The Science of the Gaps
On the limitations of scientific explanation
The tension between religion and science, at a sociological level, does not exist. There are plenty of religious scientists and scientifically-minded believers, and they do not walk around all day clutching their foreheads, trying to relieve the pressure of intense cognitive dissonance.
However, all is not as peaceful as it first appears.
Science’s ability to provide us with the theoretical underpinnings for why the world behaves the way it does, and religion’s concomitant decline as an explanatory guide, means that many believers now view the claims of religion—as well as everything else—in a scientific light. It is not so much that there is science and there is religion and they are both avenues to the truth, but rather that science has monopolized truth and religion has had to assimilate as a kind of subset, as the rational belief in the irrational or whatever. If we keep the metaphor: science’s avenue has absorbed religion’s avenue, and anyone traveling on the latter is already traveling on the former.
And why should this trend suddenly stop?
Won’t the ongoing advance of scientific knowledge continue to diminish the explanatory role of religion in people’s lives? Many have made their peace with this, but for those who haven’t, there is a fear they must feel—even if only subconsciously—that one day they will not need God to explain anything. In fact, this idea is sometimes defended theologically. God created brains, the reasoning goes, so using them to understand the world better is to put them to correct use. I’ve also heard the more mystical claim that God loves us so much he wants to equip us and set us loose, like any good parent, and that history’s march toward enlightenment is humanity’s opportunity to “move out of the house.” Even more open-minded (and my personal favorite) is the idea that using God as an explanatory hypothesis turns the deity into an instrument, into a gap-filling posit, which of course is a terrible degradation that should embarrass any mature believer!
I don’t think these arguments are correct. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we are motivated to make them in the first place; we are motivated by the discomfiting sense in the back of our minds that in a few more years, science, the disembodied god of wisdom from the headlines, will have it all figured out and religious understanding will be relegated to the museums and humanities classrooms like all good but useless things.
Actually, the opposite is likelier to be true. Nearly unnoticed, science is rushing headlong into a solid wall while stodgy, old religion is taking on new and compelling forms in the intellectual crucible. Instead of religion being in danger from the advance of scientific knowledge, science is in imminent danger of losing its grip on the truth with the advance of religious thought.
This deity we think of in scientific terms is the much-maligned “God of the gaps,” the being who presides over things science has not figured out yet. This God finds expression in the religious parallel of Clarke’s third law: “Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from religion.” Just as ancient man believed in magic and spirits controlling the weather because he didn’t have meteorology, so he believed in God because he didn’t know about astrophysics or biology or evolutionary psychology. It follows that as he learns more about any of these, he will believe less in God. Any remaining trace of theistic belief will be of a sort that is significantly curtailed; it will not be that same vigorous one from the old texts who created heaven and earth and performed miracles and wonders, but something vaguer, a kind of impotent abstraction.
But this “God of the gaps” derives from the assumption that God is a scientific proposition. That is, God is offered as an explanatory posit, as the best explanation for all the things science hasn’t figured out. When science figures them out (as it certainly must and will), God’s domain shrinks to the yet-further things science hasn’t figured out. And if science eventually clears all the important questions, well, God is no longer a good explanation for anything important.
But the assumption is itself false. God is simply not, in the first place, a “scientific” principle subject to any kind of falsification through empirical discovery. God is not Zeus, a god of thunder made irrelevant once the gap in meteorological knowledge gets filled in. On the contrary, the best arguments for God’s existence presuppose only the most basic claims that science would agree to as well.
They might even begin with premises such as, “This hydrogen atom exists,” which, unless science has somehow ruled out contingent existence, is not going to problematize God’s existence even as God’s explanatory role within the operations of nature is less needed. According to the classical versions of these arguments, God’s existence is not complicated by humans coming to know, with greater precision, the way in which the natural order of things works.
But aren’t these arguments relics from a medieval era we’ve long left behind?
Actually, let’s explore this point. To understand the curious weakness of science at the moment, we need to distinguish between the experimental data acquired through the scientific method and the theoretical underpinnings of those facts and observations. It’s important to note that by “weakness” I don’t mean that there is anything wrong, or anything insignificant, about the scientific pursuit or about the manifold scientific findings that humanity has discovered and developed. Instead, what I mean by “the weakness of science” is the way in which scientific ideas, unverified and unquestioned, punch far above their objective pay-grade in the public imagination.
