The Science of Faith and Politics

Friends have asked for my two cents about an on-line article taking to task for being right but for the wrong reasons Republican presidential candidates who don't believe in evolution. In sum, the authors, both professors, say that they don't believe in evolution either, but for a very different reason: "because we know it to be factually true." No belief required, they assert.

As the political season heats up in 2008, we may expect more of such from both believers and nonbelievers as commentators attempt to persuade those open to proclamations of Certainty and Truth and Change to vote for their candidates.

My small contribution consists of excerpting C.S. Peirce's 1887 article "The Fixation of Belief," where he lays out four ways that people form beliefs. The first he labels Tenacity, or a stubborn clinging to mere opinion that discards facts and experiences at odds with belief and that excludes independent verification or falsification.

The second he labels Authority, or human institutions systematically indoctrinating and sheltering an ignorant population. Dissenters of Authority historically have been tarred and feathered, banished, placed on trial and in prison, and even murdered both individually and as a people, notes Peirce.

The third he labels A Priori, or reasoning from the plausible and reasonable to complex and formal propositions that excludes experience but includes abstruse expression and arcane or scholastic traditions intended to overwhelm common opinion and experience. (Too much of computer modeling belongs in this third method of belief.)

My epistemological education finds me in sympathy with Peirces's fourth way of knowing, which he labels Scientific Investigation. At root it consists of testing reason against the observable by imposing objective criteria for assessing belief. Moreover, it welcomes, even invites, continual exposure to refutation as the self-correcting experience. While upholding the pursuit of Truth, it recognizes that achieving that fundamentally encompassing moment awaits us and that science takes much time and effort, a severe handicap for authoritarians of every stripe who would impose their beliefs on others, especially as elections empowering competing personal Truths approach.

Said another way, the non-scientist will create propositions containing mere opinion bolstered by appeals to authority and to the merely reasonable. Also, the non-scientist will attack the source of an assertion rather than the assertion, in effect placing the assertion above review. However, to be rigorously scientific, every assertion must be open to examination by vigorous critics. Also, notes Peirce, the absence of criticism is not proof of validity, and "the scientific spirit requires one be at all times ready to dump his cartload of beliefs the moment experience is against him.... To do otherwise is to live with the legions of the insane, and of the humbug."

To be clear to those who survived to this point and would pocket my small change, we assert that neither Republican believers nor their critics have followed modern scientific method. The fundamentally religious person proclaims his Truth, as do the professors when they claim Factual Truth. Both exhibit aspects and phases of Peirce's Tenacity, Authority, and A Priori beliefs. Moreover, we will be particularly hard on professors who claim a high degree of scientific training but also put their Truth above further inquiry, however incremental might be the reward, as they attack the source of an assertion rather than the assertion itself in their pseudo-scientific pursuit of opportunistic, partisan gain.