Imagining Metaphysical-Epistemological Frameworks: Three Types of Responses to the Fossil Record

A fossil of Tiktaalik, one of the most famous examples of the transition between lobe-finned fish and four-legged animals, was found in the Canadian arctic in 2004. Photograph by Eduard Solà. Used unde the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The fossil evidence appears to support evolutionary theory. Different species appear in the record in exactly the order one would expect if descent with modification were true.

But what if that seemingly obvious evidence was, in fact, a clever ruse? This is one argument put forth by certain creationists, who believe the Earth was brought into being by a god who made life appear via some supernatural means alluded to in the Bible (or one of several other sacred religious texts). For these people, the fossil record evidence is merely another test of faith.

This proposal, often dismissed out of hand by scientists and rarely brought to its logical conclusion by those who espouse it, nevertheless is consistent with a particular metaphysically-derived epistemological argument that has been advocated by serious philosophers, including none other than Rene Descartes.

To understand the Cartesian metaphysical-epistemological framework, it is useful first to understand two other such frameworks from which different conclusions about the meaning of the fossil record can be drawn. Bertrand Russell and Galileo Galilei are illustrious representatives of these alternative camps.

Russell is a metaphysical naturalist (sometimes also called ontological naturalism). That is, he believes that both the means of discovering knowledge (epistemology) and the nature of the universe (metaphysics) are built on a material foundation. This is the de facto position of science, which does does not permit supernatural explanations.

Russell, in chapter V of his “Problems in Philosophy,” posits that all knowledge is derived from sensory-mediated perception of the physical world – what he calls “acquaintance.” This acquaintance accounts not only for all we can call truth; it is the very substrate on which all statements of any kind depend. We cannot even have language without this direct experience known as acquaintance: “Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted [Emphasis in original].”

Russell’s epistemology comes from a metaphysical position in which there is no room for faith, for faith is that in which one believes without being able to experience it. To him, the only reason a creationist could even propose the fossil record ruse is because of experience of the actual fossil record accompanied by past experiences of lies he had encountered. The notion of a god, far from being some transcendental true being, is merely a composite of experienced human attributes transferred to an imagined deity.

Galileo would likely agree with Russell that the fossil evidence supports evolution, for Galileo is a methodological naturalist. But their agreement would end where metaphysics begins. Although Galileo believes that the proper way of gaining knowledge about the world around us is by looking at material reality, he also maintains that the nature of the universe comprises more than the material; specifically, he believes the soul, the Catholic God, and other such Biblical notions are equally - if not in a superior sense - true.

Galileo draws this distinction between the realm of science and the realm of the soul in his “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany.” In the letter, Galileo attempts to show that one cannot take all passages in the Bible literally. He does not go as far as to say that the Bible is discordant with nature. Indeed, he thinks the Bible justifies the natural order of the world. However, he argues that new discoveries may lead to new interpretations of some verses, and that others which do not directly bear on matters of salvation may in fact be purposefully skewed so as to be understandable to the masses, even if the information is not, strictly speaking, accurate.

The distinction Galileo makes between nature and the heavenly is key to his conciliatory position. “I should judge,” he writes, “that the authority of the Bible was designed to persuade men of those articles and propositions which, surpassing all human reasoning could not be made credible by science, or by any other means than through the very mouth of the Holy Spirit.”

Here Galileo diverges from Russell, whose metaphysics do not admit of a means for obtaining knowledge outside that which is accessible to science and reasoning.

Galileo's methodological naturalism is perhaps the most popular of the three frameworks today. Most people accept the authority of the understanding that the scientific endeavor produces about the physical world, while continuing to believe in a realm of life after death that is separate and inscrutable from this side of the mortal veil. His argument, in fact, reflects the current official position of the Roman Catholic Church that once persecuted him.

Methodological naturalism is the de jure position of science, because while science does not permit the supernatural, it also does not refute the supernatural.

