Science, the Supernatural, and Black-Box Mechanisms- E Anderson

MAGIC, SCIENCE, AND RELIGION: USEFUL LABELS IN THE PAST? USELESS IN THE PRESENT? E. N. Anderson Dept. of Anthropology University of California Riverside, CA 92521-0418 http://www.krazykioti.com/articles/magic-science-and-religion/ "Malinowski was guilty of many outrageous statements, such as “The road from the wilderness to the savage’s belly and consequently to his mind is very short, and for him the world is an indiscriminate background against which there stand out the useful, primarily the edible, species of animals or plants” (p. 44). This was retrograde even at the time; no Boasian would have been caught dead writing such a line. But, in general, Malinowski was on the side of the angels in this book. He was hardly the first to say that traditional people had a wealth of solid empirical knowledge and high-flown spiritual experience—anthropologists from Morgan on had said that—but he was one of the more influential people saying it." "2. Religion Malinowski saw religion as basically a way of utilizing belief in inferred, imaginary supernatural beings and forces to satisfy the emotional needs of the “savage.”" He said nothing about the civilized folk, but one assumes he was, as usual, sideswiping them via the Trobriands. He never forgot his self-imposed mission to confront his elite European readers with an ironic reflection of themselves. One can also assume that, like many early-20th-century social scientists, he expected religion to wither away in the near future. "Malinowski’s “religion” was strongly individualistic and psychological. He rejected Durkheim’s idea of religion (Durkheim 1995/1912) as the projection of society, and, by implication, Marx’ somewhat similar (though materialist) view. He dismissed Durkheim’s theory as mere mysticism, which, along with much else, proves that he did not understand Durkheim very well. (This is nothing against Malinowski—Durkheim did not go out of his way to make his case easy to follow. A frequent mistake, not well avoided by Malinowski, is to claim that Durkheim himself thought society was a mystical reality! No, he thought that Australian aboriginal rituals represented it so.)" "I think most anthropologists today would agree with Durkheim that religion is an emergent phenomenon of society, and is, by definition, a system. It has structure and social institutionalization. The lone-individual side of religious sentiment is now called “spirituality” rather than “religion.” The religious and cosmological belief system of a given society tends to reflect that society more or less closely. Sometimes, to be sure, there are time lags; Chinese religion still sees a Heavenly Emperor with his magistrates, courtiers, and classic dancers, reflecting the reality of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Revolutionary change comes slowly in Heaven. On the other hand, religion can and does change fast to accommodate new conditions; the meteoric rise of “fundamentalist” hate-based violence in the name of religion is a natural and, I think, inevitable reflex of the rise of hierarchies and giant government-business hookups in the late 20th century, with the consequent destruction of face-to-face communities, reduction of individual agency, and rise of mass violence." As human symbolic use has tool-using and socio-affective external realms, that impacted hunting and group-living contexts. As wholesale deprivation of maternal and peer stimuli can be harmful to an individual young growing monkey, it can be to a human. That begins to suggest the emergent properties of the human social symbolic context. "Religion is now almost invariably defined as belief in supernatural beings (see Atran 2002). However, Malinowski (and others of his time) differentiated religion from magic, which also depends on supernaturals. And belief in supernatural beings is generally not considered adequate to make a religion. For Scott Atran, author of one recent major book on the anthropology of religion, Mickey Mouse doesn’t count, and neither do devoutly held but allegedly “factual” or “scientific” belief systems like Marxism; religion must involve not only supernaturals but also counter-evidential beliefs and emotional sacrifices (Atran 2002:13). Others disagree, finding Marxism and “capitalism” more like religion than like science or spirituality (Atran 2002:13; David Kronenfeld, personal communication over the years, most recently on drafts of this paper, 2004; Kronenfeld points out that ideological concepts, such as the Dialectic in Marxism, take on supernatural and counter-evidential qualities when made into mass slogans)." Chapple´s behavioral-biological view focuses on emotional-interactional management by a leader to a group through rites of passage and rites of intensification. "Recent anthropological accounts of religion tend to