First, the facts of science—the actual experimental work behind the “new study finds” pieces we read about online or in popular-science books—are the rock-solid realities that, through the sieve of the scientific method we all learned about in middle school, banish false hypotheses and allow the scientist to build theoretical understanding. Except that the public is becoming more and more aware of what worries over 50 percent of polled scientists — the replication crisis, the stunningly pervasive inability of scientists to reproduce the effects of published experiments, complicating the broader applications of said experiments. Perhaps part of the problem is that, as any honest statistics professor will tell you, you really can prove almost anything with statistics, and researchers do just that all the time. Or perhaps it’s other sources of error, such as our pesky biases, that create the conditions for the result that most published research findings turn out to be false. The situation is not aided by the incredible pressure to “publish or perish,” or the general drift of science away from practical (and thus verifiable) concerns, or the massive problems with the peer review system which is supposed to be the scientific guarantee of integrity. In short, when confronted with the “scientific facts” on any particular issue, one must either be prepared to do all the dirty, messy work of assessing the research design and execution oneself, or one must have a trust for published papers that they, at least at present moment, do not deserve.¹ Why any of these “facts” should pose, without a lot more research, any sort of challenge to the truths of the religious believer, remains a mystery. The theory-ladenness of facts is a problem in its own right, or at least a problem for those who think facts are simple, uncomplicated things which unproblematically challenge more metaphysically-rich conceptions of fundamental reality.
Let’s stay on this theme of theory for a moment. When we take the leap from investigating the world of easily observable facts to investigating the world of theoretical science, things get even murkier. Take particle physics as an example. There is no denying that physics takes facts seriously. Yet in its more theoretical skin physics does not behave at all in the way that other empirical fields behave, and it’s unclear why, for example, a theory about a multiverse generator should be ruled in-bounds whereas a theory about a being at the helm of the created order should be ruled out because such an idea is not vulnerable to scientific confirmation.
Even theories that bask in the warm, illuminating light of mathematical and empirical rigor are subject to debilitating missteps and mistakes. Newton’s laws of physics, which were at one point considered the most experimentally-confirmed scientific theories of all time, turned out to be importantly incorrect, invalidated hundreds of years after their publishing by astronomical observations and replaced by Einstein’s work. There is no reason to think this could not happen again with today’s physics.
It is almost as if science is good at making quantifiable predictions (only in most cases, of course; see particle physics, above, for an exception) but bad at finding general, underlying truths about the universe.
The reality is that science’s problems go even deeper; there is a kind of “science of the gaps” problem that plagues it. Science’s problem lies in its very success. Naturally, as the explanatory apparatus of rigorously applied scientific methodology delivers the goods over time, a feeling grows in the air that there is nothing beyond this approach, nothing beyond this method, and that we ought to shave away, as if with a razor, any suggestions that lie outside its scope.
Scientism, the delimiting of truth to what can be verified using the scientific method, or perhaps more simplistically, the belief that scientific truth is the only kind of truth, is self-undermining. This is what hovers underneath our great collective regard for our scientific oracles. If we were merely won over by science’s strong track-record, we would keep scientific achievements in the category to which they belong. We would say that anything that is vulnerable to the scientific method is perhaps best unlocked or best explained by science. But scientism takes us beyond what is plausibly amenable to scientific investigation. As a result, it proves the limitations of science.
The flaw in this thinking is not due to science’s chosen area of interest; the flaw has to do with the practitioners of science, the popularizers of science, and a society desirous of getting conclusive answers to its most pressing questions, all failing to acknowledge that science has a chosen area of interest in the first place. A conceit of modernity, in its quest to fully understand the world, was to ignore everything that could not be empirically observed, quantified, and mathematically measured. A sense for many has been growing that what cannot be quantified or mathematically measured does not exist, which is about as correct as a chef deciding there is no moon because it is never mentioned in a cookbook.
This is not necessarily a crippling flaw, at least as far as the analogy goes. The chef can continue making delicious dishes, moon or no moon. Science, too, can deliver us the goods whether God turns out to exist or not. But this is actually where the analogy breaks down. Because it turns out (as the briefest perusal of popular-science headlines today will demonstrate) that the unquantifiable has much more to do with the natural world than the moon does with cooking. In fact, if human beings are part of the natural world, and if empirical observation is the only key we have to determining what there is, then theoretically psychology, history, sociology, anthropology, law, economics, political science, literature, art, theology, morality, ethics, and philosophy should all be ultimately explicable by natural science, whether by reduction (e.g., economics is real, but is emergent from brain chemistry) or by elimination (e.g., economics isn’t real; only the laws of physics are real).
