I want to return to a discussion of the scientific method that arose during discussions following my post on animal morality. That will be also set the stage for part 2 of Paganism and America’s Future, as well as keeping a promise to Franklin.

The modern world has been so transformed by science that many people have come to believe either that the scientific method provides the gold standard for knowledge, or that any question can be answered by intelligent application of scientific reasoning.  Both are mistaken beliefs.

Scientific methods arose to try and find as impersonal as possible means by which very different people could agree about something.  Measurement, prediction, and a repeatable experiment all proved very effective, and helped lay the groundwork for a huge mass of knowledge people could rely on in transforming the world.

But there is a hidden metaphysics in treating this approach as adequate for approaching truth as closely as we are able.  It assumes that the most fundamental aspects of the world are amenable to these methods.  This is why for many years mind was treated as an epiphenomena, not really ‘real,’ or perhaps some kind of fluid or something.  It is why modern western medicine assumed for a long time that good treatment focused only on the body. It is why when I was an undergraduate in college my psychology textbook, written from a “behaviorist” perspective, described us as emitting behavior.  We did not do things – which suggests some kind of mental phenomena as basic, we emitted behavior and with appropriate conditioning, we would emit different behavior.

Lots of good and complex critiques of this stuff and its contemporary equivalents have been written and it’s a subject too complicated for a blog to describe in detail.  So I want to make a different point:  How could sane people ever come to believe such things?

If, as Richard Dawkins put it in The Selfish Gene: “We are survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes,” then why should anyone care about anyone else?  The answer “because we are programmed that way” does not work very well once someone faces a real dilemma between what is personally advantageous but requires hurting another, and refraining from doing so and not hurting another.  

Because so much of what we perceive is ‘theory impregnated,’ what we perceive is shaped by what we expect to perceive.  This has been demonstrated over and over again.  If I believe I am programmed to serve my genes, that belief will influence what I notice about myself and others, and what I do not notice.  If I believe it strongly enough, I will not see counter evidence. 

This is why I always taught my students to hold their beliefs lightly – so they would be open to new insights.  This is also why I have long said becoming a Pagan made me a better social scientist: I knew the world was far beyond my understanding – so while I do the best I can, I know I am almost certainly missing some important stuff, and had better keep my eyes and ears open.

But for those wedded to the scientific method as our only or only reliable means to knowledge, given that  they ‘know’ that consciousness is not a fundamental factor in the universe, thry have two big dilemmas.  

Everyone ‘knows’ that he or she is conscious and it plays no role in science, so if awareness is unique to us, then we are fundamentally distinct from the world.  Yet we evolved within and from it.  There is a disconnect here, but I think this explains why so many scientists who accept Darwin still try so hard to find a qualitative distinction between ourselves and other life.

Second, this distinction between us and the non human has to be observable for that to be true.  So over and over people have tried to find a distinction between ourselves and animals – only to have those distinctions break down.  Do we make tools?  Well they some of them do as well, as we now know.  Do we have language?  Now we know that some animals can learn English,   and others have complex means of communication we do not understand. 

But morality long remained a human preserve even though in a very real sense, from the standpoint of PURE scientific methodology, it could not be measured or predicted or experimented because it refers to our unobservable motives. 

The experience of consciousness is not measurable.  And here is a paradox: science matters to conscious beings, but has nothing beyond the highly speculative to say about the consciousness that makes it matter. Indeed, all of scientific methodology presupposes other minds who can rationally evaluate the evidence I bring to make my case! It presupposes what it cannot prove exists by the use of its own methods, because the methods have to be convincing to another mind.  That is their entire rationale.

When we look for moral behavior in the natural world we are looking for conscious behavior.  Ants cooperate, but so far as we know there does not seem to be enough awareness there to call them moral because ants do not seem able to choose a course of action based on it helping another when it could have chose another course that was not.

But when we see a monkey or elephant act in a way we would regard as moral, we do not use scientific methods to make that judgment any more than we do when we judge another person as moral or immoral.  We look at what they did, the context of their actions, and whether they are enough like us to make that judgment.  We interpret what we see.  Interpretation is an act of consciousness, and is essential in recognizing consciousness in another, whether it be an animal or a person, and is equally essential, and I think in the same way, in judging whether an action is moral or immoral.  It requires us to be able to interpret the MEAING the action had for another.

My argument does not mean I think scientific methods are flawed.  Not at all.  It only means it is a mistake to claim these methods are an adequate way for encompassing ALL genuine knowledge, or for eliminating all false belief.  

I think this point is an essential step in recognizing the reasonableness of a Pagan view of the world as a place of intrinsic value, indeed, as a sacred place.