exaggerate the distinction from science by highlighting the aspects of religion that seem most exotic and irrational to the writers. Thus, to pick only the most reasonable and sensible recent exemplars, Atran (2002) and Sosis and Alcorta (2003) emphasize supernaturals, counterintuitive beliefs, and the like; Sosis and Alcorta also emphasize visions, hallucinations, shamanism, sacrifice, and all the other favorite exotica of anthropology. The problem here is that religion, everywhere in the world, is far more often a matter of going politely and sociably to church, temple, ch’a’chaak, or witchetty grub ceremony, there to sit patiently and be bored to death. The ordinary humdrum side of religion is far more common, typical, and important to believers than the exotica. At least in the United States, mystical experience is rare, and true religious ecstasy is very rare. Religion for the vast majority of Americans is a much more ordinary affair, involving no altered mindstates. Romantic anthropologists might argue that this is because capitalism and other political ideologies have taken over so much of the American mind—driving, often, the religious beliefs. However, my observations in China, Mexico, and elsewhere convince me that the vast majority of humans have ordinary and practical religious lives, even in shamanistic and spirit-mediumistic religions. Transcendent experience of every kind is rare and disruptive, not common, causal or constitutive. Religion, usually, is mindless ritual conformity." "mindless" is a presumptuous and extreme term, and emphasizes a scientific bias. Religion involves "ritualistic conformity," while it is dedicated, perhaps unquestioned at a certain point. Heisenberg was Christian, nationalist enough to stay in Nazi Germany, but of Christian integrity enough to have gotten nicknamed the "White Jew." By contrast, spirituality is, by definition, emotional; it is the individual’s experience of awe, reverence, entrancement, enchantment, or similar emotions or transcendent feelings, inspired by natural or supernatural entities or forces. Religion usually stimulates spirituality, and may be influenced by it. As emotional, it is also relational, leading to the sense of the sacred and holy. Objectification involves controlling or eliminating emotional-relational features. Environmentalism provides a good comparison. Environmentalism involves not merely the study of objectified ecological interactions, but the concern with human-ecological interactions. The current claim that “secularism” or “secular humanism” is a “religion” does not make the grade by any standards. First, secularism has no supernaturals—by definition. Second, it has no communitas; nobody purports to be part of the secularist church or congregation or communion, nor does secularism have festivals, rituals, temples, or anything else to show. (The French Revolutionaries briefly tried to impose such, but were laughed to shame.) Third, it has no body of beliefs. The few secular humanists out there do agree on some facts, but they have no litmus test, no professions that they must accept. Indeed, skeptics differ enormously in worldviews—they are united only by skepticism (see journals like The Skeptic and The Zetetic, passim). "3. Science The division between magic, science, and religion was also important to Lévi-Strauss (1962) and others of the time. All the thinkers of the structural and cognitive traditions of the 1960s emphasized the rational, systematic, empirical side of traditional knowledge, Lévi-Strauss’ “science of the concrete.”" "In the 1950s and 1960s, interest in such systems climaxed in the development of the field of “ethnoscience.” This field arose from the researches of several of George Murdock’s students, sent to work in Micronesia and the Philippines (Conklin 1957; Frake 1980). The word was coined from the earlier term “ethnobiology,” introduced by John Harshberger in 1895. Soon, terms like “ethnobiology,” “ethnozoology” and “ethnoornithology” followed. The word “ethnoscience” seems to have disappeared somewhere in the intervening years, but the other terms persist, in spite of an attempt by Scott Atran to substitute “folkbiology” and other “folk-” words (Medin and Atran 1999) /1/. Many of these systems are as purely empirical, self-correcting, developing, and truth-driven as any western science (Anderson 2000, 2003, 2005). They also share with scientists a concern with insight, sensed experience, testing and probing, and the like (David Kronenfeld, personal communication, comment on draft of this paper, 2004). As science, they are limited more by lack of scope and equipment than by lack of some (mythical?) scientific mentality or method. However, many, as we shall see, have supernatural entities built into them. These problematize still more the basic distinction. Insight and sensed experience are basic to both science