [84-Quote 1: Wizard of Oz] This is from an essay entitled "The Wizard of Oz as the ultimate atheist metaphor":
Well, well. Now let us consider a rather different interpretation, one that prefers the option of commitment by faith—without doubting or certainly critique—to God's path. [85-Quote 2: Wizard of Oz] This interpretation comes from a sermon entitled "Christian themes in the Wizard of Oz":
I prefer the third option, of blending commitment and critique. As I have suggested earlier, commitment without critique is not only dangerous, it is ultimately irresponsible in the deepest sense of personal responsibility. But commitment without critique is at least an option; critique without commitment is not. To imagine that one is an entirely independent and free thinker, that one trusts no authority outside of oneself, is delusional. We can change our commitments, but we cannot cease to commit ourselves to some form of epistemic and moral authority. "Trust thyself," Emerson invoked; but if each of us trusted only what we directly experience and understand, our lives would grind to a halt. We get, I believe, no better sense of the life of blending commitment and critique than as revealed near the conclusion to the Wizard of Oz. [86-Graphic: Wizard characters at door] Dorothy and her companions, who traveled far to find the Wizard and then undertook a perilous assignment at his demand, have finally vanquished the Wicked Witch of the West and have returned to the Wizard. [87-Graphic: Scarecrow shows Dorothy the truth] And he is still a terrifying authority to them. Yet, as Scarecrow points out to Dorothy in this picture, her humble dog Toto has revealed that the Great and Powerful Oz is just an ordinary man standing behind a curtain. [88-Graphic: Wizard and curtain] But the movie does not end there. The human face of authority does not necessarily deny its potential for wisdom, a far deeper form of authority than one based on power and inaccessibility. The Wizard of Oz is just a man, but he is a rather wise man, and imparts to Dorothy and her companions gifts that are far more profound than they had requested. Each comes with a sly twist: [89-Graphic: Scarecrow and diploma] as, for example, the Wizard presents a diploma to the Scarecrow he confers on him the "honorary degree of Th.D."—not a doctorate in theology, but a doctorate in what the Wizard calls "Thinkology." By trusting this man even after his mystique has vanished, Dorothy and her companions are transformed. [90-Graphic: Dorothy and Glinda] Dorothy ultimately learns that she must trust herself in order to get home, but by trusting the Wizard she and her companions have learned to trust themselves. This is where blending commitment and critique come together, as both necessitate trust: trust in the wisdom that lies beyond oneself implied in commitment, and trust of one's own doubts and strengths implied in critique. Let us remember that, by pulling the curtains open on science, religion, nature, the state, or any other authority we trust to guide us, we will reveal the inescapable humanness of these institutions of authority. They are but the finger pointing to the moon. [91-Graphic: Hotei] There is, I would venture, no Great and Powerful Oz, at least in the form of a man up in the clouds out there, nor in the form of some scientifically-tractable force out there guiding the unfolding of the universe. But there decidedly is something we experience called the Moon, and we make sense of that experience in part by trusting those authorities we deem wise. My hope is that this three-year lecture series has suggested how commitment and critique can indeed get along, how both religious and scientific commitment can be big enough to embrace the hard questions the scholarly community—which itself embodies certain commitments it must acknowledge—will pose. It will take an effort from each one of us, but we can collectively take science and religion off their pedestals, invigorate them with humanity and humility, and ultimately develop a deeper trust and respect for them, and for each other, in the process. [92-Blank slide] [1] James L. Ford, "Buddhism, Christianity, and the Matrix: The Dialectic of Myth-Making in Contemporary Cinema," The Journal of Religion and Film 4.2 (2000). Available: http://www.unomaha.edu/~wwwjrf/thematrix.htm. [3] The project is discussed in more detail on a website, http://real.geog.ucsb.edu/esr. [4] Catherine L. Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age, Chicago History of American Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), Catherine L. Albanese, Reconsidering Nature Religion (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 2002). [5] See for instance Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature, 1st ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press, 1969). [6] Robert Neelly Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in a Time of Trial (New York: Seabury Press, 1975). [7] Brian J. Zinnbauer, Kenneth I. Pargament, Brenda Cole, Mark S. Rye, Eric M. Butter, Timothy G. Belavich, Kathleen M. Hipp, Allie B. Scott and Jill L. Kadar, "Religion and Spirituality: Unfuzzying the Fuzzy," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 36.4 (1997), Penny Long and C. Kirk Hadaway Marler, ""Being Religious" or "Being Spiritual" in America: A