A critique of critical realism

Science News, April 26, 1986 by Dietrick E. Thomsen

A Critique of Critical Realism

History has known periods -- the High Middle Ages, for instance -- during which human intellectual pursuits were united by an overarching consensus. Ours is not one of them. Today science, philosophy, theology and the arts usually tend their own gardens with little penetration of the fences between them. In several countries "science" and "religion" have been embroidered on the banners of contending political factions. A popular perception has arisen that the spirit of science is inimical to religion and, if not inimical, more or less indifferent to the arts.

Yet among those who remember history, some hanker for a new reunion, a new basis for intercommunication. It is now almost respectable for scientists to publish treatises dealing with theological questions. Theologians are no longer excommunicated, although some (like Hans Kung) are severely disciplined, for allowing scientific insights to affect their theology.

Humans being what they are, institutions now arise to cultivate these interrelationships. On the science and religion front, one example is the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) in Berkeley, Calif., which is associated with the Graduate Theological Union, a consortium of theological schools there. In the domain of science and the arts is the recently formed Society for Literature and Science, most of whose present officers are at Worcester (Mass.) Polytechnic Institute.

Into this context came the conference on Critical Realism in Science and Religion, in which this reporter was invited to participate. Convened recently in Berkeley by the CTNS, the meeting was something of a Fest, a celebration, for Arthur Peacocke of Oxford University, a biologist and theologian who is a prominent proponent of the philosophical stance known as critical realism.

Critical realism proposes that science is saying something real about the nature of things. This statement is not as tautological as it may appear. As philosopher Ernan McMullin of the University of Notre Dame (Ind.) pointed out at the conference, the age-old debate over the nature of scientific theories is whether they are saying something about the nature of things or whether they are concerned mainly with "saving the appearances," with calculating how the phenomena appear and change from time to time.

The trial of Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer of Florence, Italy, is a case in point. Members of the Inquisition dearly wanted Galileo to admit that his Copernican theory of the solar system was a matter of saving the appearances, a new and more accurate way of calculating the positions of the planets in the sky without necessarily saying anything real about the configuration of the solar system itself. Galileo at first insisted that the Copernican view was saying something real about the arrangement of the solar system. Then he caved in. Finally -- in a whisper -- he supposedly retracted his retraction.

According to McMullin and to Peacocke, critical realism stands opposed to those who regard scientific development as conditioned by sociology. Specifically they mention the "Edinburgh school" of sociologists of science and the followers of philosopher and physicist Thomas Kuhn of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the Kuhnian view, scientific activity is governed by paradigms, generally accepted ways of looking at a given problem or set of problems. What people seek to find experimentally, what they do find and how they relate new findings to old knowledge are all highly conditioned by the particular paradigm they follow. The Ptolemaic picture of the solar system, to which the Inquisition was wedded, and Galileo's Copernican view are rival paradigms in the Kuhnian view. Observers believing in either one would arrange observations according to the presuppositions of that paradigm.

Critical realists will have none of this conditioning. They insist that, by correcting errors and rejecting false starts, science "converges" to real answers to given questions, answers that are not paradigmatically conditioned. To this Ian G. Barbour, professor of science, technology and society and professor of religion at Carleton College in Ottawa, objected in his response to Peacocke's opening lecture of the conference that "the theories you hold influence the data you get."

This principle of convergence is one of the elements of critical realism that allow Peacocke to use it as a common philosophical approach to both science and religion. Peacocke sees a similar kind of convergence in Christian theology. Others, however, citing serious interdenominational disagreements, don't see it. Peacocke himself admits difficulties in finding any such convergence between Christian and non-Christian religions. Here, too, Barbour objects that in religion things are even more model-dependent than they are in science. "In religion the influence of theory on data is more problematic," he told conferees. Particularly one needs to take into account the difference between Eastern and Western religions, he said, the Eastern tending toward mystical experience of divine immanence, the Western toward numinous experience of divine transcendence.