and religion, narrowing somewhat the gap between them." "As ethnoscience was developing, the term “science” was being subjected to a great deal of critique. For thousands of years—ever since the Greeks began to talk of scientia—it had had something like the straightforward, common-sense meaning that Malinowski knew. It referred to systematized knowledge, as opposed to faith (belief without evidence) on the one hand and techne, mere craft, on the other." In the early 20th century, Viennese logicians attempted to confine it to an exceedingly formal, even artificial, procedure, with very strict rules of verification or—more famously—”falsification” (Popper 1959). Science was even supposed, in some positivist quarters, to be reducible to mathematical rules; anything not mathematically expressed was not science. This was wildly out of line if one wanted to continue talking about Greek or Renaissance science, or even about the actual practice (as opposed to rigorous ideals) of 20th century science. (Try expressing paleontology mathematically.) Inevitably, a counterreaction set in, spearheaded by Thomas Kuhn’s classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), but anticipated earlier by the brilliant work of Ludwig Fleck on medical history. Kuhn concentrated on biases and limits within scientific practice, but the critiques of science rapidly expanded to include the lamentable tendency of scientists—all too human as they are—to believe pure nonsense and claim it to be scientific if it fit their biases. This was especially noted in the cases of racism and sexism, but extended to economic theories, animal psychology, medicine, and indeed most fields. However, one must note a very important difference. Kuhn was attending to real problems with science itself, whereas the critiques of racism and sexism—however necessary—were simply rewarmings of Francis Bacon’s critiques of bias-driven pseudoscience." "In any case, we all came to realize that science as practice is a very human affair. Pure science may be an ideal—or may not—but real-world science has its biases, mistakes, blind spots, and so forth. Culture and economics intrude. People try to justify their prejudices and errors. Not only such socially convenient lies as racism, but even such neutral ideas as stable continents (Oreskes 1993, 2001), persist long after their time /2/." "We have many well-established facts that were once outrageous hypotheses: the earth is an oblate spheroid (not flat), blood circulates, the sun is only a small star among billions of others. We also have immediate hypotheses that directly account for or predict the facts. However, we then move on to higher and higher levels of abstraction, inferring more and more remote and obscure intervening variables—up to the almost mystical cosmology that now postulates multidimensional strings, dark matter, dark energy, quark chromodynamics, and the rest. Even the physicist Brian Greene has to admit that “[s]ome scientists argue vociferously that a theory so removed from direct empirical testing lies in the realm of philosophy or theology, but not physics” (Greene 2004:352). To people like me, unable to understand the proofs, modern physics is an incomprehensible universe I take on faith—exactly like religion. The difference between it and religion is not that physics is evidence-based; astrophysics theories, especially such things as string and brane theory, are not based on direct evidence, but on highly abstract modeling. The only difference I can actually perceive is that science represents forward speculation by a small, highly trained group, while religion represents a wide sociocultural communitas. (Religion also has beautiful music and art, as a result of the communitas-emotion connection, but I suppose someone somewhere has made great art out of superstring theory.)" "The ethnoscientists proved that traditional ecological knowledge is not just random facts, but is systematized, elaborated, and often axiom-driven or theory-driven as much as any modern science. (The theories are, necessarily, far less comprehensive and sophisticated, because of lack of equipment and so forth.) Conversely, the historians of science have proved that contemporary laboratory science can be as culturally and socially negotiated, even “constructed,” as any traditional worldview. Old-fashioned racist ideas that contrast the superior, rational, empirical Science of “the west” with the mystical nonsense of the rest are still sometimes aired (e.g. Wolpert 1993), but few scholars take them seriously. The world has accumulated vast amounts of factual knowledge and reasonable theory in the past couple of hundred years—more than we had before. We also have developed many formal algorithms for guaranteeing that we have the most accurate data possible. However, even so, the process is not as different from what went on before