Zero-Sum Proposition?," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41.2 (2002). [8] Cite de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol II Section 3 Chapter 8: Influence of Democracy on the Family. [9] Michael Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, Riddell Memorial Lectures (London: Oxford University Press, 1946). [10] Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning, Gifford Lectures (London: Routledge, 1992). [11] Ibid. 57. [12] See Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power: Two Works (Chichester: Wiley, 1979). [13] Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free Press, 1995). [14] Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). [15] Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 1950). [16] Luhmann, Trust and Power: Two Works. [17] Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1968). [18] Sociologist Max Weber further distinguishes between rational, traditional, and charismatic appeals to legitimate authority. See Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968). [19] Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, The Library of Contemporary Thought, 1st ed. (New York: Ballantine Pub. Group, 1999). [20] Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). [21] Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, Calif.,: Stanford University Press, 1957), Elliot Aronson, "The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance: The Evolution and Vicissitudes of an Idea," The Message of Social Psychology: Perspectives on Mind and Society, eds. Craig McGarty and S. Alexander Haslam (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1997). [23] Stephen Edelston Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, University of Chicago Press ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). [24] Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) 70. [25] Alan D. Sokal, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," Social Text 46/47.Spring/Summer (1996). [26] Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Rinehart and Company, Inc., 1941). [27] Theodor W. Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality, Studies in Prejudice, 1st ed. (New York: Harper, 1950). [28] Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto, Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999). [29] Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, 1st ed. (New York,: Harper & Row, 1974). [30] Quoted in William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993) 247. [31] Kevin Courcey, "The Wizard of Oz as the Ultimate Atheist Metaphor," The Willamette Freethinker, Corvallis Secular Society, Oregon January 1998. Available online at http://css.peak.org. [32] Richard M Riss, Christian Themes in the Wizard of Oz, 1997. Available online at http://www.grmi.org/renewal/Richard_Riss/sermons/0003.html.
Jim Proctor's very interesting and masterfully illustrated lecture teases us with its title. Surely there's a moon, and, as he says, there are fingers pointing to the moon and there are fingers pointing to the fingers pointing to the moon. As a scholar-teacher, Proctor has issued a compelling call for critical thinking in the context of commitment--a call that, I think, means that the university should be teaching critical thinking and that humans, as they have always done, will choose and make their own commitments, hopefully incorporating critical thinking. To Proctor's credit, as he develops his argument, he arrives not on the moon but on the solid earth where he knows the territory and can stand and witness. All of that said, I am especially intrigued by the announcement that invites us to come to the lecture, an announcement in which there is a provocative blank. The title engages us without telling us, finally, in what or whom we ultimately trust. As a historian of American religion, I am mightily tempted to fill in the blank from a perspective that begins with colonial times, lingers in the middle and late years of the nineteenth century, and then launches itself precipitously through the twentieth century and into the present. I am tempted because I believe that the view from American religious history suggests that the participants in Proctor's survey, who provide such solid substance to the lecture, may be claiming an authority for religion that is too generous if scrutinized with a historical eye. Proctor's survey itself is complex, nuanced, and multifaceted. It matches science and nature, on one side, and religion and nation, on the other, pointing toward competing sources of authority and vested interests all around. It does give science a slight edge in the authority hierarchy, but its very complexity can lead away from a point about the place of religion in American society that I believe is worth pondering. Hence, I would like to suggest that--as a thought experiment--we frame the issues a bit differently. What if we consider the respondents to the survey as exercising one kind of rhetoric? What if we play with the possibility that there may be other rhetorics about the place of religion that Americans employ in public (and private) settings? And what if we play with the further idea that these rhetorics--these ways of talking, if you will--emerge from prior root metaphors that ground language and our ability to discern the meaning