The title of my presentation betrays my intent to explore the possibility that for some the science wars constitute, in fact, a holy war, the defense and preservation of something sacred. Who the Great Satan in all this is depends, of course, on whom one asks. There are those so resentful of the power and privilege scientists have acquired in Western culture, so, dare I say, envious of the command over cognition scientists claim, that they delight to expose what they see as the real motives, the motives to power, that have permitted satanic science to run rough shod over Western civilization with little or no regard for the margins of society. Whether or not such folks hate with religious fervor, there is no denying that they have been accused of righteous indignation toward science and scientists. On the other hand the reaction to postmodern critics of science from some scientists has been equally vehement. If we are to believe certain defenders of Enlightenment science, the future of civilization hinges on our willingness to defend the true faith from the fool who says in his heart, if I may paraphrase the Apostle Paul, "there is no scientific truth."

It would be a mistake to claim that the science wars are nothing more than a religious skirmish in secular clothing; nevertheless, I do not believe that the similarities to internecine conflict among scholars are merely coincidental. My assumption is that the utilization of the imagery, categories and concerns of religion in these squabbles exposes something deeper, something important for the issues involved.

I begin with an attack on postmodern critics of science by the well-known author and columnist Barbara Ehrenreich, who, together with a graduate student in ethnology from the University of Michigan, have objected to the dogmatism rampant in anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies across the country as "the new creationism."⁽¹⁾ Writing in The Nation the authors begin by describing a recent interdisciplinary seminar on emotions at which a social psychologist, having heard that the audience had very little patience for bold generalizations about emotions across cultures, attempted to pre-empt criticism by herself offering a social history of psychological approaches to the topic. "But no sooner had the word 'experiment' passed her lips," write the authors, "than the hands shot up." Audience members pointed out that the experimental method is the brainchild of white Victorian males. [The presenter] agreed that white Victorian males had done their share of damage in the world but noted that, nonetheless, their efforts had led to the discovery of DNA. This short-lived dialogue between paradigms ground to a halt with the retort: 'You believe in DNA'?"⁽²⁾

Ehrenreich and McIntosh go on to argue that innate biology, as they call the shared biologically based component that should, in their view, have a place in any theory of human nature, has been disallowed by postmodern critics. According to these critics innate biology has no positive insights to offer into how humans think, act, or arrange their cultures; furthermore, the "essentialism" lurking behind it implies universal properties that must be exposed for their own highly ethnocentric biases.⁽³⁾

Ehrenreich and McIntosh point out that no one objects to the idea that chimpanzees possess a set of genetically scripted tendencies that evolved along with the physical characteristics we recognize as chimpanzee-like. What these critics of experimental science are doing, then, amounts to making an exception of humans, and that suggests that we do, in fact, possess a defining essnce defined by our unique and miraculous freedom from biology. This, conclude the authors, results in "an ideological outlook eerily similar to that of religious creationism. Like their fundamentalist Christian counterparts, the most extreme anti-biologists suggest that humans occupy a status utterly different from and clearly 'above' that of all other living beings. And, like the religious fundamentalists, the new academic creationists defend their stance as if all of human dignity - and all hope for the future - were at stake."⁽⁴⁾

These two authors are not alone in drawing on religious categories to describe the enemies of science. Many of the contributors to The Flight from Science and Reason point to the intolerance of cultural critics. Referring to what he calls "academic pseudoscience" Mario Bunge denounces its failure to include a self-correcting mechanism as "dogmatic." Near the end of his essay he invokes the 1927 piece by Julien Brenda, "The Treachery of the Clergy," as the model for the kind of denunciation now called for.⁽⁵⁾

So much for fighting against the dogmatism of cultural criticism of science. Is there any sense in which the defense of experimental science in the science wars can be likened to a defense of the faith? Given the long involvement that science and religion have experienced with each other, we should indeed be surprised if that were not the case. Let me say a bit more about the relationship between science and religion.