But, just as examples, psychology has not been satisfactorily reduced to neurobiology, and social sciences have not been able to carry out experimental projects with the desired precision, or produce results on level with any major theory within the harder sciences.
In their more candid moments, economists acknowledge they’re wrong half the time, despite the application of all the latest methods and theories. Let’s not even get into the historical failures of social engineering at the state level. Questions of morality notwithstanding, the “scientific” approach to human behavior and human society has yet to produce any sort of success comparable to older societies, outside of inspiration for our great and growing canon of dystopian literature.
So, because not-easily-quantifiable things such as human nature, the experience of subjectivity, and pure reason are important to the sciences broadly defined, we must enter into a great shell game, the fantastic, audacious lie that perpetuates the science of the gaps. We say that one day, when the methods are better and the computers are fast enough and we better understand the chemistry and the genomes and the evolutionary process, we will understand all of these more difficult things. Indeed, just as once upon a time humanity didn’t understand electricity but today it is safely harnessed the world over, so, too, one day we will have an exhaustive knowledge of human experience because we will have a scientifically-exhaustive knowledge of human experience. The difference between an electric circuit and the human mind is one of degree, and the scientists simply need more time.
But this is an intellectual Ponzi scheme, which takes deposits from one place to cover its ever-expanding debts and never pays them back. It works like this: (1) Believers in scientism operate as if everything can be explained scientifically. (2) It is pointed out that there are plenty of things that cannot be explained scientifically, including the very commitment to the idea that everything can be explained scientifically. (3) Believers in scientism attribute all scientifically-inexplicable phenomena, from near-death experiences to the subjective knowledge of the self, as epiphenomena of the human mind. (4) It is pointed out that science does not understand the human mind. (5) Believers in scientism say that science will understand the mind one day, and that nothing exists outside of the realm of what science will understand!
In fact, science will never fully understand human subjective experience, because it consists of things that are not quantifiable and not reducible to material explanations. And the only reason this isn’t blatantly obvious to everyone yet is due to the shell game in which we say that all the things science cannot explain are things that one day it will explain.
I think it’s time to face it: the human mind and much about society have not remained impenetrable to scientific analysis because the techniques are not yet advanced enough or the computers fast enough. They are impenetrable to science by their nature, and science has gained its prestige and perception of omnipotence by mostly ignoring them and focusing its attentions elsewhere, like a good cookbook does.
We do not go searching for the truth in even our best cookbooks, because we realize that cookbooks are excellent for the purposes they’re designed for, but those purposes are relatively practical and limited. Science delves into matters of existence and being in a way cookbooks don’t, but there are inherent limitations to the way it goes about doing so that should be acknowledged at the outset.
In one important sense, the supremacy of science has served religion, even as we continue to hear narratives about the decline in religious participation. The Enlightenment and the scientific revolution have always put pressure on religion to refine itself. Science has seized the prestige once held by religious authorities — not only among the general public but even among the faithful. If a priest and a scientist make mutually-exclusive claims and say, “Believe this because I say so,” the scientist wins today 99 times out of 100. But rather than leading to the death of theology, this loss of authority has led to a quiet but steady religious flourishing.
If one must explain how every human has a divinely-imbued soul, or why suicide is a moral evil, mere declarations of authority will no longer suffice. Instead a serious rabbi or pastor now has to actually crack open those dusty books, sharpen his reasoning, struggle to understand and apply concepts from a different time and place to the matter at hand, and import those ideas into our modern context. And what these rabbis, priests, and even non-religious philosophers have found, to their surprise, is that the old books hold up surprisingly well.
Indeed, it isn’t hard to imagine that when the day comes that the scientists finally admit that they haven’t the faintest idea how to design a successful society, there might not be a theologian or two waiting in the wings with a book of Proverbs and Nicomachean Ethics, ready to supply advice that was not acquired by scientific method but has served older iterations of communities and civilizations quite well.
Notes:
¹That these are the only two choices makes the layman’s attempt to decide political issues purely scientifically laughable at best.