of our world? In this experimental way of framing things, these root metaphors are poetic acts. They precede conceptual forms of thinking and valuing, and they tell us in what or whom to place our trust. Moreover, we can usually hear these rhetorics best not directly, but in subtler tones--in echoes and in the sly ways that poetry symbolizes itself into being. In short, let us suppose that these rhetorics function in a world of symbol and can take visual form, too, in that world. If we turn very briefly to the history of American religion from this perspective, we find considerable evidence that religion, in the American context, has characteristically often been subsumed into something deemed greater. We get a quick snapshot of the process, for example (and I have no slide to illustrate!), in the Philadelphia Constitutional Parade of 1788 on the Fourth of July, after enough states had ratified the new Constitution to make it a go. Among the eighty-eight divisions of the Philadelphia parade that lasted all day, there was one in which, we are told, "the clergy of the different christian denominations, with the rabbi of the Jews, [were] walking arm in arm" (Francis Hopkinson, Account of the Grand Federal Procession in Philadelphia, July 4, 1788 [New Haven: Meigs, 1788]). In the spectacular symbolism of the parade, religion was just one trade practiced in the body politic and religious difference was effaced in the presence of the new--and higher--federal authority. If religion bowed before national authority, it was learning to bow, too, before science. Already, in colonial times, Puritan leaders, as exponents of the Enlightenment, were often as up on their science as on their religion. Jonathan Edwards, for example--who has been called America's greatest theologian and who preached America's first great revival--based his vivid and terrifying style of preaching not on raw emotion but on the calculated epistemological analysis of John Locke, who argued that humans learned exclusively through their senses. For Edwards, sensationalism, in effect, became God's way of doing things; one needed to work scientifically to help God win souls. Later, in the mid-nineteenth century, when spiritualism became a cultural rage in a far different sort of America, spiritualists--who believed that they were communicating with the dead--considered themselves on the cutting edge of science and invited Harvard professors to their seances to verify the ghosts. By the later years of the nineteenth century, new "scientific" religions were cropping up on the American landscape: there was Christian Science, Religious Science, Divine Science, Science of Mind. Theosophists were demanding a scientific analysis of religion, and so were free-thinking critics in the Free Religious Association. Protestant conservatives, in the Princeton Theology, were hailing the Bible as a scientific document, what they called a "book of facts." And by the twentieth century, also among conservatives, a Seventh-day Adventist apologist could talk of the "scientifically proven visions" of Ellen G. White, the Adventist prophetess--meaning that her visions had been corroborated by scientific evidence. Fundamentalists could announce that science was proving that Noah's ark had been found and that--by the twenty-first century--the tomb of Jesus had been discovered. Creation "scientists" were arguing for an upheaval of the fossil record in the "Genesis flood," so that science proved the biblical creation account. Catholics were carbon-dating the relic at Turin, Italy, which they said was the holy shroud in which Jesus had been laid for burial. Meanwhile, as new Asian export religions entered the U.S., proponents of Transcendental Meditation, which also called itself the Science of Creative Intelligence, could point to the statistics showing that when a critical mass of meditators lived in one place crime rates went down, and when individual meditators were faithful to the practice their blood pressure normalized and their heart rates grew closer to optimum. Indian and non-Indian Americans alike praised the ancient "science" of yoga. And New Agers, with their combinative West-East spirituality, regularly invoked quantum physics to establish their truth claims. What all of this suggests, of course, is that science in these cases is authorizing religion and that there are hierarchical relationships among authorities that look somewhat different from the greater evenness revealed in the rhetoric of respondents in the Proctor survey. To be sure, there are other rhetorics that suggest the power of religion still--President Bush's religious leanings have recently, for example, been the object of media scrutiny. But I know of no bona fide scientists who point to religion to authorize their findings. And, in the end, my reading as a historian of American religion is shaped by these historical rhetorics of deference to science by religious proponents. Here, science is at the top of the value hierarchy in U.S. culture and has been so for some time. In sum, I am saying that there are rhetorics, and there are rhetorics. People often tell the truth most clearly when they are not trying to tell the truth, when it leaks out of them unaware and when we catch it almost as background buzz. So: I would fill in Jim Proctor's blank with "science!"
