A plausible plausibility structure (2)

One of the reasons why Darwin’s hypothesis, in particular, seemed so conclusive in its destruction of the argument from design was that it was a scientific hypothesis and science was to become, in the West, modernity’s replacement for religion - its meta-narrative. Western thought and society came to develop a split between public ‘facts’ and private ‘values’ based on the scientific methodology of experiment through observation and measurement. Modernist Western cultures have assumed that statements of what we have called ‘facts’ are either true or false and that, “[w]e argue, experiment, carry out tests, and compare results, until we finally agree on what the facts are: … [then] we expect all reasonable people to accept them”.

We can see this in the language that is used to describe the impact of Darwin’s hypothesis. For example, Southgate argues that, “It refuted, virtually at a stroke, the notion that creatures had been individually designed by God, and hence any suggestion that one could argue directly from the ingenuity of their design, or the exquisite nature of their adaptation to their environment, to point to the existence or the ingenuity of such a Being”. To use phrases such as “refuted, virtually at a stroke” and “any suggestion” of a hypothesis suggests that the hypothesis is not being understood as a possible explanation among many but as the explanation and, therefore, a fact.

What this distinction between ‘facts’ and ‘values’ masks is the extent to which scientific knowledge (as indeed all knowledge) is faith knowledge. Scientific methodology is based on assumptions that cannot be examined scientifically, reflects the perspective of the observer in experiment and observation and utilises metaphor and worldview in creating hypotheses. In this respect, Lesslie Newbigin highlights the work of Michael Polyani who argues that “the time has come for a shift in the balance between faith and doubt in the whole enterprise of understanding, a recognition that doubt – though always an essential ingredient – is always secondary and that faith is fundamental. His book [Personal Knowledge, 1958] is a massive attempt to demonstrate that all knowledge of reality rests upon faith commitments which cannot be demonstrated but are held by communities whose “conviviality” is a necessary factor in the enterprise of knowing”.

These faith commitments form ‘plausibility structures’ or ‘worldviews’ and it is on the basis of these structures that we now, in a post-modern world, can speak of knowledge. As a result, I wish to consider the argument from design within a completely different frame of reference. To no longer talk in terms of a self-contained ‘proof’ of God’s existence or non-existence on the basis of design or chance, as scientists and theologians from the 17th to the 20th centuries have tended to do. Instead, to talk in terms of ‘plausibility’. To do so means, to no longer content ourselves with particular, isolated aspects of knowledge but with a wider, more unitive, structure of knowledge or view of the world.

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