Methodological naturalism does, however, face some significant challenges. The instability it introduces into interpretations of sacred texts can (despite Galileo's assertions to the contrary) lead to questions about the soul, the nature of gods, and salvation. More importantly, though, as science has expanded into territories previously in the purview of scripture, the unknowable space open to the spiritual has shrunken. Increasingly this framework takes on a “god of the gaps” quality.

Descartes, in contrast with the other frameworks, rejects naturalism altogether. As a devout Christian, he cannot accept the metaphysical version, and as a sophisticated thinker he recognizes the incompleteness of the methodological version.

Descartes' method is quite ingenious. Rather than asserting belief based on evidence of any sort, he instead embraces an extreme form of doubt of which even the ancient Greek Skeptics would be envious. For Descartes, this extreme doubt allows him to withdraw from the natural world; he does not plan to seek confirmation of the supernatural there.

By avoiding material objects, Descartes can assert only that which he finds in his own mind, which he takes to be the starting point of “true” reality, making him an idealist in the Platonic sense. A few ideas, he decides after establishing that his mind must exist, have more certainty than empirical observations. One of these ideas is perfection, which he declares is the essence of God. Thus he writes in the synopsis of his "Meditations” that “the idea of being perfect, which is found in our minds, possesses so much objective reality...that it must be held to arise from a cause absolutely perfect.”

Descartes' doubtful idealism offers powerful support for the creationist argument of false evidence. His method cannot be waved away on account of the evidence precisely because the evidence is not considered a reliable source for knowledge claims. It admits no assault from the empirical world.

There are, of course, weaknesses to Descartes' approach. One is that he must arrive at the concept of self prior to establishing the concept of God. He also chooses the categories on which he will focus in an explicit effort to arrive at God: for instance, he assumes definitional relations in making doubt synonymous with imperfection and imperfection antonymous with perfection. Perfection is neither objective nor specific, nor is it necessarily the same as “good.” One can be perfectly evil. Russell would likely counter Descartes by pointing out that these definitions and relations are formed in the first place on the knowledge of acquaintance, thus undermining the very effort Descartes had made in escaping sensory information.

A second concern for Descartes' method is that it tells us nothing in particular about God, beyond it being a form of absolute perfection. It certainly does not give credence to any particular scripture or deity, as Galileo's framework does.

Once accepted, though, the Cartesian God works in creationists' favor in that it offers assurance that a God does exist, and that that God is more “real” than any physical object, including fossil evidence. Assured of the prevailing truth of God, one is free to adopt any faith tradition one prefers and to reject any countervailing evidence as merely a test of that more well-established faith.

The differences between the metaphysical-epistemological frameworks epitomized by Descartes, Russell, and Galileo are today playing out in the heated debates about the veracity of evolutionary theory. Each has subtle, but practical, consequences for major societal issues, from religious adherence to education policy. Understanding them is crucial to understanding the textures of these defining public and personal debates.

Cold War Politics and the Paradigm of Militarized Science

The MIKE EVENT, part of Operation Ivy, was the first successful detonation in the testing of experimental thermonuclear weapons. It was exploded on Oct. 31, 1952 at the Pacific atoll Enewetak.
Public domain photo courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Site Office.

Thomas Kuhn’s seminal 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, argued that normal scientific practice is periodically interrupted by shifts in thinking, or paradigms, that change the nature of the entire practice. Paradigms are structures that form the cognitive environments in which science operates on a day-to-day basis.[i]

The Cold War was not in itself a scientific discovery or endeavor. However, the ideology and competition of this perpetual standoff so enveloped the American mindset, and especially scientists, during the latter half of the twentieth century that it became a paradigm of its own. Cold War military strategy became the primary impetus for nearly all major scientific projects, first in the physical sciences and soon after also in the social sciences.