Jim Proctor presents us with a provocative as well as inviting proposal to reenvision religion and science in ways that avoid the twin mental rigidities of what he calls "commitment w/out critique" and "critique without commitment." As Jim shows, both orientations, which pivot on truth claims, have serious blind spots. The two positions Jim refers to remind me of another distinction I heard in my first days of college, and I have remembered it ever since. It goes like this: There are two kinds of people in the world: those who act up a storm but are afraid to think; and those who think up a storm but are afraid to act. This distinction is crude in comparison to the complexity and subtleness offered in the problem Jim proposes. But both offer frameworks of caution with regard to the quick adoption of a position on truth claims. Nonetheless, these ideal-type positions do have their occupiers. In addition to caution, Jim is also concerned with bringing about a new kind of humility that might bring the human regions of religion and science closer together. Indeed, as I glean from this whole series, some kind of rapproachment might be in the air, at least in the context of highly reflexive symposia like the kind Jim has so wonderfully organized over the recent years. But I wonder about rapproachment. It is certainly a good idea--in that it involves engagement between religion and science. In the process of at least exploring rapproachment, or critical engagement and dialogue, the impression is that the old bifurcation between science and religion is being broken down, as both of these human enterprises being to take more stock of the merits of each other. But this could be a rather isolated conversation within the academy. And one could get the impression that there is some rather powerful paradigm shift taking place. I think there is some kind of critical reappraisal of the relationship between these two powerful modes of organizing human thought. I say reappraisal, because I think if one looks for it, one can find a number of occasions where the relation between science and religion has be previously thrown in to crisis. Indeed, the rise of my discipline--sociology--can be read somewhat as a response to modernity and the place of religion in the larger question of social forms and social order. The issues that Jim raises also bring to mind the writings of the philospher Edmund Husserl who wrote about the very problem Stephen Toulmin points his finger at: the move from an earlier period in which multiple notions of knowledge-making were embraced--scientific experimentation, the arts, literature, philosophy etc.--and referred to quite broadly as "the human sciences." Husserl, too, posed the question: where is the human dimension of intentionality in the sophisticated structures of knowledge produced by religion and science? He wrote of a the crisis of the human sciences as they were overtaken by a very narrow and specific kind of objectivism. What concerned Husserl was the eclipse of the human subject and human intentionality, a move that also eclipsed any kind of grounds for human responsibility to the power of new scientific knowledge. There are thus kindred concerns in Jim's presentation, as the problem of intention and human interests takes the form of an inescapable notion of trust. For trust--grounded in meaning and intentionality--is presupposed in both religion and science. Let us hold aside the notion that there may be underfoot some new rapproachment. I think it is safe to say that Jim presents his concerns for a blend of commitment and critique precisely because there is not nearly enough of such a groundswell or new synthesis that would bring about the kind of qualitatively new kind of reflexivity necessary for gaging the most power impacts upon social life ushered by both science and religion.Indeed, we could argue that the older, more ossified orientations of science and religion are actually quite alive and well. I do not want to raise the issue of false dichotomies, or the prospect of new and deeper similarities that bind religion and science at some fundamental point of conceptual origins (an issue that reaches back at least to Newtonian epistemology). Instead, I would suggest that if Jim's proposal for a humanistic revitalization is to gain some traction, it will have to confront the existing juggarnaut. And this he does. One of the key issues Jim raises is the primacy of trust. How might we restore the "human face," the embedded interests that take the forms of institutionally sanctioned modes of knowledge, that is always present in the pursuit of the most intense knowledge claims--those of religion and science? And how do we admit that there is no knowledge enterprise that is not grounded in some notion of trust? As Jim suggests, the first challenge is to acknowledge the "human" dimensions of both the theosophical and the calculating enterprises. There are positions in both religion and science that leave no room for the human actor. Sheer facticity (pure objectivism that obliterates the calculating subject who champions the rules that conjure such imagined purity) as well as otherworldly fate and transcendence (that render all sentiments of subjectivity superfluous) are of a peculiar brightness unto themselves; to bright to require the casting of a human shadow. Of no consequence is the actor who points, and who touching things, who leaves human fingerprints. But there are those who do seek rapprochement in science and religion; or if not rapproachment and harmony, at least critical dialogue. And in the popular culture there are many who embrace science and religion without batting an eyebrow. But there is the very divide as well where trust is given to science and not religion, and vice versa. If I understand Jim's concerns, acknowledging the human dimension in both religion and science is perhaps the most important front for a "reenvisioning of science, religion, and trust." Indeed, the notion of trust is something like the third rail that drives both science and religion. As Jim's presentation so eloquently puts it, trust should not be blind; we should not be so blind to this trust. But what does it mean to bring religion and science onto the same page, and anchored with a critical notion of trust? It has been said that religion and science have much in common. Indeed one of the founders of modern sociology, Emile Durkheim, made the claim that science is indeed rooted in religious thought. He also went further, arguing that the religion was the manifestation of society divinized. Both science and religion were rooted in the forms of society, which meant that they were specifically immanent to the formations of society rather than transcendental to it. In short, knowledge forms are derived from social forms. I raise this particular