as we used to pretend." "Consider, again, modern physics. The universe is approximately 96% composed of dark matter and energy—matter and energy we cannot measure, cannot observe, cannot comprehend, and, indeed, cannot conceptualize at all (Greene 2004). We infer its presence from its rather massive effects on things we can see. On a smaller and more human scale, we have the “invisible hand” (Smith 1776) of the market—a market which assumes perfect information, perfect rationality, and so on, among its dealers. We have abstract and unverifiable black-box mechanisms in psychology (e.g. Freudian dynamic personality factors), anthropology (“culture,” at least in its Whitean form), and sociology (“class,” “discourse,” “network.”) All these and other abstractions have become mystical entities in at least some theoretic discourses. Modern schools in the social sciences often rest on beliefs, assumptions, and global abstractions more than on data. Thus Atran’s specifications merely allow us to split an arbitrary realm, which we may please to call “religion,” from all the other realms of human knowledge. All substantial scientific knowledge must rest on at least some inferences about unprovable, abstract, obscure entities." http://www.krazykioti.com/articles/magic-science-and-religion/ "Thus, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish science from religion. However, we can say that science is made up of facts that are empirically proved and ideas that can be theoretically proved, or at least tested, while religion is made up of things that must be taken on faith because they simply cannot be proved or disproved by any evidence. Stephen Jay Gould (1999) has recently given us a strong argument for this position, and for the fundamental complementarity—and therefore the fundamental difference—of religion and science. Yet Gould has to admit that his own science, paleontology, cannot be directly tested—and that not only traditional religions, but also modern fundamentalist religions, make a number of statements that can be tested. At least, like paleontological ideas, they could be proved or disproved if we had a time machine. The reality of six-day creation in 4004 BC, Noah’s flood, and Joshua’s musical destruction of Jericho have all been established as fact to fundamentalists’ satisfaction; geology, archaeology, and other sciences are bent to their ideas. The same objective data serve to disprove the same events, of course, in the eyes of other observers." The rationalist definition, not empirical-behavioral. That is, spirituality-religion is based on relation to the Universe´s Creator aspect, its Ultimate Cause, through meditation, prayer, and devotional ritual. Eliot Chapple´s behavioral-biological anthropology observes the emotional-interactional processes in rites of passage and rites of intensification. Science is made of empirical philosophical objectification of phenomena with the intent to quantify and predict. "Meanwhile, the postmodernists have shown, quite correctly, that all too much of modern “science” is really social bias dressed up in fancy language. “Scientific” racism is the most obvious example of this. Discredited “scientific” ideas about women, children, animals, and other vulnerable entities are only slightly less obvious." "Descartes, Newton, and others of their time were deeply and devoutly religious men. Descartes imported Catholic dogma into his science; his separation of “mind and body” is actually l’âme et le corps. Moreover, scientists of that day did much that we would call “magic.” Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the prototypic early-modern seeker, saw magic as an alternative to science and philosophy. Newton sought the philosopher’s stone. Alchemy is now dismissed as magic; chemistry is science—but the two were one until the 18th century. Astronomy is science, astrology is magic—but every competent stargazer did both until the late Renaissance, and saw them as part of one agenda. It is this sort of thing that makes it difficult to contrast an essentialized, superior “Western science” with the mystical lore of the rest of the world. We can count the Greeks and the Renaissance scientists as part of the modern positivist agenda only by the most outrageous back-projection and selective quoting. In fact, the conceptualization of science as strictly factual-rational, religion as strictly otherwise, is quite recent, and seems to be evolving as we speak. Concepts of “religion” and “science” not only differ from culture to culture; they differ within the same culture over time, often over quite short temporal intervals." "Religion is heavily involved with morals, while science is traditionally considered to be values-neutral. The separation owes a great deal to David Hume’s argument that one cannot deduce an “ought” from an “is” (of course, Hume was more nuanced and subtle