The building of the first atomic bomb had little to do with U.S. worries about the Soviets. But nuclear technology quickly became the dominant tool of early Cold War policy. In 1950, U.S. foreign policy shifted strongly toward the threat of military force as a means of preventing Communist hegemony. President Truman announced that the country would pursue thermonuclear weapons, and despite some high-profile scientific opposition, the Soviet’s own development of such bombs kept the U.S. in an arms race to build bigger and more destructive weaponry.[ii]

An obsession with military-related research and development in the early Cold War led to an imbalance in science funding. In 1952, for instance, the civilian-oriented fledgling National Science Foundation’s budget was $3.5 million. The single military branch of the Navy, on the other hand, spent nearly $600 million between 1946 and 1950, or an average of $120 million per year.[iii] The security mindset permeated well into scientific circles. Because many scientific documents in specialties such as physics, electronics and oceanography were classified, most scientists needed security clearances, tying them inexorably to national defense interests and  Cold War politics.[iv]

The securitization and politicization of scientific information also affected close U.S. allies in Western Europe. When the U.S. State Department decided to pursue policies in favor of a “United States of Europe,” one of the main impetuses was to provide a strong front against the Soviet Bloc next door and take some pressure off the U.S. in defending against Communism. To attain this goal, the U.S. threw its weight behind a concept to unite a group of six continental nations under a single peaceful nuclear energy regime called Euratom, and restricted scientific information (and other nuclear resources) to potential member states unless they signed on. Though Euratom became a reality in 1958, it failed to create a united Europe and injured U.S. relations with such allies as France, Britain and Germany.[v]

Euratom was part of the prevailing paradigm of Cold War – that science and technology had the power to resolve all problems, no matter how intractable. Yet Euratom did not achieve the goals of the U.S., nor was it the only scientifically-infused foreign policy project that ended in debacle.

By the end of the 1950’s, the social sciences were being graced with the state’s largesse, too. Development theorist W. W. Rostow laid out his theory of economic takeoff, which suggested among other things that poor countries could be modernized through a combination of technology, foreign investment and the insertion of Western liberal values. The federal government seized on this, with Rostow’s support, as a way to win third-world countries over from Communist influence.[vi] Some of the resultant development programs met with mixed success, while others resulted in utter failure.[vii]

Rostow’s theory and others like it fall into what Richard Feynman dubbed “Cargo Cult science:” they have all the trappings of science, but they don’t work because their proponents fail to consider other possible explanations.[viii] At the height of the Cold War, ideological presumptions trumped attempts to ask fundamental questions about the uses of science and technology, for both good and ill. The flawed reasoning that science could fix foreign nations was also applied domestically in what became known as the “War on Poverty,” which was also largely abandoned after producing tepid results.[ix]

Although the Cold War would not end for more than another decade, the militarized science paradigm unraveled precipitously in the 1970’s. A low return on investment, growing social opposition, and health and environmental concerns largely led to what Kuhn would have called a crisis period, and then a revolution: a large-scale decoupling of the security and scientific establishments.[x]

Cold War tensions would flare up once more before the Soviet Union collapsed.[xi] But never again would science and the military be so closely and unquestioningly wed.

---

[i] Sergio Sismondo, “Fifty years of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, twenty-five of Science in Action,” Social Studies of Science 42 (2012), 415-41, http://sss.sagepub.com/content/42/3/415, 9-1-13;

[ii]           Audra J. Wolfe, Competingwith the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 20-2;

[iii]           Wolfe, Competing with the Soviets, 25;

[iv]           Ibid., 33-35;

[v]               John Krige, “The Peaceful Atom as Political Weapon: Euratom and American Foreign Policy in the Late 1950s,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 30, 1 (Winter 2008), 5-44, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/hsns.2008.38.1.5, 9-12-13;

[vi]              Wolfe, Competing with the Soviets, 60-65;

[vii]          Ibid., 72-73;

[viii]          Richard Feynman, "Cargo Cult Science," http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/cargocul.htm, 8-26-13;

[ix]              Wolfe, Competing with the Soviets, 85-88;

[x]           Ibid., 106-115;

[xi]           Ibid., 121-124.