conflation of religion and science (or at least the notion of a deep and inseparable affinity) because there is a much more critical problem. And here the desired reconciliation implied in Jim's proposal--which pivots on redeeming a critical approach to the inescapability of trust as it is worked out in religion and science--will have its work cut out for it. Worthy work, to be sure. Holding aside the conflation of religion and science, I would like to flag what I think are two quite distinct logics (which I'm sure will bore many of you who either think about these issues with some passion and detail). Science and religion have quite different logics, logics that impact the notions of truth. In brief, science is not meant to rest--it is something like an incurable insomniac. Science cannot--ever--rest assured; it cannot assume a complacent posture (of course the individual scientist can get away with this, but I'm speaking of the philosophy of the enterprise). Science is not an eschatological enterprise in pursuit of final things (this does not mean that the individual scientist cannot have eschatological dreams, or that he or she is exempt from venturing an eschatological posture). At its most lively moments science is busy deconstructing and reconstructing. It is continually on the make, on the fly. Today's serious truth claims, or regimes of knowledge-confidence may very well be tomorrow's humor if not rubble. One of science's major impulses is to undermine itself in order to continually remake itself. It is not interested in letting things settle (though settling things, at least within the temporality of pragmatic pressures, becomes one the fringe benefits of paid and commissioned science in alliance with corporate, governmental, or political initiatives). Science is about the business of unsettling things; it is an activity in the name of knowing more, knowing different, knowing new, knowing "better." (The notion of "better" is of course loaded; it is the subject matter of ethics). Religion does not seem driven by this same logic. Yes, there is the impulse of knowing more, knowing with great care, and knowing better. But engaging in systematic undermining of yesterday's positions of embrace is not core to the religious sensibility. Religion does not calculate a set of norms and routines of practice that, if one is lucky, will throw all hitherto foundations into rupture (as does the scientific "breakthrough"). Science shifts through intentional routines that have the capacity to discredit and replace old with new knowledge. Indeed a notion of progress is attached to the functional value of discredit. For religion, the undermining faith and belief is not the dominant challenge. There aren't many Kiergegardians in the world who dwell perpetually on such reflexive problems of which Kiergegarrd wrote in his essays on "doubt," "fear and trembling," and "sickness unto death." The turn toward nihilism does not square with populism (though it can grip the small movements who, in turn, can exert tremendous crisis upon their adversaries). Religious thought may prefer a mode of knowledge confidence that is anathema to science, but this does not mean that religion does not undermine itself--Weber's study of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is an attempt to show just how a religious crisis can be solved in ways that transform the social world by recombining powerful religious ideas with the pragmatics of new interests. But contrary to science, religion is not on the prowl for epistemological upheaval --and upheaval is thus not embraced with a peculiar kind of glee--though sometimes this appears to be the case for phases of intense revivals and restorations. There are lots of problems with this simple mental division of labor--so to speak--that distinguishes rather than conflates science and religion. Scientists do speak with enchantment over --say-- the mathematics of String Theory or the mapping of the human genome. And some may argue that in some cases religion is precisely in the business of undermining--but this seems mainly applicable to the undermining of those "others" (who have religion too--but the wrong kind), and who stand in the way of achieving certain worldly outcomes that are also rooted in religious interests. Likewise, some might argue that today religion is on the fly--pointing to the proliferation of quasi-experimental new religions as evidence of quite new religious impulses that are not anchored denominationally. My point here is that the challenge that Jim has presented is indeed a provocative one. It insists on bringing a much-needed reflexivity into the picture. But it also points beyond science and religion and trust. It sidles up to the problem of how knowledge claims do or do not require, or earn social legitimacy. It also raises the problem not just of confidence in trust-based practices, but of accountability. It is the problem posed by the social scientist Robert Lynd whose book title, Knowledge for What?, captures the challenge of bringing humanity back into the picture. For if trust is requisite to both religion and science, and religion and science now produce multiple and rapidly multiplying outcomes, then the matter becomes one of how we create systems for adjudicating not just divergent claims, but divergent outcomes that have tremendous implications for how we as humans live, and how we as members of societies become impacted by the decisions rooted in those initial acts of trust (two urgent examples would be genetic engineering and designer biology, and government-centralized control over data mining made possible by the digital revolution). What lies in store for any project of reenvisioning science, religion, and trust is some difficult travel in that nebulous terrain that might be called "cultural politics." For this is where authority is ultimately lived out--not in the lab or in the parish, but in the lives of people in social formations. It is where the human finger pointing takes on the form of civil society. Ultimately knowledge claims do not exist in a social vacuum. They are brokered upon and through societies that carry out their impact. In sum, Jim's provocative issues point to the cultural politics of knowledge: if trust shall not be blind, then critical vision becomes urgent. Urgency has a way of generating intense conflict. The challenge, it seems, is to be able to embrace the fonts of trust as part of our inescapable humanity, and yet be able to adjudicate the implications that both science and religion ask of those who will be asked explicitly or inadvertently to carry the weight of such knowledge in the forms of everyday life. Jim has thus done us a great favor by posing the challenge: we need both commitment and critique.
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