Thanks to the work of historians of science we are, I am aware, no longer satisfied that the metaphor of warfare, so beloved in the previous century, best summarizes the relationship between science and religion. But we have not changed our minds that historically these two expressions of humankind's wish to engage the Other, as the German romantics would put it, have always been involved with each other. From the level of interest and the widespread discussions about science and religion in the present, I might add, this seems more true today than ever.

In an essential way, then, representatives of science and religion can find themselves on the same side in the science wars. I will go farther. A most striking similarity among those who decry extreme cultural criticisms of science can be found between those who hold a traditional view of science and those who take a conservative stance in religion. Why should this be? The link that has repeatedly brought religion and science together in the past has been a common understanding that humans should seek truth about that which lies beyond. Throughout history when the truths acceptable to each have reinforced each other, science and religion have been allies; when not, they have been enemies. But always it has been an issue of who has the truth, not whether or not truth existed. This has meant that on the latter question, whether there is truth at all, defenders of science and religion have historically agreed.

No single individual is more identified with the science wars than Alan Sokal. He has been quick to identify himself as "a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them."⁽⁶⁾ Others have been more strident. Anthropologist Robin Fox, writing in The Flight from Science and Reason, asserts: "If you are indeed interested in the "truth" - and whatever you might think you really are - then you must use the scientific mode, at however low a level, to arrive at it."⁽⁷⁾ Mario Bunge and Paul Gross call, on separate occasions, for the establishment of truth squads to root out what amounts to unbelief. And in The Higher Superstition the authors call for the presence of scientists on tenure committees of those in nonscience academic departments to protect scientists against being represented improperly.⁽⁸⁾

These are the more strident calls to arms. In a more temperate fashion Gerald Holton, who helped organize the New York Academy conference in 1995, has eloquently registered his defense of what he calls the Ionian enchantment in Western thought.

Today, as in Einstein's time, and indeed in that of his predecessors, the deepest aim of fundamental research is still to achieve one logically unified and parsimoniously constructed system of thought that will provide the conceptual comprehension, as complete as humanly possible, of the scientifically accessible sense experiences in their full diversity. This ambition embodies a telos of scientific work itself, and it has done so since the rise of science in the Western world.⁽⁹⁾

Perhaps I do not need to persuade you that the religious right shares the conviction that there is but one truth. Of course you also know that representatives of this influential subculture denounce postmoderns for denying that truth can be known. God's truth is eternal and cannot be tampered with. A resolution adopted at the 55^thAnnual Meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals declares:

In the current climate of postmodernism, many argue that 1) all human interpretation involves error, and 2) as individuals or as interpretive communities, we interpret and understand everything, including the Bible, from our own perspective. This, it is argued, relativizes all claims to objective, culture-transcending truth. While we acknowledge postmodernism's exposure of the theories of autonomous reason, we cannot accept the currently politically correct relativism of postmodernism. We affirm that human beings, made in the image of God, can know some things truly, even if our finitude prevents us from knowing anything exhaustively.⁽¹¹⁾

There is more, of course, to be said here. There are, after all, differing methods in science and religion and these methods, some argue, make all the difference. Let me tell you about a recent experience I had that illustrates this attitude. I was invited this past spring to address the weekly colloquium of our physics department at Florida. Having inferred from my interactions with a number of colleagues in physics that they had little to no awareness of the controversies surrounding the "science wars," I decided I should appraise them of it. That was my first mistake. My second was to choose a contemporary critic of theoretical physics who was bound to elicit a reaction. I was not disappointed and barely escaped with my life. No matter how much I protested that I was a only messenger and that I did not necessarily share the sentiments of the critic whose work I had described, I was a victim of the old temptation to take out one's wrath on the bearer of unwelcome news.

I'm sure you want to know whose work I chose as an example of how the real agenda of physics was not what physicists thought it was. I spoke to them for 45 minutes about Margaret Wertheim's Pythagoras's Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender Wars. Now physicists, especially theoretical physicists, are vulnerable to the charge that there are few to no women in their ranks. So they had to at least listen to my account of Wertheim's explanation for the paucity of female theoretical physicists, an explanation Wertheim attempts to provide by establishing a common link in the missions of Western religion and science. Although the argument depends on sweeping historical generalizations, and although Wertheim without question imposes a master-narrative on history with a stated mission in view, there is no denying the resonance of this gender-based analysis of science and religion with the values of postmodern Western culture. Permit me to give you a brief synopsis of Wertheim's claims.