As Metro-North goes, so goes Connecticut

The tracks at the train station in West Haven, Conn.

This article originally appeared in the op-ed section of the CT Mirror.

The Metro-North Railroad is the artery that carries Connecticut’s lifeblood.

The New Haven line is the single busiest in the nation. Without Metro-North bringing workers to and from the city, the Gold Coast around Fairfield County couldn’t exist. That should concern all Connecticut residents, because the county pays an outsized share of income taxes into state government coffers and contributes to much of the state's relative wealth. The health of Connecticut’s economy is tied to the health of the railroad.

That’s why the rising tide of disruptions, mishaps and full-on disasters on the New Haven line are so disturbing.

The most recent snafu occurred when a section of the 138,000 volt feeder cable in Mount Vernon, N.Y., failed, crippling service along an eight-mile stretch of track. The cable was one of two that normally powers the trains; the other cable was shut off earlier this month as part of an effort, of all things, to upgrade the electrical system.

By their own accounts, Con Edison and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority knew the cable meltdown was possible, but decided the risk wasn't high enough to warrant a contingency plan.

Their confidence in the railroad’s resiliency is indefensible. It’s not as if the New Haven line has been running smoothly these past few years.

In the summer of 2011, hundreds of passengers were left stranded in Westport in 100-degree weather after the train stalled on the tracks. Riders stuck in potentially life-threatening temperatures weren’t even given the courtesy of an explanation for their predicament.

Then there are the movable bridges that straddle rivers along the coast. Four of them are over a century old and seize up on a regular basis.

Perhaps the most frightening indication of Metro-North's deterioration was the derailment-turned-collision in Bridgeport this May, which injured dozens of passengers and shut rail service down for several days. Preliminary reports have focused on a faulty rail joint on the section of track where the derailment occurred. In an eerie parallel to the feeder line crisis, MTA officials had inspected the section a few days earlier and found the problem, but decided it wasn't serious enough to warrant immediate attention.

The MTA isn't to blame for all Metro-North's problems, of course. Funding for rail infrastructure was neglected by New York and Connecticut for decades. And the MTA has pushed through some long-overdue upgrades recently.

Still, the MTA cannot allow itself to take risks so casually when the potential consequences are so dire. They've faced more than enough low-risk, high-cost scenarios to know better.

Rider advocate James Cameron of the Connecticut Rail Commuter Council described Metro-North to the Connecticut Post last week “as a Third World railroad, and I’ve ridden railroads in the Third World that are more reliable than this.”

Cameron is right. What's worse, though, is that the state is depending on this Third World railroad to cart it into the 21st century.

Rail may be an old technology, but it has widely come to be viewed over the last decade or so as the lynchpin of transportation infrastructure in the area. It relieves congestion on the already clogged roads and highways, and produces much lower environmental costs than most forms of travel.

Several communities have rediscovered Metro-North and embraced it as key to their economies. Fairfield opened the first new station on the New Haven line in almost a century in 2011. West Haven opened its first station this summer. Bridgeport is planning a station for its East End in the hopes the railroad can inject some life into that distressed neighborhood.

Other municipalities are reorienting their plans around existing rail stations. Earlier in the year, Stamford unveiled a design for a massive new business complex alongside its station. Stratford adopted “transit-centered” zoning regulations two years ago to bring more people within walking distance of its station. The town is just finishing construction of a condominium complex built expressly because of those zoning rules.

The MTA encourages towns and cities to think this way. It touts the economic and environmental value of a “mass transit system that works” on its website.

But all this effort to take advantage of the railroad is useless if the trains don't run properly. Increasingly, they don't.

State lawmakers and residents should demand better of the transportation system they pay for. The MTA needs to reevaluate its priorities so it can overcome the New Haven line's existing shortfalls. Until that happens, Metro-North will constrain, rather than spur, Connecticut's growth.