Ecology is a faith

"Unless ye believe ye shall not understand."
  Saint Augustine

Science is a new religion, and disinfectant is its holy water.
  G. Bernard Shaw

Science has remained predominantly an anti-rationalistic movement, based upon a naive faith.
  A. N. Whitehead

We must recognise belief once more as the source of all knowledge.
  Michael Polanyi

Vernacular man believed unquestioningly in the sacred principles underlying the cultural pattern with which he was imbued. Since they had been first formulated by his ancestors, who lived at the beginning of time, they had to be true. Who was he to doubt the ancestral wisdom which these principles so clearly embodied?

For St Augustine, knowledge was a gift of grace for which we must strive under the guide of antecedent belief. He dominated Christian thought for nearly a thousand years - until the end of the 17th century. Then came the development of 'objective science' which was, and still is, seen as free of all contamination from subjective and 'irrational' human emotions, values and beliefs.

John Locke, in particular, distinguished between faith and knowledge, persuasion and certainty. It was particularly important to root out faith or belief, for it was associated with religion and superstition. As Polanyi writes, "all belief was reduced to the status of subjectivity, to that of an imperfection by which knowledge fell short of universality". Without belief, however, there can be no knowledge. "For all truth", as Polanyi notes, "is but the external pole of belief, and to destroy all belief would be to deny all truth." [1]

This is the overall theme of his seminal book Personal Knowledge. Into every act of knowing, he writes, "there enters a tacit and passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known", and this rather than being imperfect is "a necessary component of all knowledge". [2] For him the idea that reason and intelligence alone are the source of our understanding is sheer illusion.

Tacit assent and intellectual passions; the sharing of an idiom and of a cultural heritage; affiliation to the like-minded community; such are the impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things on which we rely for our mastery of things. No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework. [3]

That this must be so follows from the fact that the human neo-cortex, which is possibly the seat of our intellectual activities, has not been designed by its evolution to function by itself as an autonomous instrument of control any more than has the gene. The lower parts of the brain which may be regarded as the seat of our values and emotions have an equally and indeed possibly greater role to play in determining adaptive human behaviour.

Our leading philosophers of science and our more thoughtful scientists fully realise that science too is a faith, in that scientists accept uncritically the basic assumptions that underlie it. Karl Popper considers that "scientific discovery is impossible without faith in ideas which are of a purely speculative kind", and which is "completely unwarranted from the point of view of science". [4]

Whitehead considers that "faith in the order of nature which has made possible the growth of science is a particular example of a deeper faith" which "cannot be justified by any inductive generalisation". [5] Waddington agrees that a scientist's work is influenced by his metaphysical beliefs - a point also made by von Bertalanffy, Paul Feyerabend and others. To say this is no more than to say that the nature of a scientist's work reflects the paradigm in terms of which he seeks to understand it and indeed the wider paradigm of science which has shaped his whole professional life.

Science, in many respects, is just another religion. Kuhn actually describes the scientific community as a sort of priesthood. John Passmore compares "aristo-scientists" with medieval theologians. [6] In many ways they are the priests of our industrial society. It is they who provide the information on the basis of which the industrial process is mediated and without which it could not occur. It is they who have formulated the world-view that provides its rationale, and like other priesthoods, they have couched their holy texts in an esoteric language of their own which no outsider can understand.

What is more they have defined truth in such a way that they alone have access to it; for it must be established by a set of scientific rituals which only they can perform; for only they possess the necessary scientific skills; only they are equipped with the requisite scientific technology and only they have access to the holy places where, in order to be effective, these rituals must be performed.

It is not surprising that their writings are imbued with an aura of sanctity previously reserved for the holy texts of the established religions. Indeed, if a proposition is classified as 'scientific', then it must be true, indeed incontestable; if on the other hand it is branded as 'unscientific' then it must be the work of a charlatan.

This has provided the scientific-priesthood with the power to prevent any undesired deviation from scientific orthodoxy, just as the Catholic establishment of the Middle Ages could excommunicate any heretic whose teachings were a challenge to its authority. Science thereby has not banished faith. It has substituted faith in modern science for faith in conventional religion.

Ecology, with which we must replace it, is also a faith. It is a faith in the wisdom of those forces that created the natural world and the cosmos of which it is part; it is a faith in the latter's ability to provide us with extraordinary benefits - those required to satisfy our most fundamental needs. It is a faith in our capacity to develop cultural patterns that can enable us to maintain its integrity and stability.

References