Susan Watkins -- Modern Idolatry

(Out of Class Reading #1)

Over this semester I've been gradually working my way through Owen Barfield's Saving The Appearances, a book which discusses the nature of symbology and its appearances in our everyday lives. I was really interested to read about his opinions on science in the book's 8th chapter, "Technology and Truth," and the chapter after that, "An Evolution of Idols," partially because it discussed a thought I have wrestled with since high school.

Barfield points out that in ancient times, the sciences maintained the viewpoint that what they worked with was totally hypothesis-- theories which strived to "save the appearances" of the universe by offering possible explanations for various phenomena but which did not presume to actually represent reality. Thus it turns out that pre-Copernican times, it was not only normal but perfectly rational for several theories about natural phenomena to coexist without any disputation about their actual reality. They were useful for human understanding and thus valuable, even if they were not "actually correct." Take for example, the common representation of the atom today-- with a nucleus and several electrons drawn in ellipses around it. Scientists are almost certain that this is not actually what an atom looks like, but it is a useful model for understanding and so we keep it. This is a modern example, but that type of thinking was the norm in ancient societies about nearly all scientific theory. The shift began when Galileo and others discovered that the sun-centered theory of the galaxy might not be only a useful hypothesis, but an actuality-- and so the shift in scientific thought began away from theoretical models to the search for "reality."

Anyway. That explanation was necessary background but not actually what I wanted to discuss. My interest lies in a point that Barfield makes that while modern science in theory still claims to acknowledge its own limitations, there is a frightening and simultaneous trend of it being treated in practice as concrete fact when that point of view is just simply not valid. A great example lies in Darwin's Theory of Evolution-- a theory which is certainly useful for "saving the appearances" of the universe and offering a possible understanding of the history of life, but when it comes right down to it has absolutely no grounds to claim that it is without a doubt REALITY. And yet, many men and women on the street would tell you that it is unmistakeably fact, because they have been taught thus. Whether you agree with Darwinism in particular or not is not the main issue-- but rather that this trend of treating scientific theory as fact is growing fast and has actually become accepted, even as scientists maintain that they are intellectually honest.

It is not possible to seek academic integrity about the limitations of science while also trying to maintain that we know more about the universe than we do. We are quite bluntly lying to ourselves, and yet this doesn't seem to bother us.