vol 3: Development
cap 1: Epistemology
page 1: Trust
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... to restore theology to the mainstream of science
Trust
Epistemology is the ancient Greek word chosen by many to name the study of truth, trust and trustworthiness. Here we are particularly concerned with the application of epistemology to the study of texts. Our question is: how truly does this text represent the reality it purports to represent? In the realm of fiction, the epistemological judgment is biased toward internal evidence, that is evidence from the text itself. How well does it represent the imagined world that its author is trying to portray?
This branch of epistemology is also called literary criticism. The critical process, working over centuries, tends to identify 'classics', artistic works that seem to capture perfectly a possible world of human experience and imagination.
The realm of science adds the requirement that the scientific story mimics some settled behaviour of the real world, and uses this mimicry to test possible scenarios for action. Like a footballer shooting for goal or a hunter watching possible prey, the practical imagination is continually examining, rejecting or perfecting strategies to perform a desired task. In choosing what to actually do (and so committing resources to possible loss) a reasonable agent might choose the one with the best apparent ratio of gain to loss. Assessing how reliably such an estimate represents reality is the work of scientific epistemology.
Let us say that epistemology is devoted to labelling human output with a number that ranges from 0 (not trustworthy) to 1 (trustworthy). We expect classics and good science to cluster at the 1 end of the spectrum, and hope that the same can be said for our sacred texts, banknotes, share certificates, land titles and all the other channels through which we communicate value with one another.
The need for epistemology
Why do we need epistemology in the first place? Can't we just look and see how things are? The problem here for science, as for life in general, is that there is more to everything than meets the eye. Everything has a 'personality' which is only revealed to us by long observation. It takes time to get to know the people around us, the animals, materials, the sea, the weather and all the other features of the world.
Our problem is that there is no direct route from experience to understanding. Scientific method is an attempt to deal with this dilemma. Its key ingredients are observation and imagination.
One begins with a set of observations, imagines as many explanations of the observations as possible, and the seeks to discriminate between the imagined models by further observation.
This is an iterative process that continues throughout one's life, and carries on across space and time through literature. Popper described this process as conjecture and refutation. Popper As the history of science has shown, it is often difficult to conjecture wildly enough to hit upon the true nature of our world, but we are gradually expanding our minds toward the boundaries of the universe that created us.
The scientific method is not confined to science. It applies everywhere in a continual cycle of look, think, act, look . . . . As I assemble each component of a structure, I must be reassure myself that it is going to do its job. After all, I am the person climbing on it as I build it, and if it fails, I will be the first to go. The same applies to all other arts: if we are close to what we do, we are likely to suffer from our own poor workmanship..
Trustworthiness is generated by consistency. If the milkman comes every day without fail for years, we rate the service trustworthy. Similarly, explanations that work for greater amounts of data are considered better than those which explain less,
Theology
Theology is at once the most important and the most difficult of the sciences, because it deals with all human experience, the whole world. This is reflected in the fact that it progresses much more slowly than the other sciences. Globally, theology is still in the prescientific stage of development. It is based on ancient texts rather than contemporary observations. For me, and for many, classical theology is not trustworthy. I want to expand classical theology to scientific theology, based on imagination and experience.
The overall task of theology is to explain all the data accessible to humanity. On this site, we move toward theology beginning with physics, and working our way through increasingly complex systems to the whole, which we call god.