Central to her approach are two claims on which the general thesis is based. First, it is asserted that there is nothing essential to Christianity about the dominant role men have acquired. A male celibate clergy successfully rose to dominance only in the second millennium of the church's history as a patriarchal ideal finally defeated the androgynous ideal with which it had been in competition. Second, with others she asserts that one byproduct of the rise of the mechanical world view in the Scientific Revolution was the availability of a means by which the established clerical order could resist forces that threatened to reform it. One aspect of the general outbreak of heresy in the Renaissance and Reformation periods, she argues, was the rise of a religiously-based magical tradition which, although it shared with Aristotelian science an organic conception of nature, sought to know the Divine intellect through means unacceptable to church practice. By opposing the organic conception of nature with a mechanical view, the men of the Scientific Revolution, despite giving the appearance of challenging the existing church powers, functioned to consolidate a new male priestly order. The view of nature as self-developing autonomous organism was discredited and replaced with a nature controlled and ruled by God the giver of fixed mechanical law.⁽¹³⁾

These two claims, that male ecclesiastical power was a late addition to Christianity and that nature as mechanism functioned as a creative defense of established order, are the foundation of a more general thesis. The argument is that, in putting the lid on post-Reformation disorder with the help of the new mechanistic science of laws, the same male-dominant structure that had earlier characterized the religious establishment became part of the new science. Further, in spite of impressions to the contrary, science continued to retain the trappings of a religious mission and, as had been the case since the tenth century whenever humans have presumed to engage the holy, it continued to retain a privileged position for men.

The clearest expression of this modern "religious" mission can be recognized wherever one encounters the ancient Pythagorean search for nature's mathematical symmetry and harmony. This Pythagorean religion was transformed by early mechanists into a search for the mind of the Christian God. That quest has been tempered since the seventeenth century by a concern to find more practical mathematical relationships in nature, but it has not disappeared. In fact, wherever the religious mission has been retained in its pure form, as, for example, in the quest for a Theory of Everything in theoretical physics, all the fewer women scientists will be found. Since the nature of science "is determined by what a society wants from its science, what a society decides it needs science to explain, and finally what society decides to accept as a valid form of explanation,"⁽¹⁴⁾ the meaning of science would be more socially responsible if we rid it of the outdated religious virus that too long has infected it from within. Wertheim goes so far as to question the use of public funds to support this new religion of theoretical physics in a the context of a kind of feminist "strong program."

How do you suppose this message was received by a group of largely theoretical physicists? In a word, some of them went ballistic. One had not been able to contain himself along the way. He kept interrupting me with objections in which the words "nonsense," "ridiculous," and the like were frequent and loud. Many were polite, a few generally intrigued by this interpretation of history; after all, physicists, as we know, are not immune from reading history, especially the history of science and religion, with master-narratives of their own. That someone could read the history of physics in such a totally different way was something certainly curious.

After the lecture I was immediately surrounded by a crowd, two of whom were visibly agitated and upset. Their voices rose in volume, their hands waved wildly, and their verbal assault on me later produced a few phone calls from their colleagues apologizing for the behavior. I knew, of course, that it was not I at whom they were angry, and I did not take any of the diatribe personally. In fact, I rather enjoyed, in a perverse sort of way, that I had clearly touched a raw nerve. I'm afraid I did nothing to help the situation when, after one particularly vehement denunciation of any association of theoretical physics with religion, I responded: "I'm sorry to have to point out to you that your demeanor reminds me of that of a religious fundamentalist."