than this canned, though useful, summary of his philosophy; see Hume 1975). Religion can prescribe morality, justifying it from divine law. Science cannot. Supposedly, it is about “is,” not about “ought.” Ethical bias in science is often seen as a contamination, inevitable or not. (The fundamentalist claim that science is really a religion of “secularism,” faked up to sell evil and cutthroat morals under the name of “evolution,” is based on complete lack of knowledge of science.) However, once again, the real world is not so simple. First, science has its own morality: one is not supposed to lie, fake results, trash one’s fellows in anonymous reviews, or plagiarize. Second, some sciences are specifically and openly moral. Medical research makes no sense except as a healing art, and agricultural research is targeted at feeding more people, or at least producing more of some desired commodities. Third, we can see from this that if one allows oneself even a single simple moral postulate, one may create an open-ended universe of scientific research. If we ought to cure sickness, a great deal of “ises” follow from that one “ought.” Medical science is the result. If society is desirable, then there must be some way to hold society together and keep it from self-destructing by failure to adapt; this opens the door to otherwise relatively values-neutral applied research in anthropology, sociology, and political science. This point, complete with the analogy to medicine, was already made almost 2500 years ago by Plato and Aristotle! (See Lloyd 1996.)" (Science does have its own inherent context of morality. The historical origins of science in Christianity make even more sense of this. Science, i.e. scientific philosophy, required a community of scholars. In their community already by 1277, with the proto-scientists like Thomas of Aquinas´ teacher Albert Magnus, contemporary Bishop Robert Grosseteste, and Roger Bacon, among others of the Oxford Franciscan School), there were complaints about Aristotle´s assumptions, including "objects can´t move in curved lines. They just move straight out, then fall straight down." "In short, separating religion from science and both from magic is analytically important, valuable, and interesting, but it must always be a somewhat arbitrary separation. It is constantly being problematized by the messiness of the real world and the messiness of real human thought. No matter how defined, “religion” and “science” (to say nothing of “magic”) are ideal types—idealtypen—that do not describe the real world very neatly. They are valuable ways of modeling thought and discourse, but not really descriptive, though they have considerable heuristic use in describing the western (and now the international) world since 1800 or 1850." Again, by "messiness", Anderson seems to be referring to overlaps between science and religion. The empirical-behavioral distinction is advanced by clarifying the more general basis of distinguishing forms of Science, Social Science, and the Humanities. Fritjof Capra´s Systems Theory is focused on assuming the empirical nature of knowledge based on observed phenomena, its epistemic nature. While fundamentally useful, it is actually a philosophical process of knowledge modelling, and epistemological. Thus, knowledge systems reflect phenomena systems, and those knowledge systems form the familiar academic disciplines, their Levels of Explanation, and based on emergent properties that give new systems fundamentally unique and differentiated, discontinuous characteristics. An atomic bomb is technology that involves physics phenomena, but it could not affect biological, psychological, anthropological, and sociological etc phenomena without having been designed by the psychological etc activity of people. Similarly, South Africa´s leaders used psychosocial and cultural reasoning and decision-making processes to eliminate their nuclear power infrastructure entirely. "This brings us back to Tylor, and to Atran (2002). Religion can be seen as partly based on plausible but wrong inferences about ultimate cause. Thus, in explaining the world, people naturally infer spirits and gods. There appears to be a genuinely natural tendency for people to assume that trees, rocks, and animals are “people,” in some sense—having volition, consciousness, and humanlike will. The Durkheimian observation that religion is a projection of the social order naturally follows from this (a point Atran rather misses). There is obviously a great deal more than this to what we normally call “religion,” but inferences about the “people” out there clearly comprise one of the building blocks from which religion is made." If it is a "natural tendency for people to assume that trees, etc are 'people'", then they are "plausible, but" unscientific "inferences about ultimate cause." They are only "wrong" in a scientific sense.