Books
| Damasio, Antonio R, The Feeling of What Happens : Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness , Harcourt Brace 1999 Jacket: 'In a radical departure from current views on consciousness, Damasio contends that explaining how we make mental images or attend to those images will not suffice to elucidate the mystery. A satisfactory hypothesis for the making of consciousness must explain how the sense of self comes to mind. Damasio suggests that the sense of self doe snot depend on memory or on reasoning or even less on language. [it] depends, he argues, on the brain's ability to protray the living organism in the act of relating to an object. That ability, in turn, is a consequence of the brain's involvement in the process of regulating life. The sense of self began as yet another device aimed an ensuring survival.' Amazon back |
| Ford, David, and (editor), The Modern Theologians : An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century, Blackwell 1997 Preface: 'The main aim of this volume is to introduce the theology of most leading twentieth-century Christian theologians and movements in theology. ... The contributors are mostly based in Europe of North America and come from a wide range of institutions, denominational backgrounds, and countries. Most are themselves constructively engaged in modern theology, and their purpose has been to produce a scholarly account of their subject and also carry further the theological dialogue in each case." Amazon back |
| Jackson, Roger, and Roger Makransky (editors), Buddhist Theology: Critical reflections by contemporary Buddhist Scholars, Curzon Press 1999 Jacket: 'This volume is the expression of a new development in the academic study of Buddhism: scholars of Buddhism, themselves Buddhist, who seek to apply the critical tools of the academy to reassess the truth and transformative value of their tradition in its relevance to the modern world.' Amazon back |
| Lonergan, Bernard J F, Method in Theology, University of Toronto Press for Lonergan Research Institute 1996 Introduction: 'A theology mediates between a cultural matrix and the signifcance and role of religion in that matrix. ... When the classicist notion of culture prevails, theology is conceived as a permanent achievement, and then one discourses on its nature. When culture is conceived empirically, theology is known to be an ongoing process, and then one writes on its method. Method ... is a framework for collaborative creativity.' Amazon back |
| Marks, Bernard, and Robert Baxt, Law of Trusts, CCH Australia Limited 1981 Preface: 'The object of this book is to provide a general statement of the equity and statutory rules governing trusts and trustees in Australia. The book is intended primarily as a handbook for professional advisors to trustees. It is hoped that this book may usefully serve as a basic text for students studying trust law.' Amazon back |
| O'Neill, Onora, Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics (Gifford Lectures, 2001), Cambridge University Press 2002 Amazon book description: ' Onora O'Neill suggests that the conceptions of individual autonomy (so widely relied on in bioethics) are philosophically and ethically inadequate; they undermine rather than support relationships based on trust. Her arguments are illustrated with issues raised by such practices as the use of genetic information by the police, research using human tissues, new reproductive technologies, and media practices for reporting on medicine, science and technology. The study appeals to a wide range of readers in ethics, bioethics and related disciplines' Amazon back |
| Popper, Karl Raimund, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1972 Preface: 'The way in which knowledge progresses, and expecially our scientific knowledge, is by unjustified (and unjustifiable) anticipations, by guesses, by tentative solutions to our problems, by conjectures. These conjectures are controlled by criticism; that is, by attempted refutations, which include severely critical tests.' [p viii] Amazon back |
| Sereny, Gita, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, Diane Publishing Company 1998 Amazon book description: 'Albert Speer was not only Hitler's architect and armaments minister, but the Fuhrer's closest friend--his "unhappy love." Speer was one of the few defendants at the Nuremberg Trials to take responsibility for Nazi war crimes, even as he denied knowledge of the Holocaust. Now this enigma of a man is unveiled in a monumental biography by a writer who came to know Speer intimately in his final years. Out of hundreds of hours of interviews, Sereny unravels the threads of Speer's personality: the genius that made him indispensable to the German war machine, the conscience that drove him to repent, and the emotional wounds that made him susceptible to Hitler's lethal magnetism. Read as an inside account of the Third Reich, or as a revelatory unsparing yet compassionate study of the human capacity for evil, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth is a triumph. Amazon back |
| Williams , Michael, Groundless Belief: an Essay on the Possibility of Epistemology, Basil Blackwell 1977 Introduction: 'In this essay I shall be concerned with the philosophical problem of perceptual knowledge and, especially, with an approach to that problem which I shall call 'phenonenalism'. I understand this term in a broad sense to be expained and defended as my argument proceeds. My interest in the topic is both philosophical and metaphilosophical: philosophical in that I shall argue that any theory of perceptual knowledge which is phenomenalistic in my senses is radically defective; and metaphilosophical in that I want to use my discussion of phenomenalism to raise, in a fairly concrete form, the question of whether epistemology, as traditionally conceived, constitutes a coherent intellectual discipline. I shall argue that it does not.' page 1. Amazon back |
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