In fact those of my physicist colleagues who took such great exception to Wertheim failed to realize that on the fundamental question her claim did not correctly characterize their real enemy. Their objection to her portrait was that theoretical physics is not predetermined by a search for symmetry; hence it could not be an ancient religion in modern disguise. Physics, they said, simply interrogates nature and lets nature respond. If for the moment we're right, we find out; if not, we find that out. We don't care where our ideas come from, we simply care whether or not they hold up to nature's reply. One of the experimentalists, incidentally, did not buy this claim from his colleagues. Later he told me: "I'm glad you exposed those guys."

But I said Wertheim's depiction did not characterize their real enemy. Why? Who is the real enemy? Their real enemy, and I admit that in spite of what Gross and Levitt say they're relatively rare, are those who say that science is a cultural product and that is is only a cultural product.

Now from my story about the physics colloquium it is perhaps easy to see how present personal belief is. And that makes one of my central points. The science wars have the potential to become holy wars because they do involve basic beliefs. I will go farther. The science wars reopen in their own way a wound that has been present in the side of Western civilization for some time. It is not a Kulturkampf in Bismarck's old sense of a dogmatic papacy that is holding back the modern forces of discovery. That, as we have seen above, is what some would like it to be. It is deeper. It is the question, to put it into theological terms, of whether in our attempts to understand we believe that we are aspiring to become gods or whether in that quest we believe that we are already gods and have been all along. In the first case there is always present a sense of humility before what the theologian calls the transcendent, be it a transcendent captured by some version of the Ionian dream or a transcendent that talks back to us in ways our comprehension must sometimes recognize as even irrational. If we believe ourselves to be gods, on the other hand, there is in the forefront an appreciation of and satisfaction with our fractured and pluralistic perspectives, which are, to use a recent film title, "as good as it gets." For believers of the first kind those of the second are simply foolish, guilty of the sin of pride. For believers of the second kind those of the first have not faced up to their responsibility and are guilty of hypocrisy. What amazes me is that each side sees the other as dogmatic but fails to see itself so.

Einstein once linked the constraint that drove him not to a deliberate decision, but to a necessity as immediate as that of the religious worshiper.⁽¹⁵⁾ This necessary and immediate drive is also present in scientists who, unlike Einstein, are not motivated by the search for symmetry but who simply insist that the ways nature talks back to us are central to our understanding. We know how both kinds of physicist would respond to Rorty's now famous dictum: "The truth isn't out there."

The issue for historians of science and technology is equally clear. We are engaged in a debate which invites every historian to decide whether there are, or even can be, identifiable shared commitments that constitute a common ground for and delimit the standards of historical research. Some are convinced there must be such shared commitments. Others, like David Harlan, insist that historians "should simply drop the question of what counts as legitimate history and accept the fact that, like every other discipline in the humanities, they do not have, and are not likely to have, a formalized, widely accepted set of research procedures, and that nothing helpful or interesting is likely to come from attempts to define one."⁽¹⁶⁾

The debate between structural and post-structural historians in the mainstream hinges in fact on incommensurable beliefs. Each side views the other as dogmatic. My point today is to suggest that each of course is. Those who wish to a cognitive element in the historian's work⁽¹⁷⁾ risk being labelled "self-designated guardians of orthodoxy" who are trying to hang onto "a nostalgic vision of an intact and uncontested intellectual world that we are losing or have already lost."⁽¹⁸⁾ Those in turn who insist that historical texts must be liberated of all constraints, including even that of the author's intent, are seen as intellectual anarchists whose claim of constituting a new reality as opposed to reflecting a past one⁽¹⁹⁾ opens the door to the dogmatism of political correctness. We have here the classical case of the scorpion and the tarantula, each convinced that in order to pursue its agenda, the other one must perish.

These dogmas are mutually exclusive. For historians they pit those who would make sense of history against those who refuse it, believers in the ideal of "the grand narrative" against those who oppose "privileging the explanatory dimension."⁽²⁰⁾ On one side are those who hold that standards of historical scholarship exist and should be articulated. On the other stand those who are profoundly suspicious of all attempts to overcome the theoretically unavoidable fragmentation of existing and possible historiographical practice. There would appear to be no resolution of the difference possible if one side declares, as it has, that "all calls for synthesis are attempts to impose an interpretation."⁽²¹⁾

If the rift is as deep between the two sides as I have said, what is to be done? First, one should realize that the rift as portrayed here represents the extremes of two tendencies. Most people have an instinctual appreciation of the problems of these extremes and have already moved away from them. The public playing out of the "science wars," of course, depends on casting the issues in an artificially dichotomized fashion. But although the science wars represent a false issue, one should not, out of some elitist and chauvinistic attitude, try to protect those beyond the discipline from the fragmentation evident everywhere in academe. There are real disagreements, and it does no good to try to pretend otherwise.

It looks to me that when all the salvos have been launched, when all the bombs have been exploded, and after all the casualties have been counted, both historiographical superpowers will be left standing. The basic beliefs are so deep and so mutually exclusive that neither is about to leave the field. In the end there nothing other than to recommend than the principle which, in democracies at least, is intended to permit people to survive together in spite of differences. Most differences among citizens are regarded as matters of taste. In this case mutual toleration is not difficult. When differences go beyond mere preferences to claims that exclude and eliminate each other, as in the answer to the question of this essay, toleration becomes more problematical.

William James was no doubt correct in his observation that "our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine opinion that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds."⁽²²⁾ In the situation where to embrace one intellectual position automatically excludes the other, the only recourse is to make toleration an act of will. In so doing one displays the modicum of humility that acknowledges that one's position, while based firmly on one's own convictions, is in the end not more than one's convictions.

Copyright ©1998 Frederick Gregory
 
 

1. "Barbara Ehrenreich and Janet McIntosh, "The New Creationism," The Nation (June 9, 1997), pp. 11-16.

2. Ibid., p. 11.

3. Ibid., p. 12.

4. Idem.

5. "In Praise of Intolerance of Charlatanism in Academia,"in The Flight from Science and Reason, ed. Paul Gross, Norman Levitt, and Martin Lewis (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1996), p. 110.

6. Quoted by Liz McMillen, "Alan Sokal, Author of Hoax, Feels Vindicated by Response," The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 28, 1996), p. A9.

7. "State of the Art/Science in Anthropology," "in The Flight from Science and Reason, p. 341.

8. Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, The Higher Superstition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 255.

9. Cited in Gerald Holton, The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens (Cambridge, 1986), p. 247. Cf. also p. 284.

10. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London: John Murray, 1991), p. 24.

11. http://nae.goshen.net/resolutions/godspeak.html.

12. See, for example, the essay by Paul Kurtz, "Two Sources of Unreason in Democratic Society: The Paranormal and Religion," Flight from Science and Reason, pp. 493-504.

13. Cf. Margaret Wertheim, Pathagoras's Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender Wars (New York: Times Books, 1995), chapter 4; David F. Noble, A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (New York: Knopf, 1993), chap. 9 .

14. Wertheim, Pythagoras's Trousers, p. 33. Although she is obviously sympathetic to a cultural analysis of science, Wertheim does not subscribe to the radical relativism of some postmodernists where science is concerned. Cf. p. 198.

15. Cf. Holton, The Advancement of Science, p. 247.

16. David Harlan, "Intellectual History and the Return of Literature," American Historical Review 94 (1989), p. 609.

17. See, for example, David Hollinger, "The Return of the Prodigal: The Persistence of Historical Knowing," American Historical Review 94 (1989), pp. 610-621.

18. Joan Wallach Scott, "History in Crisis?", American Historical Review 94 (1989), p. 682.

19. John E. Toews, "Perspectives on 'The Old History and the New': A Comment," American Historical Review 94 (1989), p. 697.

20. Allan Megill, "Recounting the Past. 'Description,' Explanation, and Narrative in Historiography," American Historical Review 94 (1989), p. 652.

21. Cf. Allan Megill, "Fragmentation and the Future of Historiography," American Historical Review 96 (1991), p. 694.

22. William James, The Will to Believe (Cambridge, 1979), p. 20.